The Anglo-Saxon Social Model - The Expanded Universe
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Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher of Scotney (nee Roberts) (13 October 1925 - 8 April 2013), commonly known throughout her career as Margaret Thatcher, was an Anglo-Commonwealth politician and stateswoman. She served as Prime Minister from 1976 to 1981 and as leader of the Liberal and Democrat grouping in the Commonwealth Assembly from 1988 to 1995.
Thatcher studied chemistry at Somerville College, Oxford and afterwards worked as a research chemist at the Sovereign Wealth Fund facility in Bletchley Park. Among the projects she worked on was what eventually became Mr. Whippy ice cream. She won a seat in the Greater London Assembly in 1950 before entering the Westminster Parliament at the 1961 election. She served in various Shadow Cabinet positions during the 1960s and became a notable member of the “neo-Gladstonian” tendency within the Liberal Party that sought to relax business regulations and reduce the role of the state in society. Although largely sidelined under the leadership of Jeremy Thorpe, Thatcher returned to prominence after his fall from grace and became leader of the Liberals in February 1972.
At this time, the Commonwealth was facing a series of interlinked currency and economic crises and the Liberals successfully exploited this to win their first majority since 1945 at the 1976 general election. In an attempt to take control of the crisis, Thatcher’s government introduced large cuts to both taxation and government spending, while also unilaterally shifting the primary aim of the Bank of England from general macroeconomic management to the control of inflation above everything else. She was a prominent force behind a series of bailout packages for heavily indebted Commonwealth member states but these policies failed to stop the crisis in both government debt and the banking system and the austerity required by the bailouts created a crisis of political legitimacy in the badly-hit Puerto Rico, among other member states. Although inflation fell in the United Kingdom, unemployment reached levels not seen since the 1930s and caused widespread civil disobedience, particularly in Ireland, which led to the declaration of a state of emergency on the island in the summer of 1980. The Liberals subsequently suffered a landslide defeat in the 1981 election.
Out of power after 1981, Thatcher resigned from the leadership but remained prominent on the backbenches as a neo-Gladstonian. However, when the “Gang of Four” of Nigel Lawson, Keith Joseph, Norman Tebbit and Michael Dobbs left the party to form the Liberal Democrats, she chose not to follow them. She would leave Parliament in 1988 when she chose to run for the leadership of the Liberal and Democrat grouping in the Commonwealth Assembly. Although she won her seat, she proved unable to form a coalition and her tenure there was uneventful before retiring from the Assembly at the 1995 elections.
After leaving the Assembly, Thatcher took up the life peerage to which she was entitled as a former prime minister. As Baroness Thatcher of Scotney, she was a regular participant in debates but did not form a part of the Liberal ministerial or shadow ministerial team in the Lords before retiring from public life in 2005 owing to ill health. She died of a stroke in 2013. Her son, Mark Thatcher, was also a politician and succeeded Thatcher in her Parliamentary seat of Finchley upon her retirement in 1988. He remained in Parliament until his arrest and jailing in Papua New Guinea in 2004, which resulted in his resignation.
Thatcher remains a controversial figure in British and Commonwealth political culture. The economic policies she pursued as prime minister are generally regarded as having failed and nearly caused the dissolution of the Commonwealth but the reasons for this, and whether they owed more to inherent failures or wider structural issues, remain debated. However, her work on environmental matters - including passing the Environmental Protection Act 1981 and being a key supporter of the 1979 Arusha Protocol - has subsequently been praised. Historians generally regard her tenure as a failed attempt to realign Commonwealth politics in a neoliberal or neo-Gladstonian direction.
Thatcher studied chemistry at Somerville College, Oxford and afterwards worked as a research chemist at the Sovereign Wealth Fund facility in Bletchley Park. Among the projects she worked on was what eventually became Mr. Whippy ice cream. She won a seat in the Greater London Assembly in 1950 before entering the Westminster Parliament at the 1961 election. She served in various Shadow Cabinet positions during the 1960s and became a notable member of the “neo-Gladstonian” tendency within the Liberal Party that sought to relax business regulations and reduce the role of the state in society. Although largely sidelined under the leadership of Jeremy Thorpe, Thatcher returned to prominence after his fall from grace and became leader of the Liberals in February 1972.
