Who pays the piper? Funding the Labour Party

Lobster Issue 85 (Summer 2023)

[PDF file]: Who pays the piper? Funding the Labour Party Colin Challen When Jeremy Corbyn vacated the leadership of the Labour Party – even after a bruising general election in 2019 – the party was left with around £13 million in the kitty. In the years that followed that balance was gradually whittled away, until the party […]

A fly’s eye view of the American war against Vietnam 40 years later: who won which war?

Lobster Issue 70 (Winter 2015)

[PDF file]: […] to Vietnam. He explained: ‘Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go ten thousand miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights?…’ 7 An autorotation is a standard emergency procedure […]

Our Fight for Democracy: A History of Democracy in the United Kingdom by John Strafford

Lobster Issue 59 (Summer 2010)

[PDF file]: […] was followed by becoming a Privy Councillor in 2006 and Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the new Ministry of Justice in May 2007. In June 2007 Gordon Brown appointed her to the Cabinet as Leader of the House of Lords and Lord President of the Council. In October 2008 she replaced Peter Mandelson as […]

THEY KNEW: how a culture of conspiracy keep America complacent by Sarah Kendzior

Lobster Issue 88 (2024)

[PDF file]: Conspiracy theories and conspiracy facts THEY KNEW How a Culture of Conspiracy keeps America Complacent Sarah Kendzior New York: Flatiron Books 2022 John Newsinger Sarah Kendzior is one of the most interesting commentators writing about contemporary America. Her two previous books, The View from Flyover Country (2018) and Hiding in Plain Sight (2020), are essential […]

View from the bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] free market moves since 1979 have all been a mistake. Even if Mr Starmer thought it, this would entail criticising Mrs Thatcher’s acolytes, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and he won’t do that. 14 15 John Hoskyns, Just In Time: inside the Thatcher revolution (London: Aurum, 2000) p. 107. He records (on p. 159) […]

Kim Philby: The Unknown Story of the KGB’s Master Spy by Tim Milne

Lobster Issue 83 (Summer 2022)

[PDF file]: […] in the region, a good subject for an experienced and knowledgeable journalist with an 11 Milne pp. 208-9. 12 See Genrikh Borovik, The Philby Files (London: Little, Brown, 1994) pp. 368-9. 13 Milne pp. 230-1, 235; Borovik (see note 12), p. 284 5 extensive network of well-placed contacts.14 Overall, his chief value to the […]

Deception in High Places: a history of bribery in Britain’s arms trade by Nicholas Gilby

Lobster Issue 69 (Summer 2015)

[PDF file]: […] business – in which ‘commissions’ are commonplace – but it has been for politicians, especially members of the Labour Party whose official ethos before messrs. Blair and Brown was something vaguely along the ‘merchants of death’ line. The Labour government of Harold Wilson solved that problem in 1966 by creating an insulation layer, the […]

View from

Lobster Issue

[…] flow of cheap consumer products opened up by the mass industrialisation of East Asia. But what, plausibly, has more impact on consumer prices: a letter from Gordon Brown to the governor of the Bank of England, or 300 million Chinese moving from the countryside to work in factories? If you can buy a 50-inch […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.’ Ambition Lord save us from people who just want to be the big I-am. We had Gordon Brown, who wanted to be the Big Yin. Gordon joined Labour and apparently was a socialist. Then he sniffed the wind and realised that he had to […]

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