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. […]

My Life, Our Times by Gordon Brown

Lobster Issue 75 (Summer 2018)

[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 […]

Chris Hani book copy

Lobster Issue

[…] over the past 30 years or so.3 He quotes a South African report from 1991 describing it as ‘an informal forum of influential representatives of a ” conservative cast of mind”’ – which is what Pinay/Le Cercle was and remains. Among recent British participants are former Conservative MPs Norman Lamont, Rory Stewart and Jonathan […]

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

Lobster Issue 84 (Winter 2022)

[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)

[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 […]

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 Bridge copy

Lobster Issue

[…] or dismiss the majority of its board — was Morgan McSweeney . . . McSweeney was also a director of Labour Together, a group formed as a conservative counterweight to the rise of Corbyn. As the Canary pointed out both the CCDH and Labour Together share the same address. McSweeney has now been appointed […]

View from

Lobster Issue

[…] such ideas in this country, our authors, like most people, are unable to change their minds. Other recent examples of this phenomenon have been displayed by former Conservative MP Matthew Parris and Gerard Baker, former editor of The Wall Street Journal. They devoted their columns in The Times to bemoaning the decline of the […]

Lob86ViewfromBridgepdf

Lobster Issue

[…] Review of Books: ‘Real-term wages in Britain today are no higher than they were in 2005. Since the global financial crisis of 2008, a succession of mostly Conservative politicians has sought to assure the British people that once the difficult bit (first austerity, then Brexit, then Covid) is behind us, the good times will […]

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