The long goodbye? Taking on the consultants

Lobster Issue 90 (2025) FREE
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[PDF file]: […] in highly technical areas of public services, such as environmental monitoring, finance and digital technologies. This became apparent in the United Kingdom in the aftermath of the Blair/ Brown years, during the period of the Coalition government’s policy to slash spending on consultants. In one instance, a major rail franchise tender was withdrawn because […]

Consultants Challen

Lobster Issue

[…] in highly technical areas of public services, such as environmental monitoring, finance and digital technologies. This became apparent in the United Kingdom in the aftermath of the Blair/ Brown years, during the period of the Coalition government’s policy to slash spending on consultants. In one instance, a major rail franchise tender was withdrawn because […]

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 […]

Books on New Labour

Lobster Issue 59 (Summer 2010) FREE
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[PDF file]: […] New Labour, he really gives the game away. While he sources more in this book than in his weekly Observer column, there’s still too much referenced as ‘Blair inner circle’ and ‘interviews, senior officers’ to accept this as anything like a historical record. What it does manage to do is confirm the New Labour […]

The Cuntocracy

Lobster Issue 62 (Winter 2011) FREE

[PDF file]: […] with the symbols and designators of merit, to perpetuate its own power, status, and privilege. He wrote to the Guardian in 2001 pointing this out when Tony Blair started prominently using it as part of running the country — to define what our society should be like.4 So it should be relatively easy for […]

A Difference of Opinion: My Political Journey by Jim Sillars

Lobster Issue 83 (Summer 2022) FREE

[PDF file]: […] in the entire history of imperialism, there has been such a calamitous appointment.’ 6 Sillars used the knowledge he acquired as a law student to pursue Tony Blair for Iraq war crimes, but his accumulated evidence did not impress the Scottish Crown Office and his efforts with the International Criminal Court also proved a […]

Broken Heartlands: A Journey Through Labour’s Lost England by Sebastian Payne

Lobster Issue 82 (Winter 2021) FREE

[PDF file]: […] frustration. It always seemed odd to me, living in London but regularly visiting family and friends in the ‘Labour heartlands’, that many party Remainers – from Tony Blair in his prime ministerial pomp to Starmer in his pre-2019 efforts to undermine Jeremy Corbyn 2– failed to address the growing popular feeling against continued European […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] – was rising before 2008 and is caused by UK taxes being too low. But no mainstream British politician will argue for raising taxes. While in office Blair, Brown and Balls encouraged the delusion that the UK could have American levels of taxation and EU levels of public services. Apologising for that and the […]

In the Thick of It: The private diaries of a minister Alan Duncan

Lobster Issue 82 (Winter 2021) FREE

[PDF file]: […] earlier Prime Minister: ‘Home for lunch with Oman Ambassador, Abdulaziz al Hinai, and bump into Simon Walters of the Mail on Sunday outside Harry’s Bar. He says Blair is pitching to Jared Kushner to offer advice on the Middle East, and (bizarre and not true) that Trump demanded the dismissal of Robert Hannigan from […]

View from Bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] say that the free market moves since 1979 have all been a mistake. Even if Mr Starmer thought it, this would entail criticising Mrs Thatcher’s acolytes, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and he won’t do that. To judge by Chancellor Reeves’ Mansion House speech in November, she isn’t going to entertain any deviant ideas.3 […]

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