Thatcher's Secret War: Subversion, Coercion, Secrecy and Government, 1974-90

Beginning with what many believe to be a political killing, this book 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 councilors of Liverpool; protesters 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 “cold 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 into the twenty-first century outside parliamentary control.