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 […]

Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics by Peter Geoghegan

Lobster Issue 80 (Winter 2020) FREE

[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. […]

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, […]

South of the Border

Lobster Issue 75 (Summer 2018) FREE

[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 […]

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; […]

My Life, Our Times by Gordon Brown

Lobster Issue 75 (Summer 2018) FREE

[PDF file]: […] dependent on the Americans. From this point of view, the so-called ‘Special Relationship’ was a vital concern of British capitalism and its political servants both Labour and Conservative. This recognition long pre-dated New Labour. The post-war Attlee government had recognised it fifty years earlier, although without any of New Labour’s enthusiasm. In the 1980s […]

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 […]

Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad by Michela Wrong

Lobster Issue 84 (Winter 2022) FREE

[PDF file]: […] Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad. What Wrong has to say is tremendously important, not least because of the Conservative government’s plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda despite – or perhaps because of – the Kagame regime’s wholly justified reputation for repression and murder. The […]

The British state’s failed attempt to kill off the Freedom of Information Act

Lobster Issue 74 (Winter 2017) FREE

[PDF file]: […] a uniform commencement of 1 January 2005, which, it was believed, would allow for public sector bodies to consult, confer, and prepare for the new openness. As Conservative Party researchers demonstrated, the five-year lead-in also coincided with a notable uptick in file destruction by Whitehall departments, with some civil service branches essentially doubling their […]

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 […]

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