Everything’s gone off the rails except the ideology!

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Lobster Issue 55 (Summer 2008) £££

[…] received. All aspects of running a railway have become far more expensive…’ Why should this be? First, of course, privatisation itself was a costly exercise. At a conservative estimate, the total cost of the process, including the amounts paid out by bidders, was reported to be at least £1bn. For the taxpayer, the direct […]

Terrorism, Anti-Semitism and Dissent

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Lobster Issue 47 (Summer 2004) £££

[…] new generation of nuclear missiles. On his London trips between 1981 and 1983 Wick mainly saw senior staff at the BBC and ITN and supporters of the Conservative government and its officials.(7) At the time Dunwoody was a shadow health minister and ostensibly a very minor player in Labour politics, so a meeting with […]

A note on the British deployment of nuclear weapons in crises – with particular reference to the Falklands and Gulf Wars and the purchase of Trident

Lobster Issue 28 (December 1994) £££

[…] the story has been subject to some ridicule by some sectors of the defence establishment. Tam Dalyell’s initial source, shortly after the Falklands War, was a senior Conservative back-bench MP with an interest in defence matters and close links with the Ministry of Defence, and who later held ministerial office. Tam later had it […]

Digging in the Oyston archive

Lobster Issue 51 (Summer 2006) £££

Tons of documents and tape recordings recovered from an old manor house in Lancashire reveal the true depths of corruption in English provincial life at the end of the twentieth century. Owen Oyston was the British Labour Party’s biggest private financial contributor in the Thatcher years. The millionaire owner of radio stations and glossy magazines … Read more

Dangerous Men: the SAS and Popular Culture

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Lobster Issue 34 (Winter 1997) £££

[…] heroes. This changed in the 1980s when the SAS found themselves enlisted as Thatcher’s Praetorian Guard, their exploits, both past and present, exploited as part of the Conservative Party’s ideological offensive against the post-1945 political and social settlement.’ (p. 3) He notes the ‘interesting cultural difference between Britain and the United States that there […]

The True Story of the Bilderberg Group

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Lobster Issue 54 (Winter 2007/8) £££

[…] foreign policy executive arm of the British monarchy.’(11) Ha! (And no evidence offered.) p. 29 ‘Lady Thatcher had been dumped as head of state by her own Conservative Party on Bilderberg orders and replaced with trapeze artist (sic) John Major.’ Not only is there no evidence that Thatcher was dumped on the orders of […]

The View from the Bridge: Blair. IMF. Bilderberg, etc

Lobster Issue 40 (Winter 2000/1) £££

[…] June 2000, he has been welcomed back into the ranks of the Pinay Circle and attended the June meeting of the Circle in Lisbon. Also present were Conservative MPs Michael Howard and Alan Duncan and Lord Cranbourne, leader of the Tories in the House of Lords. NATO and Kosovo The most surprising comments on […]

The Iron Triangle: inside the secret world of the Carlyle Group

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Lobster Issue 46 (Winter 2003) £££

[…] 2001 in the presence of Saudi investors like Shafiq Bin Laden, estranged brother of Osama. In the wake of such events and in line with wider neo- Conservative foreign policy objectives, the Carlyle Group has sought to divest itself of its dependency on the querulous House of Saud in favour of the new ‘opportunities’ […]

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 […]

The Northern Front

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Lobster Issue 54 (Winter 2007/8) £££

[…] July 2007, Charles Glass wrote in The Nation about what he knew well in those heady days during which he composed his diary: ‘Washington’s ideologically charged neo- conservative coterie possessed little or no understanding of the Middle East, allowing it to dismiss the easily predictable consequences of invading and occupying Iraq.’ A defensible charge, […]

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