The Defence of the Realm

Lobster Issue

[…] assessment of the subversive influence in the media in the 1970s: ‘There have been virtually no instances of subversion in the presentation of new bulletins by the BBC or the I B A companies. The reasons no doubt lies in the careful selection of key personnel by management….’ (p. 663, emphasis added) But he […]

South of the border

Lobster Issue 78 (Winter 2019)

[PDF file]: […] Matthews’ piece in the previous issue, ‘A tale of two Islingtons’,57 mentions Gerry Reynolds as being one of Jeremy Corbyn’s predecessors as MP for that constituency. A BBC news report on the Information Research Department (IRD) and the transfer of thousands of its files to the National Archives mentions that Gerry Reynolds had contacted […]

Lobster review: Sunday Herald, 17 August 2003

Lobster Issue

A  review of Lobster in the Sunday Herald, 17 August 2003.

[PDF file]: […] for avant-garde jazz. Like many other post-war dissidents, it was Radio Luxembourg which pointed the way to an exciting new world beyond the cosy confines of the BBC. “In the late fifties you had the BBC Light Programme or the Home Service, and then there was this decadent stuff swimming through the ether from […]

Keynes, social democracy and the Great Moving Right Show

Lobster Issue 90 (2025)

[PDF file]: […] wrote in 1926) that ‘many big undertakings’ (notably public utilities) ‘need to be semisocialised’,5 in the form of semi-autonomous public corporations. But in organizations such as the BBC, the Bank of England, the Port of London Authority, ‘the big utility enterprise’ and ‘big insurance’ firms, and even the railway companies, Keynes identified a tendency […]

Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands by Richard Sakwa

Lobster Issue 77 (Summer 2019)

[PDF file]: […] scene for international economic justice and environmental protection. 7 8 9 Sakwa, Frontline Ukraine, p. 231 See . But I have never seen him on (for example) BBC or Channel 4 (this does not of course mean he has never been interviewed there but it does suggest that any appearances have been somewhat limited). […]

The British Gladio and the murder of Sergeant Speed

Lobster Issue 81 (Summer 2021)

[PDF file]: […] the miners’ strike and then funding various I discussed this in my ‘The View from the Bridge’ in Lobster 51. The source of the story was the BBC documentary ‘The plot against Harold Wilson’ which is on-line at . 10 In 1980 General Sir Walter Walker published his account of the global Soviet threat, […]

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

Lobster Issue 77 (Summer 2019)

[PDF file]: […] Barbie, Robert Maxwell, Tiny Rowland, Mohamed Al-Fayed, Geoffrey Robinson, Gordon Brown, Conrad Black, Bernie Ecclestone, Simon Cowell, Richard Branson, Tony Blair and Prince Charles. Working for the BBC from 1970, he reported for and then produced Panorama. He hit his stride in 1981 with Blind Eye to Murder: Britain, America and the Purging of […]

Operation Chiffon by Peter Taylor

Lobster Issue 87 (2023)

[PDF file]: […] then that ‘Robert’ might also have 4 These were Frank Steele and Michael Oatley, both of MI6. I found it redolent of first episode of the 1985 BBC TV series ‘Edge of Darkness’ – a bit of a niche reference, I admit, but if you know, you know. 5 6 This is in the […]

View from

Lobster Issue

[…] 2014 launched a military attack against those two provinces in the Donbass region. or 19 20 21 6 In support of that proposition, he cites a 2014 BBC News report which begins: Ukraine’s acting President Olexander Turchynov has announced the start of an “anti-terrorist operation” against pro-Russian separatists. But the BBC piece also reported: […]

South of the border

Lobster Issue 78 (Winter 2019)

[PDF file]: […] have previously been released by the National Archives.9 Hess and the Doppleganger Hess Andrew Rosthorn’s piece on Rudolf Hess in the current issue10 makes mention of the BBC Timewatch episode ‘Hess: The Edge of Conspiracy’. The programme was fronted by the eternally smug Professor Christopher Andrew – he who was chosen by MI5 to […]

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