Political life in Britain

Lobster Issue

Contents Political life in Britain Talking to a Brick Wall: 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 Bonfire of the Liberties: New Labour, Human Rights […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 78 (Winter 2019) FREE

[PDF file]: […] of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), told its annual conference that they had to ‘to take the gloves off and have a bare-knuckle fight’ with the Thatcher government.35 But no such fight ensued, Beckett resigned and in the following decade while the City boomed, British manufacturing shrank by about 20%. The focus these […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 80 (Winter 2020) FREE

[PDF file]: […] Soros and the Rockefellers. Now there’s a list for the conspiracy theorists to play with! Politics, dear boy, politics. Thus Charles Moore, the official biographer of Margaret Thatcher: ‘At the time of the 2008/9 financial crisis, I remember Mervyn King, then Governor of the Bank of England, telling me with bitter perceptiveness, “The trouble […]

Holding Pattern

Lobster Issue 70 (Winter 2015) FREE

[PDF file]: […] fleeting shadow of an MI5 officer. alumnus of the far-right Murdoch-funded Campaign for a Free Britain, in which Hart tried to cajole Wyatt (a friend of Mrs Thatcher and the Queen Mother) into recommending Crozier to Thatcher for a knighthood. It really is a small world in the British Establishment. Speaking of which….. Coulson […]

1976 and all that: the IMF incident

Lobster Issue 89 (2024) FREE

[PDF file]: 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 […]

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 […]

The View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue 64 (Winter 2012) FREE

[PDF file]: […] the Bridge Robin Ramsay The right madness I was flipping through Richard Cockett’s Thinking the Unthinkable (Fontana, 1995) about the influence of the ‘think tanks’ on the Thatcher revolution, and noticed a quote from a 1968 Fabian pamphlet on the then politically insignificant ‘New Right’ – essentially the Institute for Economic Affairs – and […]

Misleading Parliament – Appendices

Lobster Issue 86 (2023) FREE

[PDF file]: […] had said to Mr Higgins – i.e. that I had only one ‘job description’. That was also made clear in a report by MI5 in 1975 (see attached extract). Some of the Govt Departments, such as the MoD, would have known that what Mrs Thatcher said in her letter to Terence Higgins MP was untrue.

Tittle-Tattle

Lobster Issue 70 (Winter 2015) FREE

[PDF file]: […] ‘extremely serious’. Of course not all of those should be laid at the door of the SYP as forces from around the country were deployed by the Thatcher government during the 1984-85 miners’ strike. May does not seem unhappy at taking them all on. She has long targeted the Police Federation for criticism2 5 […]

Accessibility Toolbar