At this time, the Commonwealth was facing a series of interlinked currency and economic crises and the Liberals successfully exploited this to win their first majority since 1945 at the 1976 general election. In an attempt to take control of the crisis, Thatcher’s government introduced large cuts to both taxation and government spending, while also unilaterally shifting the primary aim of the Bank of England from general macroeconomic management to the control of inflation above everything else. She was a prominent force behind a series of bailout packages for heavily indebted Commonwealth member states but these policies failed to stop the crisis in both government debt and the banking system and the austerity required by the bailouts created a crisis of political legitimacy in the badly-hit Puerto Rico, among other member states. Although inflation fell in the United Kingdom, unemployment reached levels not seen since the 1930s and caused widespread civil disobedience, particularly in Ireland, which led to the declaration of a state of emergency on the island in the summer of 1980. The Liberals subsequently suffered a landslide defeat in the 1981 election.
Out of power after 1981, Thatcher resigned from the leadership but remained prominent on the backbenches as a neo-Gladstonian. However, when the “Gang of Four” of Nigel Lawson, Keith Joseph, Norman Tebbit and Michael Dobbs left the party to form the Liberal Democrats, she chose not to follow them. She would leave Parliament in 1988 when she chose to run for the leadership of the Liberal and Democrat grouping in the Commonwealth Assembly. Although she won her seat, she proved unable to form a coalition and her tenure there was uneventful before retiring from the Assembly at the 1995 elections.
After leaving the Assembly, Thatcher took up the life peerage to which she was entitled as a former prime minister. As Baroness Thatcher of Scotney, she was a regular participant in debates but did not form a part of the Liberal ministerial or shadow ministerial team in the Lords before retiring from public life in 2005 owing to ill health. She died of a stroke in 2013. Her son, Mark Thatcher, was also a politician and succeeded Thatcher in her Parliamentary seat of Finchley upon her retirement in 1988. He remained in Parliament until his arrest and jailing in Papua New Guinea in 2004, which resulted in his resignation.
Thatcher remains a controversial figure in British and Commonwealth political culture. The economic policies she pursued as prime minister are generally regarded as having failed and nearly caused the dissolution of the Commonwealth but the reasons for this, and whether they owed more to inherent failures or wider structural issues, remain debated. However, her work on environmental matters - including passing the Environmental Protection Act 1981 and being a key supporter of the 1979 Arusha Protocol - has subsequently been praised. Historians generally regard her tenure as a failed attempt to realign Commonwealth politics in a neoliberal or neo-Gladstonian direction.
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Alan Turing, OBE FRS (23 June 1912 - 7 June 2004) was a British mathematician, computer scientist, cryptanalyst, philosopher and businessman. Turing was highly influential in the development of both theoretical and practical computer science, providing a formalisation for the concepts of the algorithm and computation through his Turing machine (which is considered a model of a general-purpose computer). Working for Colossus Computers, he was one of the important architects behind several versions of the “Manchester” range. Turing later founded his own company, Apple Computers, which would make a number of important advances in the fields of software design and artificial intelligence.
During the World War, Turing worked for the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, Britain’s codebreaking centre that produced “Ultra” intelligence. For a time he led Hut 8, the section responsible for German naval cryptanalysis. Here, he devised a number of techniques for speeding the breaking of German cyphers and played a crucial role in cracking intercepted coded messages that enabled the Allies to defeat the Axis powers in many crucial engagements. After the War, Turing worked at the National Physical Laboratory, where he designed the Automatic Computing Engine, which was one of the first designs for a stored-program computer. In 1948, he joined Tommy Flowers and Tom Kilburn’s new company, Colossus Computers, which had been founded partly via a loan from the United Kingdom’s Sovereign Wealth Fund (SWF). While working at Colossus, Turing was a key architect of the Manchester Marks 1, 2 and 3, the first family of computers designed to cover the complete range of commercial and scientific applications.
