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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

lob86South of the Border

Lobster Issue

[…] 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 […]

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: […]

Her Majesty’s secret servants

Lobster Issue 62 (Winter 2011)

[PDF file]: […] fine imposed and the expenses incurred by the Telegraph dealing with the court case. Harebrained? ‘Page 8’ was a film written and directed by David Hare on BBC 2 on 28 August 2011, in which Bill Nighy played a suave, sophisticated senior MI5 officer who saves the Service from being being destroyed in a […]

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

Lobster Issue 80 (Winter 2020)

[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 […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] bullshit basket he calls for some global action which he knows will never take place but which he thinks sounds impressive. His latest was reported on the BBC News website: he wants a ‘global fund for education’.6 No doubt this will be next on the list after the new global financial system he wants […]

Back to the future: the 1970s reconsidered

Lobster Issue 34 (Winter 1997)

[PDF file]: […] a one-sided struggle. The ‘yes’ campaign had unlimited funding, the support of the City of London, the large British companies, the British state, its broadcasting apparatus (the BBC) and almost all the rest of the media, as well as covert assistance from the CIA and IRD. The ‘no’ campaign was out-spent ten or fifteen […]

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