The Western Union Clandestine Committee: Britain and the ‘Gladio’ networks

Lobster Issue 72 (Winter 2016)

[PDF file]: […] Park. 22 As good a point to start for anyone who might want to read more about ‘Numbers Stations’ would be and the YouTube upload of a BBC Radio 4 programme at . 23 An official, and very dry account is at the Intelligence Corps Museum website at A more entertaining read can be […]

Romeo Spy by John Alexander Symonds

Lobster Issue 63 (Summer 2012)

[PDF file]: […] of inaccurate tales of espionage.’ (p. 314) Symonds’ account ends with this devastating final paragraph. ‘In retrospect, nobody emerges from the Mitrokhin affair with much credit. The BBC and The Times competed against each other to see who could renege on their agreements first; MI5 tried every slippery trick to conceal Dame Stella’s stunning […]

Historical Notes on Tom Nairn and the British State

Lobster Issue 85 (Summer 2023)

[PDF file]: […] mentor, Sir Keith Joseph, commented in 1976 that ‘the pursuit of income inequality will turn this country into a totalitarian slum’. During the 1979 election Thatcher told BBC reporter Michael Cockerell, ‘I can’t bear Britain in decline, I just can’t’.18 Like the coup plotters, the Thatcher governments were determined to reverse a ‘decline’ they […]

Holding Pattern

Lobster Issue 70 (Winter 2015)

[PDF file]: […] information you want from just about anyone, so long as it has an environmental connection. Not even the spooks are exempt from EIR and the dear old BBC, whose investigative journalism knows no depths, recently used the regulations to gain information about the energy efficiency of the headquarters of MI5 and MI6, vital information […]

The Gloucester Horror

Lobster Issue 70 (Winter 2015)

[PDF file]: […] consistency but the emerging motive is transparent. In a typed and lengthy letter dated 3 January 1973, Mr Westlake wrote concerning Mr Sargeant’s analysis of the above-mentioned BBC film of the crash: ‘George Carley and I have now had time to digest your analysis and as your draft now stands there is liable to […]

Newton on Keynes

Lobster Issue

[…] wrote in 1926) that ‘many big undertakings’ (notably public utilities) ‘need to be semisocialised’,4 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 […]

The Fate of Abraham: Why the West is Wrong about Islam by Peter Oborne

Lobster Issue 84 (Winter 2022)

[PDF file]: […] for the British state. He writes: I loved and was thankful for the monarchy, Parliament, the army, the rule of law, the NHS, the Foreign Office, the BBC and everything that the United Kingdom stood for. I considered liberal capitalism the best system of economics the world has had. I was a conventional Conservative. […]

Shirley Williams

Lobster Issue

[…] 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 description of how as a 21-year-old Oxford student the then Shirley Catlin was funded by the US government to take […]

South of the border

Lobster Issue 79 (Summer 2020)

[PDF file]: South of the border (occasional snippets from) Nick Must Spook joke department ‘UK spies will need artificial intelligence’ reads the headline to a Gordon Corera piece on BBC news online.1 Yes, the gags are pretty much writing themselves now. Deferred prosecution agreements – buying your way out of trouble ‘A deferred prosecution agreement, or […]

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