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

Lobster Issue 59 (Summer 2010)

[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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Mad Mitch’s Tribal Law: Aden and the end of Empire by Aaron Edwards

Lobster Issue 68 (Winter 2014)

[PDF file]: […] high enough), ‘what do politicians at home know of the cruel, hard facts of life when civil disorder has broken out?’ He deliberately courted controversy thereafter, as Conservative MP for Aberdeenshire West, joining the pretty extremist Monday Club and Anglo-Rhodesian Society. He also became an ‘icon’ for the Conservative Right, who of course didn’t […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 78 (Winter 2019)

[PDF file]: […] told that some British Jews are preparing to leave the UK in the event of a Labour victory.28 But wait: that came from the Chairman of the Conservative Party and he was referring to people he claims to know. These comments (and there were many similar in the first week of the election campaign) […]

Ten Years Hard Labour by Chris Williamson

Lobster Issue 84 (Winter 2022)

[PDF file]: […] figures in the Parliamentary Labour Party at the time. Several are now members of Starmer’s Shadow Cabinet. or 4 2 election, but not Williamson. He lost to Conservative Amanda Solloway by 41 votes. The election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader, in which Williamson took a very active part, gave him a second bite […]

The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America by Gerald Horne

Lobster Issue 68 (Winter 2014)

[PDF file]: […] weapons exports and military expenditure it still certainly is), then the Founding Fathers certainly intended a counter-revolution. When the dead US president, now beatified, spoke to the Conservative Political Action Conference two hundred and ten years later he said: ‘They are our brothers, these freedom fighters, and we owe them our help. I’ve spoken […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 92 (2026)

[PDF file]: […] – do not trust and will not cite Wikipedia. In this instance everything I quote from the Wiki entry on Skidelsky is third party sourced. 44 13 Conservative Party. At one point he was appointed a Conservative spokesman in the House of Lords but was dismissed by then Conservative leader William Hague for publicly […]

South of the Border

Lobster Issue 75 (Summer 2018)

[PDF file]: […] a number of years now. His ‘dead cat’ strategy7 has regularly proven counter-productive. Yet his firm Crosby Trextor was paid £18.6m for their part in the 2017 Conservative election campaign. Yes . . . £18.6m for that campaign – the one that reduced the government’s majority to a thread. Top of the tree for […]

Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics by Peter Geoghegan

Lobster Issue 80 (Winter 2020)

[PDF file]: […] social media abuse – there is much talk but little action. As I write, no better illustration of this can be seen than the submission by the Conservative Party to the Committee on Standards in Public Life’s review of electoral arrangements.4 Reports of this submission suggest a weakening rather than a strengthening of oversight. […]

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