End Times: Elites, Counter Elites, and the Path to Political Disintegration by Peter Turchin

Lobster Issue 87 (2023) FREE

[PDF file]: […] LGBTQ+, intersectionality) rather than on populist economic issues or criticisms of militarism. Useful for UK readers are summaries of the Trump political positions (populist, anti-immigration, anti-war, socially conservative); how these differ from traditional elite positions (which prefer aloof government, proimmigration policies, pro-military adventurism abroad, and are prepared to allow social liberal positions); and how […]

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 […]

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[…] 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Kim Philby: The Unknown Story of the KGB’s Master Spy by Tim Milne

Lobster Issue 83 (Summer 2022) FREE

[PDF file]: […] Bowes & Bowes to Sherratt & Hughes. I note that your letterhead is still B&B, so I hope that this letter will reach you. To an old conservative gentleman like me, it is rather a shock to hear that a name which I have revered for 57 years is no longer to be.’ ‘Kim […]

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 […]

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