While the commercial success of the Manchester Computers, in particular the Mark 3, brought great professional and material benefits, Turing found himself dissatisfied with the direction of the company and he left in 1954, following a dispute with Flowers and Kilburn. He founded his own company, Apple Computers, also thanks to a loan from the SWF. The Apple I and Apple II computers, launched in 1956 and 1959 respectively, were important steps forward in graphical-user interfaces. However, Apple often found its products out-competed by the more utilitarian products produced by Colossus and foreign competitors such as the American IBM and the Soviet ES EVM. Following the poor commercial performance of the Apple Desk Computer (the first microcomputer designed for mass commercial use) in 1964, the company transitioned entirely to making software. During this time, Apple’s products were used mainly by specialists - in particular Commonwealth governments and the Five Eyes Agency - and it was an obscure name to the general public.
Turing stepped down as chairman and CEO of Apple in 1969 but remained chief software designer. In the 1970s the company’s fortunes were revived by a mixture of new marketing strategies and a number of technical innovations in the area of digital home appliances. The most notable of these were the Apple Phone and the Apple Notepad. However, over the years Turing’s interest in the more esoteric applications of his work turned the public against him. In 1979 Apple launched the Apple Assistant, a virtual AI capable of responding to human speech commands, automating the work of other Apple-configured intelligent devices and cataloging several thousand hours of human conversation. The potential privacy implications of the device, along with several high-profile safety disasters, meant that it sold poorly. A year after its launch, reporting by the “Sunday Times” showed that the Apple Assistant was also cataloging its owners’ activities (including at times when its owners had set it to “off”) and relaying the data back to Apple. The subsequent scandal caused major damage to the company, which almost went bankrupt, and was a major impetus behind the Caracas Accords, which set out international standards for the regulation of technological companies.
Turing, who had been closely associated with the Apple Assistant and continued to publicly defend the product after the company had scrapped the program, was eased out of his remaining positions of authority and formally left the company in 1987. Although he mostly led a quiet retirement, persistent rumours of his further experiments with AI did occasionally return him to the spotlight. In 1992 he was briefly taken in for questioning by police following allegations of violating the Caracas Accords but he was subsequently released without charge. A year later, he was questioned under caution again, this time in relation to his investments in InGen Corporation following the Isla Nublar disaster. Once again, no charges were brought.
In 1997 it was announced that Turing had been diagnosed with senile dementure. He died of complications related to the disease in 2004.
Although a controversial figure towards the end of his life, since his death Turing’s reputation has recovered due to his vast contributions to computer science and artificial intelligence. In October 2009, the Bank of England announced that Turing would be depicted on the Commonwealth’s new £50 note.
Arsène Charles Ernest Wenger OBE (born 22 October 1949) is a retired French politician and professional football manager and player. He is most closely associated with the British club Arsenal - with whom he had three managerial stints (1997-2000, 2002-2003 and 2013-14) and spent many years as director of football - and with the French national team, who he led to both World and European Cup success.
Born in Strasbourg and raised in Duttlenheim in an entrepreneurial family, Wenger was introduced to football by his father, the manager of the local village team. After a modest playing career, Wenger began his managerial career in 1984 with an impressive but nonetheless trophyless three-year stint at Nancy. He subsequently moved to Reims, where he won two league championships in a six-year spell before leaving to coach the French national team in July 1994. However, following the overthrow of the Fifth Republic in January 1996, Wenger found himself chafing against restrictions imposed by the new government. In particular, he objected to rules which forbade players not in the French domestic league from being selected for the French national team. This rule was viewed by many as an attempt to force non-white players out of the national team, as domestic team owners were also strongly encouraged not to add non-white players to their squad. Wenger, along with director of football Gerard Houllier, resigned from the FFF in February 1996 in protest over the new rules.
