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 […]

A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s by Alwyn W. Turner

Lobster Issue 66 (Winter 2013)

[PDF file]: […] discuss the enormous problem of the dinosaurs – on the Thursday before the dinosaurs became extinct. Much the same could be said about fears of a one-party Conservative quasi-dictatorship. Before too long, the notion would be laughable. Maastricht In early June, the Danes stunned the European political establishment by voting in a referendum against […]

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 […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 79 (Summer 2020)

[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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

View from

Lobster Issue

[…] 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 […]

Keynes, social democracy and the Great Moving Right Show

Lobster Issue 90 (2025)

[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 […]

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 […]

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