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 […]

Collapse of stout party: Eden, Suez and America

Lobster Issue 74 (Winter 2017)

[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 […]

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 […]

Holding pattern

Lobster Issue 69 (Summer 2015)

[PDF file]: […] Murdoch has a slyer sense of humour than we realised, since it was precisely the abolition of the ‘fairness doctrine’ that enabled the growth of the rabidly- conservative self-styled ‘fair and balanced’ Fox News. Murdoch’s covert pas de deux with the Gipper raises interesting questions about news coverage of some of the 14 CIA’s […]

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 […]

Hope & Despair: Lifting the lid on the murky world of Scottish politics by Neil Findlay and But What Can I Do?: Why politics has gone so wrong, and how you can help fix it by Alastair Campbell

Lobster Issue 86 (2023)

[PDF file]: […] If the current line is held to the election, the ducking and diving of Labour will become as big a turn-off as the deceit and dissembling of Conservative ministers.’ 2 He promptly backed the election of Tony Blair as Labour leader and left journalism to work for him as spokesman on a salary we […]

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 […]

A Spy Alone by Charles Beaumont

Lobster Issue 88 (2024)

[PDF file]: […] reports, while lawyers provide litigation support. . . . What’s missing from those paragraphs (and the report generally) is the millions the Russians have given to the Conservative Party.4 Why is it missing? The Intelligence and Security Committee has a Conservative majority. Add those Russian millions to the more than ten million given to […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 69 (Summer 2015)

[PDF file]: […] the home? The two men said to have visited the source for the Express story and told him of paedophile parties in the south of England, former Conservative MP Humphrey Berkeley and Robin Bryans, are dead. Robin Bryans used to send me long, barely intelligible letters and did not mention any of this, even […]

‘To Stand against Israel is to Stand against God’: Zionism, Trump and the US Christian Right

Lobster Issue 83 (Summer 2022)

[PDF file]: […] standard of living may not be sustained’. Falwell singled out Margaret Thatcher, who had just become Prime Minister in Britain, for particular praise. Having thus established his conservative credentials, he went on to address the ‘culture wars’ agenda with chapters attacking Feminism and the Equal Rights Amendment, ferociously condemning abortion, defending the Christian family […]

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