The View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] Blair et al – detested him: he knew more than they did, knew they were talking shit and told them so. For a political leader, like Mrs Thatcher, acknowledging error and changing minds is a peculiar problem. A leader attracts followers, or builds a coalition of support, based on two things: policies and prospects […]

View from the bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] in the 1980s, either allowing domestic manufacturing to relocate abroad or failing to create conditions at home for it to prosper. The Tories – Howe, Lawson and Thatcher – were entirely City of London-focused, knowing and caring nothing about manufacturing Britain. Their successors and acolytes, Brown and Blair, thought manufacturing didn’t matter, that there […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 70 (Winter 2015)

[PDF file]: […] when Ken said it. Ken may have come from the world of the Trot groupescules,17 but he understood British political economy.18 For a political leader, like Mrs Thatcher, acknowledging error and changing minds is a peculiar problem. A leader attracts followers, or builds a coalition of support, based on two things: policies and prospects […]

View from the bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] in the 1980s, either allowing domestic manufacturing to relocate abroad or failing to create conditions at home for it to prosper. The Tories – Howe, Lawson and Thatcher – were entirely City of London-focused, knowing and caring nothing about manufacturing Britain. Their successors and acolytes, Brown and Blair, thought manufacturing didn’t matter, that there […]

View from the bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] in the 1980s, either allowing domestic manufacturing to relocate abroad or failing to create conditions at home for it to prosper. The Tories – Howe, Lawson and Thatcher – were entirely City of London-focused, knowing and caring nothing about manufacturing Britain. Their successors and acolytes, Brown and Blair, thought manufacturing didn’t matter, that there […]

View from the bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] fantasies on the British right about the communist threat to Britain. In a recent essay Richard Norton-Taylor has written: A senior Home Office civil servant reported that Thatcher was ‘convinced that a secret communist cell around Scargill was orchestrating the strike in order to bring down the country’.2 Which raises the interesting question of […]

View from the bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] fantasies on the British right about the communist threat to Britain. In a recent essay Richard Norton-Taylor has written: A senior Home Office civil servant reported that Thatcher was ‘convinced that a secret communist cell around Scargill was orchestrating the strike in order to bring down the country’.2 Which raises the interesting question of […]

View from the bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] fantasies on the British right about the communist threat to Britain. In a recent essay Richard Norton-Taylor has written: A senior Home Office civil servant reported that Thatcher was ‘convinced that a secret communist cell around Scargill was orchestrating the strike in order to bring down the country’.2 Which raises the interesting question of […]

Decades of Deceit: the Stalker Affair and its Legacy

Lobster Issue 90 (2025)

[PDF file]: […] Army (INLA) managed to place a car bomb within the precincts of the Houses of Parliament. Conservative MP Airey Neave, a key figure in the rise of Thatcher within the Conservative Party, died as a result of the blast.1 Less than six months later, on 27 August 1979, co-ordinated attacks by the IRA killed […]

Olivia Jayne Frank, 1956-2023

Lobster Issue 88 (2024)

[PDF file]: […] turned thirty and was now eligible for gender reassignment surgery . . . I was revelling in my new life in the North of England when Margaret Thatcher cracked down on the Mossad spies working in Britain. I had my first brush with this Thatcher crackdown at Grappenhall when I was on my way […]

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