Ten Years Hard Labour by Chris Williamson

Lobster Issue 84 (Winter 2022) FREE

[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 92 (2026) FREE

[PDF file]: […] of the Ukrainian farright.3 Looking at Skidelsky’s Wikipedia entry,4 the man has had a complex political journey. A founder member of the SDP, he moved to the Conservative Party. At one point he was appointed a Conservative spokesman in the House of Lords but was dismissed by then Conservative leader William Hague for publicly […]

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

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 […]

ViewfromtheBridge

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 […]

The Mandelson legacy

Lobster Issue 91 (2025) FREE

[PDF file]: […] year as Labour’s communications chief, was another BAP recruit alongside Jeremy Paxman, who he was soon to join at the BBC. Paxman reportedly apologised to Mandelson after Conservative MP Matthew Parris ‘outed’ him on Newsnight. The BBC management then placed a protective barrier around Mandelson’s private life.14 Evan Davis was a younger ‘fellow’ of […]

The View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue 62 (Winter 2011) FREE

[PDF file]: […] left) supported/ penetrated/run by the CIA during the Cold War. In its attempt to regulate the entire Western media in those years, the CIA could take the conservative UK press for granted as good anti-communists; it was the left or leftish media it needed to concentrate on. And in the UK, America’s most important […]

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