Word: thatcherism
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Iran's newly aggressive naval forces last week also attacked a British- flagged tanker, Gentle Breeze, setting it afire and killing one seaman. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher called the assault "absolutely outrageous." In the wake of the attack, Britain finally ordered the closing of Iran's Arms Procurement Office in London, which has been operating openly on the international weapons market throughout the country's seven-year war with Iraq...
...topple the Labor government of Prime Minister Harold Wilson. Wright also speculated that a former MI5 director general, the late Sir Roger Hollis, was a Soviet mole. In the U.S., such charges might have produced a riot of headlines and calls for congressional hearings. But in Britain, the Thatcher government quickly won a court order barring the press from even discussing Wright's disclosures. It also filed suit in Australia, where Wright is living in retirement, to prevent publication of the book there...
...case wended its way through Australia's courts -- the Thatcher government lost the first round but has appealed -- several British papers mounted a legal challenge. After U.S. editions of Spycatcher began filtering into Britain this summer, a high-court judge lifted the ban on reporting details from the book. But in late July, the Law Lords, Britain's highest court, once again barred accounts of Wright's charges...
...Thatcher government insists that it has a moral duty to try to prevent Wright from setting a dangerous precedent. "It has nothing to do with freedom of speech," says a senior official, "but everything to do with the notion that if you're a secret agent, you bloody well stay secret." Still, it is one thing to stop an agent from violating his vow of secrecy and quite another to try to bar reporting about allegations that are now public. "To fail to distinguish between Mr. Wright's obligations to the government and the press's right to publish seems...
...July as he pressed for a formal merger of the Liberals and the centrist Social Democratic Party. The two political groups, which won only 22 of 650 parliamentary seats in last spring's British general election, have since 1981 formed a carefully calibrated alliance, wedged between Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's Conservatives and the union-backed Labor Party. Last week, after a tally of ballots mailed to the S.D.P.'s more than 58,000 members showed that 57.4% favored Steel's merger proposal, it was formally accepted...