That option no longer exists: Britain 1974-76 by John Medhurst

Lobster Issue 69 (Summer 2015)

[PDF file]: […] could be persuaded to embark on this journey – even though most of the senior leadership of the unions would probably have welcomed it – with a Conservative government. (And it is absolutely bizarre that anyone in the Heath government associated with this could ever have thought otherwise.) The author writes: ‘For a brief […]

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. […]

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 […]

The News Machine: Hacking,The Untold Story by James Hanning with Glenn Mulcaire

Lobster Issue 69 (Summer 2015)

[PDF file]: The News Machine: Hacking,The Untold Story James Hanning with Glenn Mulcaire London: Gibson Square, £12.99, p/b T he Conservative Party had already lost the Rochester and Strood by-election in the hours before its former director of communications left prison early on the morning of 21 November. Whether the timing of Andy Coulson’s release was […]

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 Bridge copy

Lobster Issue

[…] idiocy climaxed with the murder of police sergeant John Speed in Leeds in a botched psy-op intended to blame striking miners for his shooting.3 As soon as Conservative MP Nicholas Ridley’s 1977 plan to fight the miners on the government’s terms, the so-called Ridley Plan for Coal, was rediscovered a few weeks into the […]

Apocryphylia

Lobster Issue 68 (Winter 2014)

[PDF file]: […] or another hung Parliament with Callaghan remaining at Downing Street as the leader of the biggest single party. Thatcher would clearly not have won – and the Conservative Party would then have dumped her, as they planned to do. To imply that this wouldn’t have occurred, or simply didn’t matter, is to underplay, massively, […]

Lob86 View from Bridge

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 […]

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 economic crisis continues

Lobster Issue 61 (Summer 2011)

[PDF file]: […] Lobster 61 the last economy-wide recession in 1994.’ 1 9 But nothing has actually been done. This is not surprising. How do the British state and the Conservative Party now decide to build an industrial strategy? Does the British state have people in its upper echelons who believe in the economically active state (except […]

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