The Return of the Public and the Death of the Liberal Class

Lobster Issue 89 (2024)

[PDF file]: […] 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 wellbeing. From surveillance […]

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 […]

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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 […]

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 […]

South of the border

Lobster Issue 78 (Winter 2019)

[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 […]

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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. 14 15 John Hoskyns, Just In Time: inside the Thatcher revolution (London: Aurum, 2000) p. 107. He records (on p. 159) […]

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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 […]

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

Lobster Issue 77 (Summer 2019)

[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 […]

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