Is this what failure looks like? Brian Sedgemore 1937–2015

Lobster Issue 70 (Winter 2015) FREE

[PDF file]: […] the preceding Conservative government (and of course, by implication, critical of any accommodation with those hinted at 1 Labour won Wandsworth – at that point a pre- Thatcher, pregentrified area of London à la Up the Junction – in 1971 and held it until 1978. by Wilson, Jenkins, Healey and Callaghan), its central thrust […]

A tale of two Islingtons: How Blair opened the door for Corbyn

Lobster Issue 77 (Summer 2019) FREE

[PDF file]: […] Executive Committee (NEC) had agreed proposals for the selection and re-selection of Parliamentary candidates, as suggested by the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy. Even after 1979, with Thatcher markedly unpopular, it was assumed (pre-Falklands War) that Labour would win any general election called in 1982-1983.7 Had Labour won a general election in 1978, then, […]

View from Bridge copy

Lobster Issue

[…] with Lobster. *new* Broken-down Blighty In my local library book sale I picked up a copy of Dominic Sandbrook’s 2019 account of the early years of Mrs Thatcher, Who Dares Wins. Yes, the title is meant to evoke the SAS and the Iranian Embassy siege but it also represents Sandbrook’s view that Mrs T […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 86 (2023) FREE
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[PDF file]: […] believed the conspiracy theory of ‘the enemy within’. This said that the Soviet Union ran the CPGB, which ran the unions, which ran the Labour Party. Mrs Thatcher was one such patriot. When leader of the Opposition, she took the various allegations 20 Details at . In Lobster 81 at or . 21 Precisely […]

The View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] shop. Heseltine served in the government of Edward Heath, which was partly responsible for the worst inflation this country has every experienced, and in that of Margaret Thatcher, which created the worst recession since the 1930s. I was curious to see how he dealt with these politically uncomfortable facts. Not well, is the answer. […]

Climbing the Bookshelves by Shirley Williams

Lobster Issue 58 (Winter 2009/2010) FREE
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[PDF file]: […] well positioned will be disappointed, as they will be in seeking any sharp observations on British politics. Those who remember the Callaghan government and the rise of Thatcher may recall Williams and other Labour right-wing ministers vociferously rushing to the defence of one of their number, Reg Prentice, faced with deselection. Prentice subsequently switched […]

View from Bridge copy

Lobster Issue

[…] politicians to get real. But politicians can’t ‘get real’ just yet. No mainstream British politician is willing to say that Britain is run down because (a) the Thatcher and New Labour administrations abandoned the manufacturing sector of the economy, and (b) the prosperous haven’t paid enough taxes for 40 years. For a while longer […]

David Stirling: The Phoney Major: The Life, Times and Truth about the Founder of the SAS, by Gavin Mortimer

Lobster Issue 85 (Summer 2023) FREE
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[PDF file]: […] what we need. Remind you of anyone? And does all this presage an attempt to revive the SAS as the right-wing cultural phenomenon it became during the Thatcher years? In the aftermath of the SAS storming of the Iranian Embassy in May 1980 and then the retaking of the Falklands in 1982, the Regiment […]

Britannia Unchained, by Kwasi Kwarteng , Elizabeth Truss et al

Lobster Issue 85 (Summer 2023) FREE
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[PDF file]: […] per hour grew faster than France, Germany and even the United States. (pp. 8/9) What, things were better under John Major and Tony Blair than during the Thatcher years? You might think this would give our authors pause, but it doesn’t. It all seemed very different at the turn of the millennium. At the […]

When the Lights Went Out by Andy Beckett and Strange Days Indeed by Francis Wheen

Lobster Issue 58 (Winter 2009/2010) FREE
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[PDF file]: […] 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 Mrs Thatcher. As the delusions of the free marketeers crumble, so the history of the years in which these notions were dominant will be re-examined. And as the […]

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