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 view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 88 (2024)

[PDF file]: […] that just after the election of the original NuLab, in 1997, I commented that Labour was led by three ‘not very bright Thatcherites’.7 One of them, Gordon Brown, is still talking about poverty here without betraying the slightest awareness that he had any role in this country’s economic decline.8 6 or . Peter Mandelson […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 93 (2026)

[PDF file]: […] be believed until reliable other sources have confirmed it as real. *new* Broon Despite being the unapologetic co-parent of the financial disaster of 2007-9, 1 1 Gordon Brown still has access to the Guardian’s columns for his banalities. In a recent piece,2 he wrote: the US has abandoned its longstanding championing of the rule […]

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 […]

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 […]

Blair and Israel

Lobster Issue 92 (2026)

[PDF file]: […] that time would have had a much greater interest in that subject – not that Mandelson would want to introduce his best mate to him (i.e. Gordon Brown). After leaving parliament both Blair and Mandelson went on to building their own political consultancies, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change and Mandelson’s Global Counsel […]

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 […]

In the Thick of It: The private diaries of a minister Alan Duncan

Lobster Issue 82 (Winter 2021)

[PDF file]: […] Balls from Morley and Outwood in 2015 after the New Labour machine had found a second ‘safe’ seat in Yorkshire for the friend and ally of Gordon Brown. Jenkyns, ‘the brainless nothing’, now sits on a Tory majority of 11,267. 1 2 comment . . . . He is an egotistical showman who just […]

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 […]

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