Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain’s Battle with Coronavirus by Jonathan Calvert and George Arbuthnot

Lobster Issue 81 (Summer 2021) FREE

[PDF file]: […] explaining. This is not a task Calvert and Arbuthnot seriously attempt but is one worth pondering as ever more tales of Tory crony corruption emerge and Starmer’s Labour falls further behind in the polls. I finished their book just as Johnson’s PR, Allegra Stratton, declared that he acted with ‘honesty and integrity’ as London […]

Everybody Knows: Corruption in America by Sarah Chayes

Lobster Issue 81 (Summer 2021) FREE

[PDF file]: […] for twelve hours a day. As we now know, that allowed Epstein to continue his assaults on young girls. Acosta went on to be Trump’s Secretary of Labour. Kendzior is incredulous that the allegation that Trump raped a thirteen year old girl who had been ‘forced to work’ for Epstein in 1994 was pretty […]

Is a new ‘cold war’ coming?

Lobster Issue 68 (Winter 2014) FREE

[PDF file]: […] War’ meant for anyone except the white middle-class and the ruling elite, the suppression of demands for peacetime economic justice. As Tony Benn, the recently deceased UK Labour politician, once said: after the war people asked, if we could organise fullemployment for war, why couldn’t we organise fullemployment for peace?4 This question was answered […]

South of the border

Lobster Issue 76 (Winter 2018) FREE

[PDF file]: […] the back of the Mini which had rescued him when his official car broke down,23 George Brown was the premier comic political figure of his time. When Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell suddenly died in 1963, George Brown was widely expected to be his successor. In the end Harold Wilson won the contest when his […]

War on Terror Inc: Corporate Profiteering from the Politics of Fear

Lobster Issue 58 (Winter 2009/2010) FREE

[PDF file]: […] of the NuLab story, for it shows that the Blair-Brown administrations really did believe that private is always better than public. (How they must have hated the Labour Party!) Yet it still astounds me to read an account of a (nominally) Labour government casually handing over chunks of the British defence structure to American […]

Hugh who? (Hugh Mooney)

Lobster Issue 75 (Summer 2018) FREE

[PDF file]: […] the Irish 4 The sections in italics, INQ 1873, have been added by hand in the original. In 1987 someone anonymously sent me a collection of anti- Labour forgeries from the mid 1970s period. They were reproduced at end of Paul Foot’s Who framed Colin Wallace?, still available from . One of those forgeries, […]

When the Lights Went Out, and, Strange Days Indeed

Lobster Issue 58 (Winter 2009/2010) FREE

[PDF file]: […] but having received about 30% of the votes cast in the elections of 1974 and 76, they hardly had a mandate for revolution. But the little that Labour and the unions did deliver was too much for the middle and upper classes. A more equal society means the prosperous lose more via taxation. He […]

Time for the pavilion (or: there are only 365 Conservative MPs)

Lobster Issue 80 (Winter 2020) FREE

[PDF file]: […] on 4 November, the day before England went into its second national lockdown, the House of Commons voted 516 to 38 in favour of the restrictions, with Labour and the Liberal Democrats backing the government. But 50 Conservative MPs rebelled, either by voting against the motion or abstaining; and in the three-hour debate before […]

The Oyston Files by Andrew Rosthorn

Lobster Issue 83 (Summer 2022) FREE

[PDF file]: […] Darwen, Lancashire: Red Sea Books, 2021, £16.99, h/b Nick Must At a macro level, this is a fairly simple story: Owen Oyston, a multi-millionaire supporter of the Labour Party,1 was subject to a politically motivated smear campaign that lasted nearly two decades. Andrew Rosthorn identifies the three main instigators and manipulators as being a […]

My Turn: Hillary Clinton targets the presidency by Doug Henwood

Lobster Issue 71 (Summer 2016) FREE

[PDF file]: […] the trade unions was electorally popular way back in their days in Arkansas. For a British reader this tale has resonance, for the Blair/Brown faction within the Labour Party copied the Clintons’ ‘New Democrats’ strategy right down the line,1 the only real difference being that the opposition to the changes within Labour put up […]

Skip to content