The attempt to plan growth had failed. Britain was left with little expansion and political disaster. Most economists blamed it on the government’s failure to devalue. ibid.
In the early 1970s many economists began to find they no longer understood how money behaved … Prices and unemployment began to rise together: people called it stagflation. ibid.
Monetarism offered an attractive technical explanation for the problem of inflation but from it would come in less than ten years another scheme for Britain’s salvation: a set of scientific rules which if the politicians followed them correctly would create the right conditions for economic growth … The time was right for the monetarists. ibid.
Then in March 1976 Britain fell into the abyss. Foreign investors led by American bankers panicked. The Pound began to slide against the Dollar and nothing would stop it. Britain faced bankruptcy. In desperation Labour turned to the International Monetary Fund for a loan. An IMF team came to London. ibid.
The supply of money was to be reduced by increasing interest rates and cutting public spending. Inflation would fall and enterprise flourish. ibid.
But the economy did not behave in the way the monetarists had predicted … Even more mystifying was the behaviour of the money supply. ibid.
In the budget of 1981 public borrowing was cut by a fifth; 364 leading economists wrote to The Times and the prime minister accusing her of virtually destroying the economy. That summer there were riots in English cities. ibid.
Britain is a country haunted by its past. It is possessed by the memory of a golden age, a time long ago when this country was the most powerful on Earth. This is a film about what happens when politicians summon up that romantic vision; for a moment it gives them immense power but then they discover they have evoked forces they cannot control. The price they pay is to become imprisoned by their vision. Adam Curtis, The Living Dead III: The Attic, BBC 1995
Some of the Colditz generation even set up private militias; a network of retired military officers who would take over the running of the country if law and order collapsed. ibid.
Mrs Thatcher took over a demoralised Tory party. The modern Britain the Conservatives had tried to build in the ’50s and ’60s had collapsed. In its place she offered a new vision: she too would modernise the economy and make it grow, but the wealth produced would recreate an older form of Britain. ibid.
He [Churchill] led the British people into a world of his own imagining. They were drawn by the power of his imagination into an idealised vision of Britain’s past. A dream from a world that was long gone. ibid.
One of Mrs Thatcher’s aims was to generate a new sense of pride in Britain’s past. ibid.
Mrs Thatcher soon established herself as a new kind of leader driven by a messianic vision. But her party didn’t realise the price the country would have to pay to be reborn in her terms. ibid.
The powerful historical forces she [Thatcher] had summoned up in Ireland were not under her control. ibid.
The Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II was a triumphant assertion of Britain’s power in the world. But it was held in a city that was still ruined from the bombing ten years before. Britain had been bankrupted by the War. Many of those clustered around the new Queen knew that it could no longer afford to rule the world. Adam Curtis, The Mayfair Set I: Who Pays Wins ***** Channel 4 1999
Colonel David Sterling, a war hero famous for founding the Special Air Service, the SAS. What Sterling would do was to sell to other countries Britain’s military power: Britain would supply them with modern weapons and with mercenaries who would fight their wars for them. ibid.
Sterling set up his own political party called Capricorn Africa. He proposed an alternative form of power where people like himself would civilise the black majority. It attracted widespread support among the white middle-class settlers. But it was firmly rejected by politicians in London. ibid.
In 1962 John Aspinall opened his own gambling club, the Clermont Club in Mayfair. Stirling was one of its members. The Clermont was deliberately designed to recreate a time when Britain had been rich and powerful. The set that Aspinall gathered around him at the Clermont were like Stirling disaffected right-wingers, men who felt themselves out of tune with the consensus politics of the post-war world: they included James Goldsmith, a playboy and ferocious gambler who was to become a close friend of Stirling’s; the tycoon Tiny Roland who Stirling already knew from his time in Africa; Lord Lucan, a descendant of the man who had led the Charge of the Light Brigade; and Jim Slater, a takeover tycoon and asset-stripper who ran the notorious Slater-Walker. What united all these men was a belief in decisive action: it was this they believed that made Britain great not moderate post-war governments. ibid.
Then an event occurred in the Middle East which gave Stirling the chance to reassert Britain’s power abroad but in a new different way: in September 1962 Egyptian troops invaded the Yemen. ibid.
