Oscar Wilde’s Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy and the First World War

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Lobster Issue 38 (Winter 1999) £££

[…] the great Liberal newspaper. Casement’s appeal was heard – and dismissed – by the same judge who dealt with the Pemberton-Billing/Allen trial, Mr Justice Darling, an ex- Conservative MP. Other parallels? Both Wilde and Casement were Irish, both were gay, both were Protestants. How the English establishment takes its revenge! (And how little good […]

Fifth Column: The decadence of our political system

Lobster Issue 55 (Summer 2008) £££

[…] the exposure of the lies and illusions within the carefully balanced society that has emerged over the last three hundred years as much as any traditionalist or conservative. And yet things are palpably beginning to fail. The US has a constitution that still permits lurches of adjustment to changed conditions – we think of […]

Iraq

Lobster Issue 47 (Summer 2004) £££

Since issue 45, last June, there has been so much information produced on the events preceding the assault on Iraq it is impossible to keep track of it all. Here is my selection. For the powers-that-be, the war has been traumatic, not least because their various cover stories and deceptions have been exposed so rapidly, … Read more

The Labour Finance and Industry Group: a memoir

Lobster Issue 51 (Summer 2006) £££

[…] there will be a base left in the country for Labour and its two hundred thousand members when this era is over. Notes Similar problems at the Conservative Party show a general bankruptcy, possibly actual as well as figurative, if a grip is not acquired soon, of a system that, far from being new […]

Historical Notes

Lobster Issue 43 (Summer 2002) £££

[…] Amalgamated Engineering Union and the Electrical Trades Union. I have talked to individuals of varying ranks in the Armed Services….and to some senior members of the late Conservative Government. From these discussions I have concluded that there is no effective contingency plan at the present time.’ (4) So it seems that Walker, Young and […]

The rise of warfare capitalism

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Lobster Issue 54 (Winter 2007/8) £££

[…] to Stephen Marshall’s important but flawed book, Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing, she’s just another ‘fallen liberal’ who either provides ineffective and impotent criticism of the present neo- conservative order or actually feeds it. It’s because of the essential truth in much of what Marshall says about former Left renegades in his book, that I […]

In a Common Cause: the Anti-Communist Crusade in Britain 1945-60

Lobster Issue 19 (1990) £££

[…] the Labour Party and socialism. Hulton, who later joined the Common Cause Advisory Board, had earlier told his editor, ‘Kindly remember that I am not only a Conservative, I am loyal supporter of Mr Neville Chamberlain.’ (25) Hulton, like many right-wing Tories, may have supported corporatist aims in war-time, but never socialism. He was […]

New Labour Notes

Lobster Issue 37 (Summer 1999) £££

[…] by the late Sir Fitzroy Maclean…… managing director, Christopher James…..Baroness Smith joins Sir Brian Cubbon, a former top civil servant, Lord Laing of Dunphail, Treasurer of the Conservative Party towards the end of the Thatcher period…Earl Jellicoe….Sir Peter Cazalet, director of the P and O Group, former BP Chairman…and Sir Peter Holmes, one-time managing […]

Rolling Back Revolution: The Emergence of Low Intensity Conflict

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Lobster Issue 42 (Winter 2001/2) £££

Ivan Molloy London: Pluto Press, 2001, £18.99/£55   In the 1980s the resurgent US military and neo-conservatives were in a bind: faced with a variety of challenges to the American economic empire, the enormous military power they possessed was constrained by PR considerations; American parents who didn’t want their children dying abroad (the so-called ‘Vietnam … Read more

Fifth Column: A brief sojourn East of Suez: a last gasp for British great power status

Lobster Issue 54 (Winter 2007/8) £££

The debate about whether the British should have a military presence East of Suez seemed to have been settled under the Wilson-Callaghan Government in the 1960s and 1970s. The process of withdrawal started with the independence of India and Pakistan (widely celebrated in the UK media recently on its sixtieth anniversary), was confirmed by the […]

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