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

Lobster Issue 59 (Summer 2010) FREE

[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 […]

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

Lobster Issue 87 (2023) FREE

[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 […]

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[…] destroying Jeremy Corbyn. *new* The MLK files I asked Google why the Trump administration had released the official files on 5 6 The sole exception is former Conservative minister Alan Duncan, whose 2021 memoir begins with complaints about that lobby. See the review by John Booth at or . 7 3 the assassination of […]

South of the Border

Lobster Issue 75 (Summer 2018) FREE

[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 […]

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

Lobster Issue 68 (Winter 2014) FREE

[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 […]

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

Lobster Issue 80 (Winter 2020) FREE

[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. […]

Keynes, social democracy and the Great Moving Right Show

Lobster Issue 90 (2025) FREE

[PDF file]: […] of post-war British society. A range of political and economic philosophies and traditions went into the version embraced by the Attlee government and indeed successive Labour and Conservative administrations all the way to 1979. Nurtured by over a century of humanistic and religious teaching, and a respect for the rights of the individual citizen […]

My Life, Our Times by Gordon Brown

Lobster Issue 75 (Summer 2018) FREE

[PDF file]: […] dependent on the Americans. From this point of view, the so-called ‘Special Relationship’ was a vital concern of British capitalism and its political servants both Labour and Conservative. This recognition long pre-dated New Labour. The post-war Attlee government had recognised it fifty years earlier, although without any of New Labour’s enthusiasm. In the 1980s […]

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

Lobster Issue 68 (Winter 2014) FREE

[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 […]

Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad by Michela Wrong

Lobster Issue 84 (Winter 2022) FREE

[PDF file]: […] Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad. What Wrong has to say is tremendously important, not least because of the Conservative government’s plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda despite – or perhaps because of – the Kagame regime’s wholly justified reputation for repression and murder. The […]

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