Misc reviews

Lobster Issue

[…] a major piece of work by any standards. What is Opus Dei? Noam Friedlander 10 Headpress; UK £13.99 US $19.95, p/b Thom Burnett both London: Collis and Brown, £8.99, p/b These are two of the first batch of a new series, Conspiracy Books. Which might lead you to suspect you’d get a conspiracy or […]

Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics by Peter Geoghegan

Lobster Issue 80 (Winter 2020) FREE

[PDF file]: Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics Peter Geoghegan London: Head of Zeus, 2020, £8.99 Colin Challen Ever since the birth of ‘democracy’ it has been for sale. Influence pedlars, bribery, blackmail, fraud, honours touting – these are all as common as the ballot box. A whole library has been written about these less […]

The long goodbye? Taking on the consultants

Lobster Issue 90 (2025) FREE
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[PDF file]: […] 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 In one instance, a major rail franchise tender was withdrawn because the […]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 Bridge 87

Lobster Issue

[…] thought this. Jackie Kennedy and her mother. JFK’s secretary Evelyn Lincoln. KGB officer Oleg Nechiporenko. The KGB office in the USA. CIA officer E. Howard Hunt. Madeleine Brown, LBJ’s mistress. Barr McClellan, a Dallas lawyer. Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. Gen. Joseph J. Cappucci, the head of Air Force Counter Intelligence. And yet barely […]

The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and How to Build a Better Economy by Stephanie Kelton

Lobster Issue 80 (Winter 2020) FREE

[PDF file]: […] topics such as foreign or social policy – or else they swallowed whole the current orthodoxy since they had no capacity to take an independent view. Gordon Brown fell into this latter category – Tony Blair the former. John Smith had only a rudimentary knowledge of economics, but was a little more confident on […]

Consultants Challen

Lobster Issue

[…] 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

[…] 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.43 It was all […]

Survival of the Richest: escape fantasies of the tech billionaires, by Douglas Rushkoff

Lobster Issue 85 (Summer 2023) FREE
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[PDF file]: […] by Epstein, launched his One Laptop per Child project in 2005. Addressing education and literacy in the non-developed world, and endorsed by many politicians (including notably, Gordon Brown), it ended in 2014 without coming anywhere near meeting its objectives. Similarly, a Global Hackathon involving Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Microsoft and many others, to ‘solve’ the […]

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