Armed and Dangerous: the corporate origins of war with Iran

Lobster Issue 63 (Summer 2012) FREE

[PDF file]: […] Outsourced state terrorism and the contras The link between British Special Forces and military privatisation partly entered the public domain in the IranContra Affair. In 1983, Margaret Thatcher was returned to office with an increased majority only because of the Falklands’ War. But victory in that war carried a price. Britain won the Falklands […]

finklestein 1976

Lobster Issue

1976 and all that: the IMF event Robin Ramsay I still buy a daily paper, The Times. One of its regular columnists is Daniel Finkelstein. Lord Finkelstein, as he is now, has been around the upper reaches of the centre (and latterly the centre–right) of British politics for 40 years and is thus one of […]

Johnson at 10: The Inside Story

Lobster Issue 86 (2023) FREE

[PDF file]: […] to get a handle on Johnson, the book does not seriously attempt to put his government in the context of what has happened to British society since Thatcher and Blair, and more particularly since Cameron, Osborne and Clegg’s austerity regime. What we have seen is a massive aggrandisement of the rich and super rich […]

1976 anmd all that

Lobster Issue

1976 and all that: the IMF event Robin Ramsay I still buy a daily paper, The Times. One of its regular columnists is Daniel Finkelstein. Lord Finkelstein, as he is now, has been around the upper reaches of the centre and latterly the centre–right of British politics for 40 years and is thus one of […]

That option no longer exists: Britain 1974-76 by John Medhurst

Lobster Issue 69 (Summer 2015) FREE

[PDF file]: […] for creating a recession – which they did. Recessions reduce inflation. (Creating more poor people, you reduce demand in the economy, which inhibits price increases.) Like Mrs Thatcher, Peter Jay had been persuaded that there was no alternative. It is not difficult to understand why: in 1976 no-one had ever seen ‘Keynesian’ policies deal […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 73 (Summer 2017) FREE

[PDF file]: […] listen to polls and focus groups for their professed views, I find myself unable to suppress the thought: I wonder what they are really thinking? Take Margaret Thatcher: what did she really think she was doing when she fronted the creation of the grossly unequal society we now have? Frank Field MP gave us […]

Divining Desire: Focus Groups and the Culture of Consultation by Liz Featherstone

Lobster Issue 75 (Summer 2018) FREE

[PDF file]: […] you really want to change things and you want to get listened to, that’s the place to be.’ 1 On the other hand, Norman Lamont wrote: ‘Margaret Thatcher certainly knew when to disregard market research. In the 1980s, opinion polls regularly showed that voters preferred public spending to tax cuts. Mrs Thatcher insisted on […]

Tittle-tattle

Lobster Issue 68 (Winter 2014) FREE

[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 […]

In The Thick of It: The Private Diaries of a Minister by Alan Duncan

Lobster Issue 85 (Summer 2023) FREE

[PDF file]: […] ‘given by the Prince of Wales in honour of Wafic Said and his charitable work, and to mark his eightieth birthday’. This wonderful man had given Margaret Thatcher ‘the 4 run of a lovely country house in Oxfordshire’ during her final years. (pp. 483, 535) Wafic Said, it is worth remembering, was involved in […]

Beyond Business by John Browne

Lobster Issue 62 (Winter 2011) FREE

[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 […]

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