Lobster Issue 78 (Winter 2019)
[PDF file]: […] like to be transgender two generations ago. But most of all it is a stunning indictment of the lawless, literally murderous, unaccountable British secret state in the Thatcher years. Olivia’s experience shows that MI5 committed arson, falsely imprisoned people, manipulated the National Insurance system, the passport office, the prison service, the criminal justice system, […]
Lobster Issue 60 (Winter 2010)
[PDF file]: How New Labour stopped listening to the voter and why we need a new politics Deborah Mattinson London: Biteback, 2010, £17.99 People, Politics and Pressure Groups: Memoirs of a lobbyist Arthur Butler Hove: Picnic Publishing, £12.99, 2010 Tom Easton Deborah Mattinson is just one of the many early enthusiasts for what became New Labour to […]
Lobster Issue 84 (Winter 2022)
[PDF file]: Ten Years Hard Labour Chris Williamson Lola Books, 2022, £19.00 ISBN 978-3-944203-48-5 John Booth This is a revealing and powerful book by a Labour MP who vocally supported the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn and paid the price by losing his career. It’s an angry book because he says that this loyalty was not reciprocated when […]
Lobster Issue 68 (Winter 2014)
[PDF file]: […] BBC TV veteran also followed him into membership of the British American Project (BAP), the informal network of aspiring Brits and Americans set up during the Reagan- Thatcher years to revive what the White House and No. 10 feared was a weakening ‘special relationship’ between the two countries. Paxman was recruited into the BAP […]
Lobster Issue 62 (Winter 2011)
[PDF file]: […] telling management exactly what it wanted to hear….McKinsey has, indeed, provided the cover an executive needed to carry out distasteful dismissals, restructurings, downsizings’.3 Most 2 Simon Jenkins, Thatcher & Sons, (London: Penguin, 2007), p. 277 3 James O’Shea and Charles Madigan, Dangerous Company, (London: Nicholas Brealey Publishing, 1999), pp. 256, 261-262 infamously, they advised […]
Lobster Issue 68 (Winter 2014)
[PDF file]: […] had to do to get Murdoch to change sides. As Davies points out, since 1979, ‘no British government has been elected without the support of Rupert Murdoch…. Thatcher, Major, Blair and Brown have consistently cleared their diaries and welcomed him to the inner sanctum of their governments (and then disclosed as little as possible […]
Lobster Issue 73 (Summer 2017)
[PDF file]: Colin Wallace and the Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry The Kincora cover-up continues Robin Ramsay Back story T his journal has been reporting on the Colin Wallace story since 1986.1 Among the many striking things Wallace has spoken and written about over the years was the situation in the Kincora boys’ home in Belfast in the […]
Lobster Issue 68 (Winter 2014)
[PDF file]: […] for the Conservative Right, who of course didn’t mind any of this. There were ‘rumours’ – only – that he ‘was engaged as a trouble-shooter for the Thatcher government’ in the early 1980s. Most damaging to his reputation, however, may be the fact revealed here that when the Argylls marched into Crater – ostensibly […]
Lobster Issue 73 (Summer 2017)
[PDF file]: […] However, since 1970 (Edward Heath – 46% of the votes cast) neither Labour nor Conservatives have polled above 45% of the votes cast in a general election. Thatcher didn’t get above 44%, Blair peaked at 43% and 1 This adversarial mindset even extends to the architecture of the House of Commons: two narrow rows […]