Ten Years Hard Labour by Chris Williamson

Lobster Issue 84 (Winter 2022)

[PDF file]: […] (p. 27) Many of these New Labour MPs who had been parachuted into their safe seats by the party machine returned to Westminster after the 2015 This BBC documentary made at the time of the 2017 general election gives a flavour of the attitudes of leading figures in the Parliamentary Labour Party at the […]

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 […]

The View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue 63 (Summer 2012)

[PDF file]: […] 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 […]

We don’t need no…

Lobster Issue 79 (Summer 2020)

[PDF file]: […] was necessary to let him make friendly things (sic) to the manufacturing people.’ 12 (emphasis added) Mrs Thatcher also bought this line. In his memoir, the former BBC political correspondent, John Cole, describes asking Mrs Thatcher for an example of how this ‘service’ or ‘post-industrial economy’ would work: ‘She cited an entrepreneur she had […]

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. […]

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 […]

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 […]

View from Bridge 89

Lobster Issue

[…] Together came from the Israel lobby in the UK. I wonder why. Not a million miles from which . . . as far as I can see BBC News, the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph and The Times have not reported the arrest of Richard Medhurst and Sara Wilkinson under anti–terrorism legislation for their reporting […]

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