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 […]

The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War by Craig Whitlock

Lobster Issue 82 (Winter 2021) FREE

[PDF file]: […] unlikely that we shall ever know the scale of British complicity in this crime. There is also the determination of retired generals and politicians from both the Conservative and Labour parties to cover up the reality of the war in Afghanistan. Without any shame whatsoever, the war was portrayed as being about the protection […]

Apocryphylia

Lobster Issue 68 (Winter 2014) FREE

[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, […]

The economic crisis continues

Lobster Issue 61 (Summer 2011) FREE

[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 […]

View from the bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] of the mid 1970s – control the money supply and you can control inflation – appealed because it was so simple. It took hold, particularly in the Conservative Party, where what became the Thatcherites adopted it and wrecked the British manufacturing economy with it between 1980 and 1984. Margaret Thatcher was a politician who […]

Europe Isn’t Working by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson

Lobster Issue 72 (Winter 2016) FREE

[PDF file]: […] that my economics tutor gave it to us non-specialists in our second year to kick around. Four years or so later this nonsense was adopted by the Conservative Party. It is unclear to me if they believed it or not. My guess would be that Mrs Thatcher and Geoffrey Howe – both tax lawyers […]

The Rise of New Labour: Into Office

Lobster Issue 68 (Winter 2014) FREE

[PDF file]: […] excessively high exchange rate.’ – Wynne Godley, The Observer (Business) 23 August 1998. By the time Labour took office Brown and Blair had promised to toe the conservative line on economic policy: no income tax rises, no increased public spending, no attempts to use government to direct the economy; and no reacquisition of the […]

Peer group pressure

Lobster Issue 78 (Winter 2019) FREE

[PDF file]: […] feature which Mandelson’s connection with a cyber security outfit suggested: Labour peers seem to have a far greater predilection for working with cyber security firms than do Conservative peers. 1 Judging by the political affiliations of Vice Chairs of the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Cyber Security,2 which MPs can join, this is […]

Is there a ‘political class’?

Lobster Issue 61 (Summer 2011) FREE

[PDF file]: Is there a ‘political class’? Scott Newton It has become fashionable to argue that Britain is in the grip of its own ‘political class’. Most recently the idea has been promulgated by Peter Oborne, in his 2007 book, The Triumph of the Political Class. I have been sceptical about this, remembering the dominance of Oxbridge-educated […]

The Western Union Clandestine Committee: Britain and the ‘Gladio’ networks

Lobster Issue 72 (Winter 2016) FREE

[PDF file]: […] Executive (SOE) were instigated. One figure who played a part in the preparations for what would become the ‘Gladio’ networks was British military intelligence officer (and future Conservative MP) officer Airey Neave. From late May of 1942, Neave was an officer in the ‘escape and evasion’ department MI9 and engaged in ‘secret communications with […]

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