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 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 […]

Climbing the Bookshelves by Shirley Williams

Lobster Issue 58 (Winter 2009/2010)

[PDF file]: […] 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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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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