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 anmd all that

Lobster Issue

[…] was to cut consumption by cutting wages and it wanted a statutory incomes policy. For a Labour government, largely funded by the trade unions, 1 See . Conservative PM Edward Heath had created a credit boom in a ‘dash for growth’ and so greatly aggravated the inflation which all industrialised economies were suffering after […]

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 […]

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 […]

The Rise of New Labour: Into Office

Lobster Issue 68 (Winter 2014)

[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 […]

When the Lights Went Out by Andy Beckett and Strange Days Indeed by Francis Wheen

Lobster Issue 58 (Winter 2009/2010)

[PDF file]: […] twenties’, ‘swinging sixties’ – irritates serious historians; but in the case of the 1970s it does make a a kind of sense, the decade being bookended by Conservative Party election victories in 1970 and 1979, heralding a return to the market: the half-hearted version under Heath, ‘Selsdon man’, and then the real thing with […]

The Hotel Tacloban by Douglas Valentine

Lobster Issue 74 (Winter 2017)

[PDF file]: […] recount events which, by his own standards, filled him with shame. The story he told his son could not be uplifting or evidence that indeed the father’s conservative ideals had triumphed or were in any way worthy of emulation. Of course some of the feelings burdening the principal in the story cannot be attributed […]

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 […]

Gone but not forgotten… (Donald Trump book reviews)

Lobster Issue 82 (Winter 2021)

[PDF file]: […] journalistic accounts of the Trump years, If Only They Didn’t Speak English and A Year at the Circus.1 These two resolutely mediocre volumes show how the BBC’s conservative even-handedness makes it unable to deal seriously with the likes of Trump and the MAGA movement. What of UnPresidented? This takes the form of a diary […]

Is there a ‘political class’?

Lobster Issue 61 (Summer 2011)

[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 […]

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