Sailing Close To The Wind: Reminiscences by Dennis Skinner and Kevin Maguire

Lobster Issue 69 (Summer 2015)

[PDF file]: […] I breathe’. What is needed to deal with the likes of Ashley are ‘new employment and trade union rights’. But he doesn’t explain why the Blair and Brown Labour governments did not introduce such legislation between 1997 and 2010. The book’s best chapter is on the 1984-85 miners’ strike, which he describes as ‘the […]

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 […]

Apocryphylia

Lobster Issue 68 (Winter 2014)

[PDF file]: […] the English political stage seem able to contemplate changes to this. Certainly the efforts of Labour pre-2010 do not inspire confidence. Great store was set by Gordon Brown in 2009 in the establishment of the International Centre for Financial Regulation was announced. Designed to map out the future of responsible capitalism, it came with […]

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 […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] years 8 See for example Not that this makes a change from NuLab. See James Chapman, ‘Meet Labour’s City cronies: The roll call of bankers rewarded by Brown and Blair’, The Daily Mail 12 February 2009. 9 These are detailed in James Lyons, ‘NHS reform leaves Tory backers with links to private healthcare firms […]

Gone but not forgotten… (Donald Trump book reviews)

Lobster Issue 82 (Winter 2021)

[PDF file]: […] and the young Miller became ‘a Horowitz acolyte’. Miller ‘was awed by Horowitz’s ideas’, and came to see ‘this country as a white-forged masterpiece, unfairly demonized by brown hordes’. (pp. 6, 7, 75, 77, 78) When he left school, Miller published a condemnation of it on Horowitz’s website as ‘Left-Wing’, as ‘an institution not […]

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. To judge by Chancellor Reeves’ Mansion House speech in November, she isn’t going to entertain any deviant ideas.3 It was all […]

Political life in Britain

Lobster Issue

[…] He’s travelled a fair bit of the world and knows a lot of law. He brings both together in a clearly written, heavyweight assault on Blair and Brown governments packed with lawyers with little apparent concern for either the legality of their actions on their far-reaching consequences for human rights and well-being. From surveillance […]

Broken Heartlands: A Journey Through Labour’s Lost England by Sebastian Payne

Lobster Issue 82 (Winter 2021)

[PDF file]: […] the UK’s underlying issues. After the Iraq war and the banking crisis there was little shine left on the New Labour brand. The successors to Blair and Brown were left to pick up the English and Welsh pieces, Scotland by then having shed much of its 20th century loyalty to Labour. Corbyn revived the […]

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