Gordon Brown: in the country of the blind…

Lobster Issue 60 (Winter 2010)

[PDF file]: […] experience on her part, Mattinson lacks a certain perspective while making many of her otherwise correct points. The role of the SDP in disastrously splitting the anti- Conservative vote in 1983 and 1987 is not mentioned at all; nor are the very real difficulties for any major political party, led by even the most […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 84 (Winter 2022)

[PDF file]: […] the standards of France, Germany, Denmark etc, it is one. But uniquely, among European states as far as I know, there is a minority of the ruling Conservative Party which wants the state to fail; which welcomes a failing state; which regards the state as essentially a necessary evil to be kept as small […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 89 (2024)

[PDF file]: […] original formulation of something akin to the ‘power elite’ idea was the 1959 anthology edited by historian Hugh Thomas, The Establishment. This suggested that there were unelected conservative forces within the state which existed to prevent any (elected) liberal/left from enacting policies which threatened the status quo. The recent talk on the right about […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] some, or all of, their operations out of the UK.9 Since the Tory Party has always been the party of the City, can we really envisage a Conservative prime minister doing a deal with the EU which damages it? The narrative There is the concept of ‘the narrative’ in politics and the media. The […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 88 (2024)

[PDF file]: […] the sake of liberal values may and 23 24 The radical right in the USA has spotted it. See ‘Disinformation Inc: State Department bankrolls group secretly blacklisting conservative media’ at or . 25 9 26 seem a paradox, but it is not illogical. For latter-day hyper-liberals, free speech is useful only so long as […]

View from Bridge 89

Lobster Issue

[…] fundamental point, why should we take him seriously? Then there was Nick Timothy, former chief of staff to Tory PM Theresa May. Trying to big-up the outgoing Conservative Party’s economic record, he asserted: Inflation, borrowing and unemployment are all lower than when Labour last left office. Debt is lower than in the 1950s, and […]

A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s by Alwyn W. Turner

Lobster Issue 66 (Winter 2013)

[PDF file]: […] discuss the enormous problem of the dinosaurs – on the Thursday before the dinosaurs became extinct. Much the same could be said about fears of a one-party Conservative quasi-dictatorship. Before too long, the notion would be laughable. Maastricht In early June, the Danes stunned the European political establishment by voting in a referendum against […]

All In It Together: England in the early 21st Century by Alwyn Turner

Lobster Issue 82 (Winter 2021)

[PDF file]: […] 2021, £20, h/b Dan Atkinson On March 20 1976, in the immediate wake of Harold Wilson’s resignation as Prime Minister and Labour leader, Margaret Thatcher told the Conservative Central Council about ‘a little piece of advice’ she had given him the previous week. ‘Go’ I said, ‘and go now’. ‘It’s always gratifying to be […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 72 (Winter 2016)

[PDF file]: […] 1970s Milton Friedman’s views on the money supply – monetarism – and its centrality in government economic policy had become adopted by the Thatcher faction of the Conservative Party, apparently by Labour Prime Minister Callaghan2 4 and by sections of the higher media commentariat. In 1980 Friedman presented a series of hour long films […]

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