View from the bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] May) making the striking claim that ‘Trump’s hundred days have been a triumph. The swamp is being drained’. It was by Nile Gardiner, Director of the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom at The Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC.1 This organisation bearing the Blessed Margaret’s name is not to be confused with the Margaret Thatcher […]

Treasure Islands: Tax havens and the men who stole the world by Nicholas Shaxson

Lobster Issue 63 (Summer 2012)

[PDF file]: […] on with the serious business of looting the global economy and crushing attempts to hold them to account. And this government? It has learned the lesson that Thatcher never grasped: if you want to turn this country into another Mexico, where the ruling elite wallows in unimaginable, state-facilitated wealth, while the rest can go […]

lob86View from Bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] call) Thatcherism and thus the person chiefly responsible for the creation of today’s Broken-down Britain. Of the triumvirate in charge of the economic policy in the first Thatcher government, he was the one who knew what he was doing. Geoffrey Howe and Thatcher merely had some free market clichés in their brains at the […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 74 (Winter 2017)

[PDF file]: […] 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. […]

The rise of New Labour

Lobster Issue 63 (Summer 2012)

[PDF file]: […] Gaitskellites. In the late 1960s and 70s it gathered round Roy Jenkins and eventually split Labour to form the SDP – a move which ensured that Mrs Thatcher won the 1983 general election. After which, job done, the SDP faded away. After the Labour election defeat of 1987 its leadership, Kinnock and Hattersley, set […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] the (theoretical) risk of prosecution. Today it wouldn’t. What has changed? Then it seemed worthwhile to stick two fingers up to the British state, headed by Margaret Thatcher, by revealing (minor) state secrets. Today we have Cameron and Clegg, imitations of Tony Blair, Thatcher’s successor, who hardly matter. Then, influenced by research on the […]

A Thorn in Their Side: The Hilda Murrell murder by Robert Green with Kate Dewes

Lobster Issue 62 (Winter 2011)

[PDF file]: […] are not Socratic dialogues; for the most part they are the necessary pantomimes to rubberstamp decisions taken in Whitehall. On the other hand, this was 1984: the Thatcher regime was still being challenged by the left; the Labour Party had not then embraced the ‘Washington consensus’; the American banks had not completed their take-over […]

View from Bridge 89

Lobster Issue

[…] of meaningful change in modern British politics begins with the realisation that politics must act in service of the British people, rather than dictating to them. Margaret Thatcher sought to drag Britain out of its stupor by setting loose our natural entrepreneurialism. Tony Blair reimagined a stale, outdated Labour Party into one that could […]

The long goodbye? Taking on the consultants

Lobster Issue 90 (2025)

[PDF file]: […] consultancies rocketed: At the time of the 1979 general election in the United Kingdom, the government was spending about £6 million on consulting services annually; when Margaret Thatcher stepped down as prime minister eleven years later, the amount was more than 40 times greater at £246 million.8 Where the Iron Lady failed, Reeves’ ‘Iron […]

Accessibility Toolbar