View from Bridge 89

Lobster Issue

[…] $2.07 at its peak in 2007). A strong pound is bad for the British manufacturing economy, making exports expensive and competing imports cheap. But Blair (and Chancellor Brown) didn’t care about manufacturing – or simply didn’t understand the impact the value of sterling had on it – or both. After all, we had the […]

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 […]

The View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue 63 (Summer 2012)

[PDF file]: […] and interests are not beneficial and are opposed to the armed forces. The unit is well placed to do this because its members are civilians.”’ When Gordon Brown dips into the bullshit basket he calls for some global action which he knows will never take place but which he thinks sounds impressive. His latest […]

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 […]

The View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue 61 (Summer 2011)

[PDF file]: […] 10 See for example 11 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. These are detailed in James Lyons, ‘NHS reform leaves Tory backers with links to private healthcare firms set […]

View from the Bridge 89

Lobster Issue

[…] that just after the election of the original NuLab, in 1997, I commented that Labour was led by three ‘not very bright Thatcherites’.31 One of them, Gordon Brown, is still talking about poverty here without betraying 30 or . Peter Mandelson was Thatcherite number 3. 31 11 the slightest awareness that he had any […]

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 […]

The Watergate break-ins and the Howard Hughes connection

Lobster Issue 87 (2023)

[PDF file]: […] extremely narrow loss to Kennedy on the Hughes loan story.28 The same scandal haunted Nixon again in his 1962 gubernatorial campaign in California.29 In fact, Gov. Edmund Brown, father of the current governor, reportedly ‘credited his election victory’ over Nixon that year to a magazine article about the Hughes loan.30 That should have been […]

Between The Waves: The Hidden History of a Very British Revolution 1945-2016 by Tom McTague

Lobster Issue 92 (2026)

[PDF file]: […] Michael Gove is piffle compared to the fact that City-friendly policies damaged the British economy for Edward Heath in 1973/4 and reshaped it under Thatcher, Blair and Brown, destroying much of the manufacturing sector. It’s not that Mr McTague is entirely unaware of the City’s significance. He writes on p. 468: Britain did not […]

Accessibility Toolbar