Thatcher's Secret War

This book, which begins with what many believe to be a political killing, is an alternative history of Margaret Thatcher's premiership. It looks at the secret campaign that Mrs Thatcher and her government waged before and after the Falklands War against 'subversives': anti-nuclear, new age and ecology campaigners; poll tax protesters; trade unionists at GCHQ and Wapping; Greenham Common women; Scottish nationalists; Ken Livingstone and the GLC; Derek Hatton and the city councillors of Liverpool; protestors and rioters in Brixton, Toxteth and Broadwater Farm; the far right; the Europe Union; and the Irish Republican Army. The central argument of the book is that there was not only a secret, internal 'col war' fought throughout the 1980s (a war that had started in the 1970s), but that the consequences of those years have huge implications for the importance and role of the state as it evolved beyond into the twenty-first century outside parliamentary control. It is in these years that the state becomes a direct arm of government policy, but undeclared and unexamined in parliament, which led to it actually metamorphosing into the real and uncontrolled hidden political power in Britain; a power no longer decided by parliamentary process.

CLIVE BLOOM is Professor in Residence at the Larkin Centre for Poetry and Creative Writing at Hull University and also holds a Visiting Fellowship at the University of Western Timisoara, Romania. He was the historical consultant to the BBC and a number of national and international newspapers on the G20 disturbances and the 2011 riots in Britain. He is an occasional feature writer for The Financial Times, The Times, The Guardian, The Independent, The Irish Times and the London Evening Standard, as well as being quoted in The Washington Post. He regularly appears on television and radio and he is quoted in The Columbia Book of World Quotations. He has also advised the British Cabinet Office on public disorder issues.