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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Collapse of stout party: Eden, Suez and America

Lobster Issue 74 (Winter 2017)

[PDF file]: Collapse of stout party Eden, Suez and America Simon Matthews Have you heard the one about the Conservative Prime Minister who is disowned by the right-wing of the Tory Party for not seeing through a bombastic and nationalist policy, and disowned by its left-wing for duplicity and generally ridiculed by the wider public? Forget […]

How our politicians helped to kill UK manufacturing

Lobster Issue 80 (Winter 2020)

[PDF file]: […] Barber was Heath’s Chancellor the Exchequer. Of the Thatcher/Major period, 1979-97 he notes: ‘ . . . Britain’s manufacturers should have thrived during the 18 years of Conservative rule . . . yet the reverse was the case with the manufacturing industry suffering painful reductions in markets, capacity Dan Atkinson’s thoughts on what is […]

The Oyston Files by Andrew Rosthorn

Lobster Issue 83 (Summer 2022)

[PDF file]: […] two: ‘The reporters David Graham and Bob Satchwell, and their crusading editor Barry Askew, examined Sir Douglas Osmond’s careful description of how Bill Harrison used the pliant Conservative leader of Lancashire County Council to bend Chief Constable Stanley Parr to his will.’ In fairness though, we are at least being given a clear indication […]

Friends of Israel

Lobster Issue 86 (2023)

[PDF file]: […] local government and the legal sphere; academia; and the media’. (p. 12) So we are introduced to the work of the Labour Friends of Israel (LFI) and Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI), highlighting ‘these groups’ non-transparent and unaccountable modus operandi and the intermittent scandals which occasionally illuminate their activities, as well the close informal […]

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 […]

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