The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 67 (Summer 2014) FREE

[PDF file]: […] had been involved with the National Union of Students in the early 1980s. He recalled the libertarian right which was then a force in the Federation of Conservative Students – all that macho posturing in support of the Cold War, the Contras in Nicaragua and the South African government against the ANC. How many […]

Holding Pattern

Lobster Issue 72 (Winter 2016) FREE

[PDF file]: […] in other nations when Theresa 45 46 47 Another little mystery might be explained by an MI6 link. Fresh out of Oxford University, young Dave’s entrance to Conservative Central Office was smoothed by a phone call from someone at Buckingham Palace, who told the startled recipient: ‘I understand you are to see David Cameron. […]

Books on New Labour

Lobster Issue 59 (Summer 2010) FREE

[PDF file]: […] also writes well: ‘What ended in the slump of 2008-9 was a decade of increasingly frenzied profit-taking in a metropolitan financial sector run out of control. The Conservative political elite had migrated to it as dealers, executives and corporate lawyers, and no longer supported the elite plus middle-class “public servant” consensus Schumpeter had praised […]

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 […]

View from

Lobster Issue

[…] destroying Jeremy Corbyn. *new* The MLK files I asked Google why the Trump administration had released the official files on 5 6 The sole exception is former Conservative minister Alan Duncan, whose 2021 memoir begins with complaints about that lobby. See the review by John Booth at or . 7 3 the assassination of […]

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 […]

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 […]

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

Lobster Issue 58 (Winter 2009/2010) FREE

[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 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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