View from the Bridge 89

Lobster Issue

[…] Lobster. *new* By their omissions . . . Michael Gove, the outgoing Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, passes for an intellectual in today’s Conservative Party. In May he delivered a speech on anti-semitism.1 He made some interesting points. This paragraph, for example: There are no BDS campaigns directed against Bashar […]

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Lobster Issue

[…] to the lessons of Major’s locust years. His government needs a philosophy, a set of principles, an ideology. Indeed Starmer’s need is greater than Major’s was. A Conservative administration benefits from a sense of purpose; a Labour government cannot survive without one. Progressive politics needs a galvanising, or 3 4 5 2 uniting, liberating, […]

Holding pattern

Lobster Issue 69 (Summer 2015) FREE

[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 […]

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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 […]

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

Lobster Issue 83 (Summer 2022) FREE

[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 […]

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 […]

We don’t need no…

Lobster Issue 79 (Summer 2020) FREE

[PDF file]: […] appreciation of the pound expected from its imminent status as a ‘petro-currrency’, the government would raise interest rates to ‘control the money supply’. Which is what the Conservative government elected in 1979 did. Increased interest rates made the pound attractive, pushing up the value of sterling. Frank Blackaby noted that, during the great rise […]

Hoodwinked by the Department of Health? Frank Dobson and the 1997 Jimmy Savile report

Lobster Issue 74 (Winter 2017) FREE

[PDF file]: […] the 1997 General Election’ in Lobster 73.1 What happened to the external management review of Broadmoor highsecurity hospital that Health Secretary Stephen Dorrell had commissioned, once the Conservative Party had left office? The report was sent to his office in April 1997, shortly before the Conservatives lost power at that year’s General Election. The […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 69 (Summer 2015) FREE

[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 […]

That option no longer exists: Britain 1974-76 by John Medhurst

Lobster Issue 69 (Summer 2015) FREE

[PDF file]: […] could be persuaded to embark on this journey – even though most of the senior leadership of the unions would probably have welcomed it – with a Conservative government. (And it is absolutely bizarre that anyone in the Heath government associated with this could ever have thought otherwise.) The author writes: ‘For a brief […]

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