The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 89 (2024)

[PDF file]: […] $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 Lockerbie Bombing: A Father’s Search for Justice by Jim Swire and Peter Biddulph

Lobster Issue 84 (Winter 2022)

[PDF file]: […] properly shocked by its verdict and the subsequent failure of his appeals against it. Along the way Swire observes the servile performances of Thatcher, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron, Jack Straw and David Miliband – none willing to challenge the determination of Washington to pin the blame for Lockerbie on Libya. He is […]

The long goodbye? Taking on the consultants

Lobster Issue 90 (2025)

[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 In one instance, a major rail franchise tender was withdrawn because the […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Lobster review: Sunday Herald, 17 August 2003

Lobster Issue

A  review of Lobster in the Sunday Herald, 17 August 2003.

[PDF file]: […] now plan to control the entire non-EU world so that they can continue to extract raw materials and consume at their present rate. A lot of skinny brown, black and yellow people are going to die to enable a lot of fat Americans to stay fat. This new American empire will not be sustainable […]

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 […]

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 […]

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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