Our Secret Servants: the Shayler affair

Lobster Issue 34 (Winter 1997)

[…] Brown’s economics advisor, and former SIS officer Baroness Ramsay.(9) Only in forelock-tugging Britain would a former intelligence officer be appointed to a (nominal) oversight committee. From the Conservative Party there is former Northern Ireland junior minister Michael Mates (Colonel, rtd.), and Tom King, former Secretary of State for Northern Ireland and former Minister of […]

Men of Property: The Very Wealthy in Britain Since The Industrial Revolution

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Lobster Issue 53 (Summer 2007)

[…] interest in whether fortunes are inherited or acquired in one generation, and his interest in ‘politics’ concerns only which parties the rich support. His approach is unquestioningly conservative. This edition is an update of the author’s now classic book from 1981 on the history of the super-rich in Britain. It coincided with the rise […]

The Making of New Labour’s European Policy

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Lobster Issue 44 (Winter 2002/3)

[…] the ERM fiasco of 1992, is wary of the single currency, fearing another ERM-style debacle. (2) ‘New Labour’ is stuck in precisely the same way that the Conservative Party was stuck and it is entirely unclear whether or not a pro-single currency propaganda campaign like those described in Andy Mullen’s piece above would work […]

Marching to the fault line: The 1984 miners’ strike and the death of industrial Britain

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Lobster Issue 57 (Summer 2009)

[…] Scargill made no bones about it, seeking funding from the Soviet bloc and Colonel Gaddafi. (It was as if he was following a script written by the Conservative Central Office and MI5.) But Rimington’s statement does not quite support Thatcher’s ‘the enemy within’ theory about the CPGB. I assume that MI5 knew that her […]

Lockerbie, the octopus and the Maltese double cross

Lobster Issue 27 (1994)

Political debris continues to fall from the bombing of the Pan-Am flight 103 on 21 December 1988, which killed 270 people. Fallout from Lockerbie has begun to reveal one of the ugliest political corruptions of recent times. This Byzantine tale is further evidence of just how powerful and ruthless the American-led international security apparatus — … Read more

Blairusconi: populism and elite rule

Lobster Issue 53 (Summer 2007)

Tony Blair will be remembered not just for the slaughter in Iraq, and the subsequent collapse of Labour in Scotland in face of a resurgent SNP, but as the Labour leader who could have forged common links across Europe but chose to side with one of the continent’s most despised figures. Charles Clarke, one of … Read more

Two views of Dorril: MI6: Fifty years of Special Operations

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Lobster Issue 39 (Summer 2000)

[…] the Labour Movement and his former allies, but in the words of his former wife Margaret, has sold his soul to the devil. Never mind, that ghastly conservative creep Blair tells us we should be proud of our MI6 boys and girls for they give us a cutting edge over the rest of the […]

Major Farran’s Hat

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Lobster Issue 57 (Summer 2009)

[…] into pointless murder. It will come as no surprise to learn that Farran walked away from the crime, wrote a best-selling memoir, stood for parliament as a Conservative candidate in 1950 (he was defeated by the sitting Labour MP, a certain George Wigg), and went on to have a successful political career in Canada. […]

A short history of Lobster

Lobster Issue

[…] Steve, and, in publishing it, we breached the Official Secrets Act in a big way. But apart from being denounced in the House of Commons by a Conservative MP – who was among those listed – nothing happened. Evidently the British state had learned the lesson that prosecution merely makes those prosecuted the subject […]

Behind right-wing conspiracy theories

Lobster Issue 8 (1985)

[…] of the 19th century, a new wave of working class secret societies – including the Oddfellows, Buffaloes and Forresters – appeared. These groups, based on the highly conservative world of British Freemasonry, were an important index of the emergence of a working class politics based on acceptance of the social order (and male domination).As […]

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