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 […]

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

Lobster Issue 83 (Summer 2022) FREE

[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) FREE

[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 […]

Misc reviews

Lobster Issue

[…] a major piece of work by any standards. What is Opus Dei? Noam Friedlander 10 Headpress; UK £13.99 US $19.95, p/b Thom Burnett both London: Collis and Brown, £8.99, p/b These are two of the first batch of a new series, Conspiracy Books. Which might lead you to suspect you’d get a conspiracy or […]

South of the border

Lobster Issue 78 (Winter 2019) FREE

[PDF file]: […] he’s down. . . … especially if that man is Boris Johnson. I have previously written of the similarities betwixt himself and the unlamented ‘accident prone’ George Brown, late of the 1960s Labour front bench. I have recently been taking advantage of the Netflix streaming service to work my way through the entire Monty […]

The long goodbye? Taking on the consultants

Lobster Issue 90 (2025) FREE

[PDF file]: […] highly technical areas of public services, such as environmental monitoring, finance and digital technologies. This became apparent in the United Kingdom in the aftermath of the Blair/ Brown years, during the period of the Coalition government’s policy to slash spending on consultants. In one instance, a major rail franchise tender was withdrawn because the […]

View from Bridge 87

Lobster Issue

[…] thought this. Jackie Kennedy and her mother. JFK’s secretary Evelyn Lincoln. KGB officer Oleg Nechiporenko. The KGB office in the USA. CIA officer E. Howard Hunt. Madeleine Brown, LBJ’s mistress. Barr McClellan, a Dallas lawyer. Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. Gen. Joseph J. Cappucci, the head of Air Force Counter Intelligence. And yet barely […]

Consultants Challen

Lobster Issue

[…] highly technical areas of public services, such as environmental monitoring, finance and digital technologies. This became apparent in the United Kingdom in the aftermath of the Blair/ Brown years, during the period of the Coalition government’s policy to slash spending on consultants. In one instance, a major rail franchise tender was withdrawn because the […]

Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World by Adam Tooze

Lobster Issue 77 (Summer 2019) FREE

[PDF file]: […] everyone who mattered, politicians included. Tooze notes that it was the social democrats in the US and the UK, the ‘new’ Democrats (Clinton) and New Labour ( Brown and Blair), who took all this free market nonsense seriously and gave the money men their heads. ‘It was, therefore, no coincidence that it was now […]

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.43 It was all […]

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