Shirley Williams

Lobster Issue

[…] could possibly quibble with that reasonable-sounding voice when the Foreign Secretary appears barely old enough to vote? But then I read Climbing the Bookshelves by the former Labour Cabinet minister who helped launch the short-lived SDP in 1981. Sure enough the wise words I’d heard on the BBC were there. But so was her […]

Everybody now loves widgets!

Lobster Issue 63 (Summer 2012) FREE

[PDF file]: […] protectionism. I have no interest in going back to those days.3 What I want to do, however, is to ensure the British Government supports British manufacturing….The next Labour government will put British design, British invention, British manufacturing at the heart of our economic policy. When I talk about how we need to encourage productive […]

Signs of the times

Lobster Issue 81 (Summer 2021) FREE

[PDF file]: […] muddling through’. But Butskellism wasn’t ‘simply muddling through’. The term came from merging the name of Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer R A Butler with that of Labour Chancellor Hugh Gaitskell and was coined in the mid 1950s, when there was a considerable consensus across the major political parties in the UK about how […]

The View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] but as ‘Laura Corbyn’. – Bower frequently accuses Corbyn of being a Trotskyite. Elsewhere he states that Corbyn’s ‘personal commitment to Stalinism set him apart from most Labour Party members.’ Trotskyites and Stalinists hate each other, and Stalin ordered Trotsky’s brutal murder. Bower, who, with his knowledge of the farLeft, ought to know you […]

The View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue 87 (2023) FREE
To access this content, you must subscribe to Lobster (click for details).

[PDF file]: […] major part of the answer is that the Conservative governments of the 1980s cut back taxing and spending and let the public sector decline. (And the New Labour governments followed suit.) After 40 years of neglect, the comparison between public provision and public spaces in the UK and the rest of the EU is […]

Brexit: an accident waiting to happen

Lobster Issue 73 (Summer 2017) FREE

[PDF file]: […] syndrome, and they opted for one of two monolithic parties, a certain rough justice prevailed.2 However, since 1970 (Edward Heath – 46% of the votes cast) neither Labour nor Conservatives have polled above 45% of the votes cast in a general election. Thatcher didn’t get above 44%, Blair peaked at 43% and 1 This […]

Holding Pattern

Lobster Issue 72 (Winter 2016) FREE

[PDF file]: […] much of all this was known to Prince Bandar’s good friend in the Oval Office, and when. Smith’s myths The campaign to elect Owen Smith MP as Labour Party leader has been making claims that do not accord with verifiable facts, but the media are reporting them unquestioningly. Chief among these is the claim […]

Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad by Michela Wrong

Lobster Issue 84 (Winter 2022) FREE

[PDF file]: […] – or perhaps because of – the Kagame regime’s wholly justified reputation for repression and murder. The grim reality is that both the Conservative government and the Labour opposition are very much in bed with the Kagame regime, and have been for many years now. Indeed the next Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 77 (Summer 2019) FREE
To access this content, you must subscribe to Lobster (click for details).

[PDF file]: […] but as ‘Laura Corbyn’. – Bower frequently accuses Corbyn of being a Trotskyite. Elsewhere he states that Corbyn’s ‘personal commitment to Stalinism set him apart from most Labour Party members.’ Trotskyites and Stalinists hate each other, and Stalin ordered Trotsky’s brutal murder. Bower, who, with his knowledge of the farLeft, ought to know you […]

Europe Isn’t Working by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson

Lobster Issue 72 (Winter 2016) FREE

[PDF file]: […] Atkinson’s on his site, you will understand this. Here are two quotations. The first is from Elliott and Atkinson (p. 282) quoting the late Peter Shore, sometime Labour cabinet minister and one of the few Labour MPs to understand political economy. ‘Peter Shore asked how a country was to regain competitiveness once it had […]

Accessibility Toolbar