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 […]

View from 92

Lobster Issue

[…] of the Ukrainian farright.28 Looking at Skidelsky’s Wikipedia entry,29 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 […]

Hope & Despair: Lifting the lid on the murky world of Scottish politics by Neil Findlay and But What Can I Do?: Why politics has gone so wrong, and how you can help fix it by Alastair Campbell

Lobster Issue 86 (2023)

[PDF file]: […] If the current line is held to the election, the ducking and diving of Labour will become as big a turn-off as the deceit and dissembling of Conservative ministers.’ 2 He promptly backed the election of Tony Blair as Labour leader and left journalism to work for him as spokesman on a salary we […]

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

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; […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 93 (2026)

[PDF file]: […] of the Ukrainian farright.28 Looking at Skidelsky’s Wikipedia entry,29 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Reporting Trump

Lobster Issue 79 (Summer 2020)

[PDF file]: […] his chief of staff were decidedly frosty too. (pp. 63-64) It is worth remembering here that McCain was not some sort of liberal, but a right-wing warmongering conservative who just could not stomach Trump’s ignorance, dishonesty and corruption. This, one cannot help but thinking, is what Sopel considers the limit of legitimate opposition to […]

Newsinger Armed and Dangerous 88

Lobster Issue

[…] of racial violence and vandalism. There would be much more horror to come’. And ‘at least two prominent white supremacist organizations – Stormfront and the Council of Conservative Citizens – saw their websites crash due to the flood of online traffic that came their way following Obama’s victory’. Incredibly, Johnson has had the faces […]

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