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 […]

View from the Bridge 89

Lobster Issue

[…] an eyebrow. 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.13 He made some interesting points. This paragraph, for example: There are no BDS campaigns directed against Bashar […]

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 […]

The Clandestine Caucus: a minor update

Lobster Issue 88 (2024)

[PDF file]: […] the source of the organisation’s funding. It reported that ‘a great many dollars are coming from America’ or, put more simply, ‘there are Yankee dollars behind it’. Conservative sources reported that this US-funded British pressure group intended ‘to spend a considerable number of dollars over the years in this country with the purpose of […]

lob86View from Bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] might not have obtained in normal circumstances as a reward for their dishonesty. This is followed by a catalogue of allegations – the majority of them involving Conservative Party and/or establishment (i.e. senior police/senior military/ royal family) figures – with many of the accusations being that children were physically and sexually abused. And that […]

1976 and all that: the IMF incident

Lobster Issue 89 (2024)

[PDF file]: […] memories of the previous year’s Treasury and Bank of England-led attempt to coerce the Labour government into a statutory incomes policy, Bernard Donoughue, of the Downing Street Conservative PM Edward Heath had created a credit boom in his ‘dash for growth’ and this greatly aggravated the inflation which all industrialised economies suffered when the […]

South of the border

Lobster Issue 80 (Winter 2020)

[PDF file]: […] the Labour Party – at least during the idyllic, pre-war criminal days. Blair was seen as a soft-right (within Labour) and Stewart espouses many soft-left (for a Conservative) ideas. Many within his own party would probably see Rory Stewart as a neater fit within Labour, just as many within Labour saw Blair’s more natural […]

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