View from

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, […]

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 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) […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue

The view from the bridge Robin Ramsay Meeja news Udo Ulfkotte, a former editor of the German conservative newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, did an interview with Russia Today1 in which, among other things, he said this. ‘Germany is still a kind of a colony of the United States, you’ll see that in many points; […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

Accessibility Toolbar