The Phoenix Program: America’s Use of Terror in Vietnam by Douglas Valentine

Lobster Issue 68 (Winter 2014) FREE

[PDF file]: […] meant expanding the British principle of indirect rule by creating and supporting nominally independent regimes that bear all the social costs through extortionate taxation, while assuring that labour and natural resources are freely accessible to US corporations — in Vietnam’s case, particularly those operating in Japan. Unlike industrial economies, peasant economies, such as those […]

Trump, the US Military and the American Empire

Lobster Issue 80 (Winter 2020) FREE

[PDF file]: […] is unprecedented, but it certainly reflects the times we are living through. John Newsinger is a retired academic working on things Trumpian and (slowly) on the foreign, colonial and defence policies of the Labour Party. David Charter, ‘Joe Biden: Army will have to drag Trump out if he loses’, The Times 13 June 2020 7

Holding pattern

Lobster Issue 71 (Summer 2016) FREE

[PDF file]: […] results started to trickle in. The example that is foremost in my mind is the constituency of Bedford Borough, my place of birth and a key Tory- Labour marginal. Here it was reported that a sack containing 5,000 extra votes had appeared, as if out of nowhere, when the count was nearing completion. When […]

Iraq and intelligence

Lobster Issue 65 (Summer 2013) FREE

[PDF file]: […] When I became interested in the relationship between the intelligence and security services and the British political system in the late 1970s, it was believed on the Labour left that the intelligence and security services were allpowerful and unaccountable. They are still unaccountable in any real sense (their accountability to Parliament is notional) but […]

Hack Attack: How The Truth Caught Up With Rupert Murdoch by Nick Davies

Lobster Issue 68 (Winter 2014) FREE

[PDF file]: […] that far from exaggerating, if anything McBride understated Murdoch’s influence, the extent to which modern Britain has been shaped in his image, and the way politicians, both Labour and Conservative, were willing to be of service. Most of the reviews of Hack Attack have focussed on the dramatic story of how Davies and the […]

Thatcher versus the City of London

Lobster Issue 60 (Winter 2010) FREE

[PDF file]: […] and was one of the causes of the inflation of the 1970s (which reached 25% in 1975). That inflation became a stick with which the Tories beat Labour and unions in the 1974-79 period and beyond, 98 Winter 2010 and a section of the Tory right beat the Heathites. Mrs Thatcher and her faction […]

The State of Secrecy: Spies and the Media in Britain by Richard Norton-Taylor

Lobster Issue 80 (Winter 2020) FREE

[PDF file]: The State of Secrecy Spies and the Media in Britain Richard Norton-Taylor London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2020, £20 h/b Scott Anthony Logic would tell you that the relationship between journalists and secret agents should be antagonistic. Journalists are after all charged with exposing power, while intelligence work is supposedly done in the […]

Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The diaries 1938-1943 Edited by Simon Heffer

Lobster Issue 83 (Summer 2022) FREE

[PDF file]: […] days earlier he had seen Edward Rice, a brother-in-law of Lady Cynthia Mosley, deep in conversation in the House of Commons tea room with James Maxton, Independent Labour Party (ILP) MP for Glasgow, Bridgeton and assumes they are up to something. He confirmed this (24 June 1940) with the comment: ‘Edward Rice came to […]

General Władysław Sikorski and the B-24

Lobster Issue 79 (Summer 2020) FREE

[PDF file]: […] (London: Random House, 2007). The historian Donald Cameron Watt described Mason-MacFarlane as a ‘courageous eccentric’. See his How War Came, (London: Heinemann, 1989) p. 183. Mason-MacFarlane was Labour MP for Paddington North between 1945 and 1946. 15 and into the North African Desert as part of Churchill’s Eighth Army. ‘Mason-Mac’ managed to keep Maisky […]

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