The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 79 (Summer 2020) FREE
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[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 […]

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

Lobster Issue 87 (2023) FREE
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[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 […]

Our Fight for Democracy: A History of Democracy in the United Kingdom by John Strafford

Lobster Issue 59 (Summer 2010) FREE
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[PDF file]: […] of Ministers should meet in public. 32: The European Scrutiny Committee of the House of Commons should meet in public. 39: Both the Labour Party and the Conservative Party should reform themselves to become democratic bodies answerable to their membership so that members can change the Constitution of their party on the basis of […]

Collapse of stout party: Eden, Suez and America

Lobster Issue 74 (Winter 2017) FREE

[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) FREE

[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) FREE

[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) FREE
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[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 […]

View from Bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] of the mid 1970s – control the money supply and you can control inflation – appealed because it was so simple. It took hold, particularly in the Conservative Party, where what became the Thatcherites adopted it and wrecked the British manufacturing economy with it between 1980 and 1984. Margaret Thatcher was a politician who […]

View from Bridge copy

Lobster Issue

[…] and McTeague are political commentators, Libby Purves is not. Occasional Times columnist, BBC presenter for many years, Purves is the personification of the middle-of-the-road, mainstream, apolitical (but conservative) journalist.4 But things are now so bad even Purves was moved to write that the privatisation of public services has been a disaster5 – something the […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 89 (2024) FREE
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[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 […]

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