South of the border (occasional snippets from)

Lobster Issue 91 (2025)

[PDF file]: […] of 40 years! The shitshow continues Regular perusers of this column may recall my item from Lobster 78 on facial recognition.17 The 6th August report on the BBC news website that ‘Facial recognition tech mistook me for wanted man’18 informs us that the shitshow continues. Presumably, we are supposed to be comforted by the […]

Is there a ‘political class’?

Lobster Issue 61 (Summer 2011)

[PDF file]: […] of social and economic liberalism, and they reproduce themselves across the generations, with the children moving seamlessly from (usually) private school to university, to political intern/private office/journalism/ BBC, to think tanks like Reform, Policy Exchange or the Centre for Policy Studies, or to polling organisations like YouGov, and thence to Parliament. If they want […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue

The view from the bridge Robin Ramsay Meeja news Udo Ulfkotte, a former editor of the German conservative newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, did an interview with Russia Today1 in which, among other things, he said this. ‘Germany is still a kind of a colony of the United States, you’ll see that in many points; like […]

Meltdown UK, and, Crisis and Recovery

Lobster Issue

[PDF file]: […] (Lobster 31 et seq). He is now director of the Global Policy Institute, a senior fellow of the Federal Trust and a prominent republican, opining recently on BBC Radio 4 on the forthcoming royal marriage. His latest book is a fulminating criticism of those elected to power in Britain while he was busy on […]

The Rise of New Labour: Into Office

Lobster Issue 68 (Winter 2014)

[PDF file]: […] employed more than 30% of the work force, half had recorded a rise in unemployment in the previous six months.8 As I was writing this paragraph the BBC news announced at the beginning of August 2001, that the manufacturing sector of the British economy was officially in recession – in large part the victim […]

Cummings, Greensill and all that

Lobster Issue 82 (Winter 2021)

[PDF file]: Cummings, Greensill and all that Robin Ramsay I watched the Dominic Cummings interview with the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg on the same day that the first report on the Lex Greensill affair became available on-line. Greensill was the fringe banker who hired former PM David Cameron – at around £29,000 a day – as a ‘consultant’.1 […]

The crisis

Lobster Issue 60 (Winter 2010)

[PDF file]: Contents Lobster 60 The crisis Robin Ramsay The doom loop W e are now into the ‘doom loop’ described last year by Bank of England officials Alessandri and Haldane in which the banks, having discovered that their respective host states do not have the courage to regulate them, say ‘Thanks for the bailout’ and carry […]

Hack Attack: How The Truth Caught Up With Rupert Murdoch by Nick Davies

Lobster Issue 68 (Winter 2014)

[PDF file]: […] interests of News International. What seems to have persuaded Murdoch to ditch him was the Tories’ readiness to take measures to inflict serious financial damage on the BBC by freezing the tv licence, weakening Ofcom and waving through the Murdochs’ takeover of BSkyB. It was not that Brown would have balked at such measures […]

The View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue

The View from the Bridge (a kind of blog) Robin Ramsay Big Cyril H ow do we interpret the Cyril Smith story to date? We know that allegations about Smith were given by MI5 officers to Colin Wallace in the British Army’s Information Policy Unit in Northern Ireland in 1974 for use in psy-ops projects. […]

In the Thick of It: The private diaries of a minister Alan Duncan

Lobster Issue 82 (Winter 2021)

[PDF file]: […] Secretary and then as Foreign Office minister:8 or 7 Ed Balls, Lord Pickles of Brentwood and Ongar, former head of NHS Test and Trace Baroness Dido Harding, BBC TV presenter Natasha Kaplinsky and convicted Guinness fraudster Gerald Ronson are among the members of the UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation. or Lord Triesman is probably better […]

Accessibility Toolbar