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 […]

South of the Border

Lobster Issue 75 (Summer 2018)

[PDF file]: […] included General Abdul Rashid Dostum (now the Afghan Vice-President) who had a close working relationship with US SF Operational Detachment Alpha 595.18 The money that John Simpson’s BBC report shows are in the 10,000 Afghani denomination which would, at the time, have had an approximate value of $150 per banknote. A conservative estimate would […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Get In: The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer by Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund

Lobster Issue 90 (2025)

[PDF file]: Get In: The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund London: The Bodley Head, 2025, £25, h/b Colin Challen One of the earlier books seeking to answer the questions of who and what Keir Starmer is and represents was Oliver Eagleton’s The Starmer Project: A Journey to the Right (Verso, 2022). […]

‘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 […]

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