Wenger moved to Jersey, where he was given the position of Minister for Sports in the French government-in-exile. In this position he had a key role in helping exiled French footballers transfer to other European clubs, mainly in Britain and Iberia. He left this role after a year to become head coach of Arsenal in the British Premier League. In his first season, he led the club to a Premier League and FA Cup double, retaining the title the following season. However, after a trophyless 1999-2000 season, he resigned his position. He moved to Iberia, where he became manager of Nueva Sociedad de Madrid. He won the Copa del Presidente in 2001 but was unable to disrupt the Barcelona-Benfica duopoly at the top of the Iberian League.
He returned to Arsenal in 2002 for a single season as head coach before moving upstairs in 2003 to work as the club’s Director of Football. In this position he was responsible for signings and youth development. Players such as Jack Wilshere, Michael Carrick and Lionel Messi have credited Wenger with having a major influence on their early careers. When David Rocastle was forced to step down due to illness in 2013, Wenger took over as Arsenal manager for a third and final time, winning another FA Cup in the sole season of his third spell. By this time the French government had changed, following the revolution of February 2009, and Wenger was persuaded to leave Arsenal for the final time in 2014 and manage to French national team once again. He led the team to victory in the 2018 World Cup and 2020 European Championships before retiring at the end of the latter tournament.
In Britain, Wenger is commonly nicknamed “Le Professeur” to reflect his studious demeanour. His approach to the game emphasised an attacking mentality with players taking responsibility on the pitch. However, his teams have also been criticised for their indiscipline: over his three spells in charge his Arsenal teams received 30 red cards in five seasons.
Born in Strasbourg and raised in Duttlenheim in an entrepreneurial family, Wenger was introduced to football by his father, the manager of the local village team. After a modest playing career, Wenger began his managerial career in 1984 with an impressive but nonetheless trophyless three-year stint at Nancy. He subsequently moved to Reims, where he won two league championships in a six-year spell before leaving to coach the French national team in July 1994. However, following the overthrow of the Fifth Republic in January 1996, Wenger found himself chafing against restrictions imposed by the new government. In particular, he objected to rules which forbade players not in the French domestic league from being selected for the French national team. This rule was viewed by many as an attempt to force non-white players out of the national team, as domestic team owners were also strongly encouraged not to add non-white players to their squad. Wenger, along with director of football Gerard Houllier, resigned from the FFF in February 1996 in protest over the new rules.
Wenger moved to Jersey, where he was given the position of Minister for Sports in the French government-in-exile. In this position he had a key role in helping exiled French footballers transfer to other European clubs, mainly in Britain and Iberia. He left this role after a year to become head coach of Arsenal in the British Premier League. In his first season, he led the club to a Premier League and FA Cup double, retaining the title the following season. However, after a trophyless 1999-2000 season, he resigned his position. He moved to Iberia, where he became manager of Nueva Sociedad de Madrid. He won the Copa del Presidente in 2001 but was unable to disrupt the Barcelona-Benfica duopoly at the top of the Iberian League.
He returned to Arsenal in 2002 for a single season as head coach before moving upstairs in 2003 to work as the club’s Director of Football. In this position he was responsible for signings and youth development. Players such as Jack Wilshere, Michael Carrick and Lionel Messi have credited Wenger with having a major influence on their early careers. When David Rocastle was forced to step down due to illness in 2013, Wenger took over as Arsenal manager for a third and final time, winning another FA Cup in the sole season of his third spell. By this time the French government had changed, following the revolution of February 2009, and Wenger was persuaded to leave Arsenal for the final time in 2014 and manage to French national team once again. He led the team to victory in the 2018 World Cup and 2020 European Championships before retiring at the end of the latter tournament.
In Britain, Wenger is commonly nicknamed “Le Professeur” to reflect his studious demeanour. His approach to the game emphasised an attacking mentality with players taking responsibility on the pitch. However, his teams have also been criticised for their indiscipline: over his three spells in charge his Arsenal teams received 30 red cards in five seasons.
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So, this is something I've been working on for quite a while. As you can tell, graphic design isn't really my forte and most of what I've been doing has been trying to get the various 'voices' right. I think it's a fun way to get a new angle on TTL and hope you do too. Let me know if you have any problems opening it.
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