Description
A devastating account of the Thatcher Government's involvement in the covert arms trade, by the man who turned Astra Fireworks into a ยฃ100m arms manufacturer
In the Public Interest rewrites the Thatcher years, revealing a political management structure in Britain today which makes a mockery of the democratic process.
In her two volumes of bestselling memoirs, Margaret Thatcher gives scant coverage to an event which Gerald James describes as the linchpin of her economic strategy. The event the war between Iran and Iraq ran for 80 per cent of her term, during which time James was chairman of Britain's fastest rising arms company, Astra Holdings plc. The war offered a market worth billions, and represented the most efficient means to turn round Britain's ailing economy: Saddam Hussein held at least 10 per cent of the world's oil reserves; the market simply could not be ignored.
Thatcher's strategy was not handled in Parliament, which had outlawed trade with Iraq, but in a political backroom by a cabal, an amalgam of secret state and City interests, made up of businessmen (including major manufacturers), powerful civil servants and intelligence officers from MI5 and M16. Administered from Whitehall's Cabinet Office by the Cabinet Intelligence Unit and the Joint Intelligence Committee, the cabal is wholly unaccountable to our elected politicians, few of whom are fully aware of what is going on. Margaret Thatcher was the first Prime Minister to harness the might of this group to her purpose, and, as the Scott Inquiry discovered, she got her ministers to rubber-stamp the group's every move.
The benefits of this to the nation, however, proved a mirage in the Iraqi desert, vanishing almost as soon as the war was over in 1988. When Saddam Hussein failed to pay his bills, Britain's net overseas assets were pillaged to plug the gap and finance sweeteners of aid and arms contracts with Malaysia and other arms markets. Mrs Thatcher was relieved of office, and Government strategy changed to quell speculation and make scapegoats of those who, like Astra, Matrix-Churchill, Ordtec and Euromac, they had used.
The best prizes had gone not to the nation but to facilitators of the trade, like Mrs Thatcher's son Mark. Party coffers overflowed with donations at one time reaching ยฃ200m from companies benefiting from cabal business. The involvement of former Government Minister Jonathan Aitken as director of BMARC, one of Astra's companies, has received huge publicity. Gerald James reveals the LISI contract with Iran as but one instance of Government collaboration in a trade not only in conventional weapons, but in chemical and nuclear ones too, which was conducted on almost a daily basis until a few years ago.
In the Public Interest reveals, possibly for the first time, how the defence industry was used to serve the interests of a few at the expense of the interests of the nation.
After school and military service, Gerald James qualified as a chartered accountant with Peat Marwick Mitchell. He subsequently worked for nearly twenty years with Hill Samuel, Baring Brothers, and as a Director of Henry Ansbacher merchant bankers on the corporate finance side. He was then a consultant to, and director of, several companies both private and public in the plastics, brewing, engineering and electronic sectors, and also a consultant to Singer and Friedlander merchant bankers for two years.
In 1981 he organised the purchase of Astra for six colleagues who became the board of Astra Holdings plc, which went from ยฃlm to ยฃ100m turnover, and which James left with an order book approaching ยฃ300m. The company grew rapidly in the 1980s by a series of acquisitions and ultimately had 4,000 employees with operations in the UK, USA, Canada and Belgium.
Gerald James lives with his wife Gisela in London. They have three sons, one of whom served in the Gulf War and in Northern Ireland, and another in Northern Ireland.
ISBN:9780316877190
