The British Gladio and the murder of Sergeant Speed

Lobster Issue 81 (Summer 2021)

[PDF file]: […] the Labour Party through the role of the Communist Party of Great Britain in several of Britain’s biggest trade unions. In the mid-1970s a section of the Conservative Party and its allies within the state believed – or pretended to 8 Herb Meyer worked with David Hart and Brian Crozier in the 1980s peddling […]

Apocryphilia

Lobster Issue 71 (Summer 2016)

[PDF file]: […] late Leon Brittan as a rapist and as someone who had thwarted adequate investigations 5 The Sunday Times 18 October 2015. See 6 Victor Raikes was a Conservative MP 1931-1957 and later Chairman of the Monday Club 1976-1978. He resigned from Parliament in 1957 in anger at the UK ‘climbing down’ and abandoning military […]

Donald Trump and the Christian Right

Lobster Issue 76 (Winter 2018)

[PDF file]: […] (p. 70). And, of course, God was to impart this prophetic message to more and more people as the 2016 Presidential election approached. As far as most conservative Christians were concerned, Trump presaged ‘a cultural counter-revolution’ and was ‘an answer to prayer’. (p. 15) The result was that Trump received the votes of ‘more […]

Signs of the times

Lobster Issue 81 (Summer 2021)

[PDF file]: […] by Littlewood: ‘Butskellism is back. Expect an economic future of simply muddling through’. But Butskellism wasn’t ‘simply muddling through’. The term came from merging the name of Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer R A Butler with that of Labour Chancellor Hugh Gaitskell and was coined in the mid 1950s, when there was a considerable […]

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 […]

Britannia Unchained, by Kwasi Kwarteng , Elizabeth Truss et al

Lobster Issue 85 (Summer 2023)

[PDF file]: […] MP for South West Norfolk London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012 Robin Ramsay This is what we might call the manifesto of the group of free marketeers1 within the Conservative Party which briefly had nominal control of British economic policy this year.2 Lobster’s site creator and manager, Ian Tresman, sent me this and suggested I review […]

View from Bridge 89

Lobster Issue

[…] 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 […]

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 […]

View from Bridge 89

Lobster Issue

[…] 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 […]

Accessibility Toolbar