Get In: The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer by Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund

Lobster Issue 90 (2025) FREE
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[PDF file]: […] Pogrund’s book is certainly a corrective to the subtitle of Eagleton’s book: there was no journey to the right; that’s where it started. In this regard Tony Blair comes close to the truth, quoted as saying (p. 184): It’s possible his journey isn’t like Neil Kinnock, where you start on the left and then […]

Divining Desire: Focus Groups and the Culture of Consultation by Liz Featherstone

Lobster Issue 75 (Summer 2018) FREE

[PDF file]: […] sold himself to the Parliamentary Labour Party as a man of vision, of farsighted and deep intellect and sought publicly to distance himself from the perception of Blair as a lightweight, focus group-driven politician. So as a ‘strong’ leader, should he follow his own instincts, or trust in the views of small groups of […]

Hack Attack: How The Truth Caught Up With Rupert Murdoch by Nick Davies

Lobster Issue 68 (Winter 2014) FREE

[PDF file]: […] to do to get Murdoch to change sides. As Davies points out, since 1979, ‘no British government has been elected without the support of Rupert Murdoch….Thatcher, Major, Blair and Brown have consistently cleared their diaries and welcomed him to the inner sanctum of their governments (and then disclosed as little as possible of what […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 81 (Summer 2021) FREE
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[PDF file]: […] the time of the crash: the market is magic, we need no regulation of the City and the domestic manufacturing economy can be ignored. Messrs Brown and Blair had persuaded themselves in the early 1990s that it was necessary to follow the neo-con (and Conservative Party) line on economic policy to get elected because […]

Hoodwinked by the Department of Health? Frank Dobson and the 1997 Jimmy Savile report

Lobster Issue 74 (Winter 2017) FREE

[PDF file]: […] dealings with ‘the machine’. 1 2 Interview conducted at the Cafe Russell, London on 30 November 2017. He famously wrote a memo about the NHS to Tony Blair in 1998, telling the Prime Minister: ‘If you want a first-class service, you have to pay a firstclass fare – and we’re not doing it.’ What […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] See for example Not that this makes a change from NuLab. See James Chapman, ‘Meet Labour’s City cronies: The roll call of bankers rewarded by Brown and Blair’, The Daily Mail 12 February 2009. 9 These are detailed in James Lyons, ‘NHS reform leaves Tory backers with links to private healthcare firms set for […]

The View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] the time of the crash: the market is magic, we need no regulation of the City and the domestic manufacturing economy can be ignored. Messrs Brown and Blair had persuaded themselves in the early 1990s that it was necessary to follow the neo-con (and Conservative Party) line on economic policy to get elected because […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] 1974. That narrative says that Labour politicians don’t understand the economy and can’t be trusted with it. This narrative had such power over Gordon Brown and Tony Blair that they spent the period in opposition from 199497 endlessly endorsing it and promising not to challenge its perceived prescriptions. When he was finally Prime Minister, […]

Also noticed

Lobster Issue

[…] the boundary between analysis and advocacy, so be it. The stakes are high, and there is much work yet to do.’ Anthony Frewin 20 Remember this? ‘Tony Blair personally ordered an exemption for motor racing from a tobacco sponsorship ban after Labour received a secret £1m donation from Bernie Ecclestone, the Formula One boss’ […]

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