Gordon Brown: in the country of the blind…

Lobster Issue 60 (Winter 2010) FREE

[PDF file]: […] books, as its participants cash in with lucrative publishing deals and get their version of history into print as quickly as possible. Thus has the demise of Labour in May 2010 been marked. The accounts that have appeared include the absurdly self-centred, stating-the-obvious-at-alltimes tales of Peter Mandelson; the fantastic, optimistic and daytime TV-oriented (and […]

A tale of two Islingtons: How Blair opened the door for Corbyn

Lobster Issue 77 (Summer 2019) FREE

[PDF file]: […] the LSE (1964-1967) during which, he asserts, he was a revolutionary socialist himself. Apparently, this makes him especially qualified to ruminate on the background of the current Labour Party leader. Even if this is so, early on it becomes clear that this book doesn’t tell us anything that we didn’t already know (or couldn’t […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 82 (Winter 2021) FREE
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[PDF file]: […] Yes, in a sense they are. Hence the impact of the phrase ‘open conspiracy’. I first came across it in The Open Conspirator, a book about preWW2 Labour Party activist and pacifist Clifford Allen.11 But searching for that I noticed that H. G. Wells had written something called The Open Conspiracy12 and Garrick Alder […]

View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] Yes, in a sense they are. Hence the impact of the phrase ‘open conspiracy’. I first came across it in The Open Conspirator, a book about preWW2 Labour Party activist and pacifist Clifford Allen.11 But searching for that I noticed that H. G. Wells had written something called The Open Conspiracy12 and Garrick Alder […]

Well, how did we get here?

Lobster Issue 60 (Winter 2010) FREE

[PDF file]: […] the Second World War the state controlled everything: capital movements, production and trade. Of necessity a version of the producers’ alliance sought by some sections of pre-war labour, capital and state, was formed. Cooperation rather than conflict was the model chosen for total war, a lesson not lost on the wartime generation of politicians […]

The Two Goulds

Lobster Issue 63 (Summer 2012) FREE
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[PDF file]: The two Goulds Robin Ramsay In ‘The crisis’ in issue 62 of Lobster I referred to the economic debate during the Labour Party’s policy review, which produced the Meet the Challenge, Make the Change document in 1989. On page 6 of that are these sentences: The Conservatives are the party for the City. We […]

The two Goulds

Lobster Issue

The two Goulds Robin Ramsay In ‘The crisis’ in issue 62 of Lobster I referred to the economic debate during the Labour Party’s policy review, which produced the Meet the Challenge, Make the Change document in 1989. On page 6 of that are these sentences. ‘The Conservatives are the party for the City. We […]

Keir Starmer: The Biography by Tom Baldwin

Lobster Issue 89 (2024) FREE
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[PDF file]: Bad Labour Keir Starmer: The Biography Tom Baldwin London: William Collins, 2024, £25, h/b John Newsinger At the recent election Labour only secured 33.7% of votes nationally, and half the number of people voted for Keir Starmer in his own constituency as they did in 2019.1 Despite this, he became Prime Minister with a […]

Newsinger on Strarmer

Lobster Issue

Bad Labour Keir Starmer: The Biography Tom Baldwin London: William Collins, 2024, £25, h/b John Newsinger At the recent election Labour only secured 33.7% of votes nationally, and half the number of people voted for Keir Starmer in his own constituency as they did in 2019.1 Despite this, he became Prime Minister with a […]

Is this what failure looks like? Brian Sedgemore 1937–2015

Lobster Issue 70 (Winter 2015) FREE

[PDF file]: […] probably longer than usually accorded to a backbench MP. The accounts were clear that he was independently minded and latterly something of a rogue elephant on the Labour benches. Perhaps they could have paused to reflect on how much he had achieved by the time he was thirty-five: brought up by a single parent […]

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