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 […]

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 […]

Newton on Keynes

Lobster Issue

[…] 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 […]

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 […]

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

Lobster Issue 69 (Summer 2015)

[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 […]

Keir Starmer: The Biography by Tom Baldwin

Lobster Issue 89 (2024)

[PDF file]: […] 35, 39, 52, 60-61 4 6 difficulties caused by the election of a left-winger, Jeremy Corbyn, as leader of the Labour Party in the aftermath of the Conservative victory. Corbyn’s election was very much a repudiation of Blairism and New Labour by the party membership. Corbyn promised to end Labour’s embrace of neo-liberalism and […]

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 […]

View from Bridge 88 copy

Lobster Issue

[…] is presumably not wholly coincidental that Britain’s decline from 10th in the OECD ‘league tables’ of economic performance to its present 18th began in 1980 when the Conservative government scrapped all the remaining controls on overseas investment of British-generated wealth. *new* Is Doty dotty? I have been slightly interested in the UFO phenomenon since […]

The News Machine: Hacking,The Untold Story by James Hanning with Glenn Mulcaire

Lobster Issue 69 (Summer 2015)

[PDF file]: The News Machine: Hacking,The Untold Story James Hanning with Glenn Mulcaire London: Gibson Square, £12.99, p/b T he Conservative Party had already lost the Rochester and Strood by-election in the hours before its former director of communications left prison early on the morning of 21 November. Whether the timing of Andy Coulson’s release was […]

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. […]

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