[…] be mobilised by the media, the way it was in 1924 and 1979, and Labour’s had 80 years to work out how to stop them doing it. Blair, of course, prefers joining them to beating them. From Phil Edwards I expected my review of Russ Kick’s collection You are being lied to in Lobster […]
Votescam (again) Reading the papers and listening to the radio in the days immediately after Bush’s election victory brought home what a parallel universe we – readers of magazines like Lobster – are living in. Here we had an enormous election surprise: despite many of the pre-election polls in the last few days of the […]
Ed. Jon Melissen London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, h/b, £50.00 Just after World War 1, a group of the liberal-left in Britain began campaigning against orthodox – i.e. secret – diplomacy. It had caused the mind-bogglingly stupid carnage of World War 1, they argued, and had to go. This was the Union for Democratic Control […]
Down Under David Lange may have come and gone and the New Zealand Labour Party may have blazed a rightwards trail for Tony Blair et al to follow, but the New Zealand anti-military, anti-spook campaigns continue. The latest journal to document the activities of the spooks and military in that part of the Pacific […]
[…] the British economy to make it fit for EEC entry. In Heath’s day the major co-conspirator in the project was the Cabinet Secretary Sir William Armstrong. With Blair it was his chief media wallah, Alistair Campbell. Thus the world has changed. Casualties So, after two reports by noble Lords and thousands of critical column […]
Waking up the incredible economic, political and social illusions of the Blair legacy Larry Elliot and Dan Atkinson London: Constable, 2007, p/b, £7.99 This appeared just as the last issue of Lobster was going to print and has been widely reviewed since then. Extracts were published in The Guardian and The Mail on […]
[…] Movement and his former allies, but in the words of his former wife Margaret, has sold his soul to the devil. Never mind, that ghastly conservative creep Blair tells us we should be proud of our MI6 boys and girls for they give us a cutting edge over the rest of the world. Has […]
[…] has completely replaced the Tories as the main party of British capitalism by hijacking the historical Labour Party in violation of its own constitution. But while Tony Blair had almost zero experience of labour movement politics and was certainly no intellectual, those who theorised and rendered the process possible – in terms of a […]
HP source ‘The plot against Harold Wilson’, the drama-documentary broadcast on BBC 2 on 16 March, was a strange affair. It was really little more than a World in Action half hour from the late 1970s puffed-up, complete with redundant reconstruction of Wilson and Marcia Falkender meeting BBC journalists Penrose and Courtiour (Pencourt). Is the […]
[…] MP or the prospective candidates were insufficiently robust on this issue. The Goldsmith effect By 1995 it seemed clear to many observers of UK politics that Tony Blair and the Labour Party, now packaged as the ‘New Labour project’, were likely to do very well at the forthcoming general election. For a range of […]
