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 […]

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 In one instance, a major rail franchise tender was withdrawn because the […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The diaries 1938-1943 Edited by Simon Heffer

Lobster Issue 83 (Summer 2022)

[PDF file]: […] in Menzies and Churchill at War (London: Paragon House, 1987). Channon’s comments seem to bolster this assessment. 20 21 Her nickname was due to her thick, dark brown hair. 22 Channon had written The Ludwigs of Bavaria (1933), an account of the Wittlesbachs. 14 Given its date, was the message ‘Mrs Woolly well now […]

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 […]

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