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

Lobster Issue 87 (2023)

[PDF file]: […] American reformers raised inheritance taxes to prevent the emergence of a hereditary aristocracy, and engaged in massive trust-busting. Modernising urban-planning systems could lower housing costs, and deregulating labour markets would help create good jobs for “excess” elites. David Goodhart in his TLS review15 refers to the cleansing effect of the extermination of a the […]

The Phoenix Program: America’s Use of Terror in Vietnam by Douglas Valentine

Lobster Issue 68 (Winter 2014)

[PDF file]: […] meant expanding the British principle of indirect rule by creating and supporting nominally independent regimes that bear all the social costs through extortionate taxation, while assuring that labour and natural resources are freely accessible to US corporations — in Vietnam’s case, particularly those operating in Japan. Unlike industrial economies, peasant economies, such as those […]

Trump, the US Military and the American Empire

Lobster Issue 80 (Winter 2020)

[PDF file]: […] is unprecedented, but it certainly reflects the times we are living through. John Newsinger is a retired academic working on things Trumpian and (slowly) on the foreign, colonial and defence policies of the Labour Party. David Charter, ‘Joe Biden: Army will have to drag Trump out if he loses’, The Times 13 June 2020 7

Holding pattern

Lobster Issue 71 (Summer 2016)

[PDF file]: […] results started to trickle in. The example that is foremost in my mind is the constituency of Bedford Borough, my place of birth and a key Tory- Labour marginal. Here it was reported that a sack containing 5,000 extra votes had appeared, as if out of nowhere, when the count was nearing completion. When […]

JFK tramps Lob 71

Lobster Issue

[…] recounted in ‘The View from the Bridge’ in this issue. For Holt that was just one episode in a life of crime. Whose current head is former Labour Foreign Secretary David Miliband. I don’t know if IRC is still a CIA front. 19 6 kind of bagman for the CIA front, the International Rescue […]

Is there a ‘political class’?

Lobster Issue 61 (Summer 2011)

[PDF file]: […] been deriding only a few days, let alone weeks, earlier. In a way their experience was a more vivid, concentrated and dramatic version of what happened to Labour after Neil Kinnock embraced the liberal rather than the social-democratic path to ‘modernisation’ after 1987. Maybe the result of the 1979 election was the watershed here […]

Hack Attack: How The Truth Caught Up With Rupert Murdoch by Nick Davies

Lobster Issue 68 (Winter 2014)

[PDF file]: […] that far from exaggerating, if anything McBride understated Murdoch’s influence, the extent to which modern Britain has been shaped in his image, and the way politicians, both Labour and Conservative, were willing to be of service. Most of the reviews of Hack Attack have focussed on the dramatic story of how Davies and the […]

The View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue 64 (Winter 2012)

[PDF file]: […] was talking to a City source yesterday (one who is strongly opposed to the investment bankers “soft coup” of Westminster and Whitehall). He said that under New Labour, H.M. Treasury had been “utterly captured” by the investment banking industry. He said it had happened through subscription to a ludicrously flawed ideology, the “revolving door’” […]

Blair and Israel

Lobster Issue 92 (2026)

[PDF file]: […] that they knew each other; but it is said that they were ‘old friends’. In 1997, Barak had arrived in London as the leader of Israel’s beleaguered Labour Party, seeking help to win the 1999 election. With the aid of Blair’s experts in Millbank, he won and remained prime minister for two years. After […]

The State of Secrecy: Spies and the Media in Britain by Richard Norton-Taylor

Lobster Issue 80 (Winter 2020)

[PDF file]: The State of Secrecy Spies and the Media in Britain Richard Norton-Taylor London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2020, £20 h/b Scott Anthony Logic would tell you that the relationship between journalists and secret agents should be antagonistic. Journalists are after all charged with exposing power, while intelligence work is supposedly done in the […]

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