Yo, Blair!

Lobster Issue 52 (Winter 2006/7) £££

The unspeakable Martin Kettle of The Guardian is a political journalist who has been pretty close to, and supportive of, New Labour since the 1990s. His article ‘The special relationship that squandered a noble cause’ (27 May 2006) opened with this: ‘The long arc of Tony Blair’s rise and decline has been punctuated by journeys […]

Politics and Paranoia

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Lobster Issue 57 (Summer 2009) £££

[…] produced a radical local monthly magazine. I stayed involved for about 20 issues, none of which sold more than 500 copies. At that time, four years into Thatcher, her big recession in full swing, local radical mags were springing up all over Britain. I remember attending a conference in 1984 at which we all […]

The Neave letters

Lobster Issue 17 (1988) £££

Never mind Peter Wright, he was obviously lying in Spycatcher anyway. Wallace is a vastly more important source: he doesn’t tell lies, for one thing; and he’s got bits of paper, evidence, some of which concerns his dealings with the late Airey Neave after he was thrown out of government service. At the time Neave […]

Ken Livingstone’s questions

Lobster Issue 16 (1988) £££

[…] only from 1978 to 87, and for officers only, not civilians and officers, the figures were: 1978 -72 1987 -164 This doubling over the period of the Thatcher years is very interesting. For while the South and Midlands has voted Tory, Scotland has been moving leftwards throughout the Thatcher period – the Tories now […]

New Labour news

Lobster Issue 54 (Winter 2007/8) £££

BERR In a profile of John Hutton, the new Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, Hutton said that Labour ‘is the natural party of business’,(1) another benchmark (or, in Corinne Souza country, ‘rebranding’) in the shift from old to New Labour. For it was Harold Wilson’s boast that he had made Labour … Read more

Friends of the British Secret State

Lobster Issue 16 (1988) £££

[…] is to plan and command a massive revenge attack by the PLO on Israel and her allies.” May 8th 1988, Sunday Express, Massie tells us that “Mrs Thatcher has given the security services two months to crack down on IRA killer squads on the Continent … Mrs Thatcher, through her Security Coordinator, Sir Colin […]

Tittle-tattle

Lobster Issue 51 (Summer 2006) £££

[…] heads Opinion Leader Research (OLR), part of the Chime Communications empire of Tim (since 1990, Lord) Bell, who served in a somewhat similar advisory capacity to Margaret Thatcher. I have yet to see any report of how much of Gould and Mattinson’s wealth has come from Labour party sources in those 20 years, or […]

The Making of New Labour’s European Policy

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Lobster Issue 44 (Winter 2002/3) £££

[…] leader Neil Kinnock’s book Making Our Way, the Labour Party as an institution had grasped that the interests of the City of London were the core of Thatcher economics – Labour MPs’ constituents were unemployed because of it. You might have thought that since everybody hates the bankers, and they were getting fat in […]

Travesty: The trial of Slobodan Milosevic

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Lobster Issue 53 (Summer 2007) £££

[…] to identify his politics. Three years ago David Aaronovitch wrote about him. (14)Aaronovitch noted that Laughland is European Director of the European Foundation whose patron is Margaret Thatcher, and concluded by describing Laughland (and his associates) as ‘right-wing anti-state libertarians and isolationists, suspicious of any foreign entanglements’. Aaronovitch’s description above isn’t entirely inaccurate, though […]

A note on the British deployment of nuclear weapons in crises – with particular reference to the Falklands and Gulf Wars and the purchase of Trident

Lobster Issue 28 (December 1994) £££

[…] confront the possibility that Argentine air superiority and Exocet missiles could mean the military defeat of the British task force and the rapid political extinction of the Thatcher government. The New Statesman has been able to confirm that a Polaris submarine was indeed deployed to this position. Details of the deployment are given in […]

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