They proposed a plan: a group of ex-SAS men would mount an operation to fight the Egyptians but they would do it privately. ibid.
[Prince] Faisal was terrified that Nassar would invade his county next and agreed to the British idea: the Saudis would pay for the war. ibid.
The Saudis agreed to pay for the British mercenaries but also to smuggle weapons into the Yemen. ibid.
What was invented in the Yemen was a new private form of foreign policy for Britain, paid for by other countries’ money. But then at the very moment when Stirling’s team seemed to be on the brink of success, an economic crisis hit Britain which threatened his whole concept: in 1964 a new Labour government was elected; almost immediately there was a run on the pound. ibid.
To save the pound Labour decided on wide-ranging spending cuts, and one of the main targets was defence. Denis Healey had been made minister of defence, and in 1965 he began a series of enormous cutbacks; he closed the overseas’ bases and brought the troops who had once protected the empire back home. ibid.
[Denis] Healey believed that instead British defence industries should make money for the country. The Americans were selling weapons throughout the world and Healey wanted Britain to compete with them and earn precious foreign currency. But Britain was not very good at selling weapons until David Stirling decided to get involved. ibid.
He [Khashoggi] told Lockheed that the only way to win the [arms] deal was to bribe the Saudi government. Ten years later in a Senate investigation Lockheed’s chairman admitted what had happened. Stirling told the British government they would have to do the same as the Americans: pay commission to their agents in King Faisal’s entourage. If they didn’t, Britain would lose the deal. In December 1965 the Saudis announced they would buy the British planes: the bribes had worked. It was the biggest export deal in Britain’s history. And King Faisal came on a state visit to celebrate it. It was also the beginning of the modern arms trade with the Middle East which has grown to dominate Britain’s economy. And from it also came a much wider commercial relationship with Saudi Arabia. ibid.
By the late ’60s many of Britain’s former colonies were being torn apart by civil war. In Nigeria the federal government were fighting a vicious campaign to stop Biafra from seceding. The British government were secretly supplying the federal side with weapons. Their aim was to protect Britain’s oil interests in Nigeria. ibid.
The federal government won helped by the British arms. But the resulting scandal clearly showed the limits of openly using arms sales as a tool of foreign policy. As coups and civil wars spread throughout the Third World, Stirling was determined to find a subtler way to maintain Britain’s influence in the world. He set up a secret organisation called WatchGuard: its job was to provide Africa and Middle-Eastern leaders with a private army of British mercenaries. They would prevent the rulers that Stirling approved of from being overthrown. WatchGuard was a great success. Stirling organised protection for leaders in Africa and the Middle East. ibid.
In Oman many of the Sultan’s advisers were ex-SAS men. They ran the Sultan’s guerrilla war against Marxist rebels. The rebels made a propaganda film attacking the Sultan and his British mercenaries. But the British won. ibid.
By the early ’70s [David] Stirling had become a successful businessman. He arranged enormous arms deals, and his mercenaries kept many third-world leaders in power. Almost single-handedly Stirling had created the foundations of Britain’s modern privatised foreign policy. It is a hidden world of vicious guerrilla wars fought by British mercenaries, a world that occasionally surfaces in scandals like the Sandfire affair. It all began with Stirling selling Britain’s military power to countries he approved of. ibid.
The price of oil had been massively increased as a result of the Arab/Israeli war. The oil-producing states led by King Faisal of Saudi Arabia were furious at American support for Israel. Their action had catastrophic effects for Western economies. ibid.
Government attempts to hold down wages led to violent strikes. To Sterling it seemed that the country he had fought to keep great was now collapsing from inside. ibid.
David Stirling returned to his traditional recruiting ground, the clubs of Mayfair. He formed an organisation called Great Britain 75. It was a group of military men, many of them ex-SAS. They planned to take over the running of Britain if the strikes led to the collapse of civil order. Stirling also formed a secret organisation within the trades unions itself; its job was to fight and undermine the leftwing union leaders. Much of the money to fund Stirling’s operations came from his friend at the Clermont Club – James Goldsmith. Like Sterling, Goldsmith believed that politicians no longer had the power to control Britain. ibid.