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) […]

Ten Years Hard Labour by Chris Williamson

Lobster Issue 84 (Winter 2022)

[PDF file]: […] Labour Party (PLP) were the dilapidated remains of New Labour, the construct that had effected some positive change in its 13 years under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, but which had steadily lost members and electoral support before its 2010 defeat.4 Williamson had campaigned to make Ed Miliband leader and for a while was […]

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 […]

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.17 It was all […]

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 Gloucester Horror

Lobster Issue 70 (Winter 2015)

[PDF file]: […] National Archives file AVIA 101/745 is perhaps most interesting not for what it contains but for its folder. In common with such files of government paperwork, the brown card ‘dust jacket’ bears columns that record to whom the completed file was referred and on what date, allowing a reader to trace its bureaucratic travels. […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 78 (Winter 2019)

[PDF file]: […] 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 […]

The Lexit delusion

Lobster Issue 79 (Summer 2020)

[PDF file]: […] Murdoch, Viscount Rothermere and the Barclay Brothers, it has sustained a series of Conservative governments since 2010. It propelled the country towards Euroscepticism even in the Blair- Brown era and achieved its most spectacular success in the 2016 referendum and 2019 General Election. The politics and economics of Brexit are therefore right-wing, fusing neoliberalism […]

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 […]

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