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) […]

Broken Heartlands: A Journey Through Labour’s Lost England by Sebastian Payne

Lobster Issue 82 (Winter 2021) FREE

[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 […]

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 […]

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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 Watergate break-ins and the Howard Hughes connection

Lobster Issue 87 (2023) FREE

[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.3 It was all […]

view from 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 […]

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

Lobster Issue 82 (Winter 2021) FREE

[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 […]

The crisis: an historical perspective

Lobster Issue 67 (Summer 2014) FREE

[PDF file]: […] as a result flowed via corporate tax and asset and bond purchases to governments (so helping to finance the expansion of the welfare state under Blair and Brown) and, via banks, building societies and finance companies, both to businesses and to millions of private citizens. Lending expanded, personal and corporate borrowing mushroomed. The most […]

Back to the future (again)

Lobster Issue 75 (Summer 2018) FREE

[PDF file]: […] electoral participation by the young (so noticeable post-1997) was due to a combination of youth culture drifting into slick consumerism and political leaders – like Blair and Brown – not being prepared to do very much, unless they have the agreement of (perpetually) undecided voters. Despite repeated electoral endorsements, the Labour years continued with […]

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