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 […]

Code of Conduct: Why We Need to Fix Parliament – and How to Do It by Chris Bryant

Lobster Issue 87 (2023)

[PDF file]: […] countries’. Bryant goes on to make the point that ‘Parliament doesn’t work if you can’t rely on ministers to tell the truth’. (pp 121-123) Of course, the Conservative governments that have been in power since 2010 hardly have a monopoly as far as lying and dishonesty is concerned – a point we shall return […]

Newsinger Bryant copy

Lobster Issue

[…] than others’. Bryant provides some examples: ‘Meller Designs, which was co-owned by David Meller, who had backed Michael Gove’s bid for leader and donated £60,000 to the Conservative Party, was referred by Gove and won £164 million in Covid contracts’.5 There was Greg Hands who ‘passed on a recommendation . . . which led […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 79 (Summer 2020)

[PDF file]: […] has been operating among what used to known as the Stupid Party. By their omissions shall ye know them In his Times column on 28 March, former Conservative MP Matthew Parris worried about the ‘magic money tree’ the Conservatives had discovered with which to pay employees and employers whose livelihoods had been shut down […]

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 […]

The Fate of Abraham: Why the West is Wrong about Islam by Peter Oborne

Lobster Issue 84 (Winter 2022)

[PDF file]: […] the BBC and everything that the United Kingdom stood for. I considered liberal capitalism the best system of economics the world has had. I was a conventional Conservative. I wrote for Conservative newspapers. He worked alongside Boris Johnson at The Spectator and was its political correspondent at the time of 9/11. Not long afterwards […]

Killing Thatcher: The IRA, the Manhunt and the Long War on the Crown

Lobster Issue 87 (2023)

[PDF file]: […] two days earlier. As a result, a general election had immediately been called and the INLA may have predicted that Labour were going to lose power.2 A Conservative win would have lead to Neave – who wanted to replace the Callaghan/Mason policy of containing and marginalizing the IRA with an outright war against republican […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 91 (2025)

[PDF file]: […] centre of this crisis is Robbie Gibb, a man who has spent more than a decade shaping the BBC’s political coverage, zig-zagging between the BBC and the Conservative government while advancing his own partisan project that has distorted the corporation’s journalism on Brexit, Trump and, eventually, Gaza . . . . . . Gibb […]

Is this what failure looks like? Brian Sedgemore 1937–2015

Lobster Issue 70 (Winter 2015)

[PDF file]: […] Strategy (AES), adopted by Tony Benn as a campaigning tool in early 1975. Framed to cast Labour as firmly opposed to the decisions taken by the preceding Conservative government (and of course, by implication, critical of any accommodation with those hinted at 1 Labour won Wandsworth – at that point a pre-Thatcher, pregentrified area […]

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