Hope & Despair: Lifting the lid on the murky world of Scottish politics by Neil Findlay and But What Can I Do?: Why politics has gone so wrong, and how you can help fix it by Alastair Campbell

Lobster Issue 86 (2023)

[PDF file]: […] included this hoping no one recalled his role in the promotion of the Iraq War, the mysterious death of Dr Kelly or his venomous attack on the BBC that led to the resignation of its chair, Gavyn Davies, and its director general Greg Dyke. Dyke initially helped fund Blair. He later regretted it ‘because […]

The Brexit impasse

Lobster Issue 74 (Winter 2017)

[PDF file]: […] this out last year, it Scott Newton, ‘The Conservatives and Europe: the long view’, History and Policy Opinion Paper, January 2013, or . 14 Matt Drake, ‘ BBC Newsnight: Lord Heseltine “in favour” of voting for “horrific” Corbyn to STOP (sic) Brexit’, Daily Express, 10 November 2017. 15 still involves a very significant U-turn. […]

View from Bridge copy

Lobster Issue

[…] the country as it actually is and as it is represented in Westminster.3 If Butler and McTeague are political commentators, Libby Purves is not. Occasional Times columnist, BBC presenter for many years, Purves is the personification of the middle-of-the-road, mainstream, apolitical (but conservative) journalist.4 But things are now so bad even Purves was moved […]

The Dr Strangeloves of the Mind

Lobster Issue 59 (Summer 2010)

[PDF file]: […] found out what was going to happen and objected he just dosed them up so they didn’t know whether they were coming or going. In April 2009 BBC Radio 4 broadcast a documentary by James Maw entitled Revealing the Mind Bender General. Maw interviewed several of Sargant’s patients who spoke of their lives being […]

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 […]

South of the Border

Lobster Issue 86 (2023)

[PDF file]: […] fact that there has been more than a little victim-shaming – sometimes subtle, other times not so. Take, for example, a piece by Gordon Corera for the BBC in 2021, detailing information on U.S. diplomats who were suing their government employer.1 Corera states that ‘members of the public, some with mental health issues, approach […]

9/11 attracts mainstream critics

Lobster Issue 91 (2025)

[PDF file]: […] the influence of American Neoconservatives and Zionists in 9/11 events. There is everything from the dancing Israelis working as spies for Urban Moving Systems to the prompt BBC framing of events by former Israel Prime Minister and friend of Jeffrey Epstein, Ehud Barak.17 We can learn more about Sandy Berger, President Clinton’s national security […]

‘Nobody told us we could do this’

Lobster Issue 64 (Winter 2012)

[PDF file]: […] hapless politician who is effortlessly outmanoeuvred by self-serving senior officials. They were co-written by Sir Anthony Jay, a right-wing polemicist, whose production company also produced the 1979 BBC series Free to Choose in which Peter Jay (his cousin) sympathetically interviewed Milton Friedman about his monetarist views. There is a clear undertow of cynicism and […]

The Never Trumpers

Lobster Issue 80 (Winter 2020)

[PDF file]: […] The role of Fox News in enabling Trump is particularly relevant in Britain today as it seems almost certain that the Johnson-Cummings government intends to defund the BBC if it can get away with it and to bring in Fox News-style TV. This will certainly be necessary if they are to succeed with the […]

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