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 […]

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 […]

Various: Political life in Britain by Tom Easton

Lobster Issue 60 (Winter 2010) FREE

[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 […]

The MOSSAD Spy by Olivia Frank

Lobster Issue 78 (Winter 2019) FREE

[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, […]

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 […]

View from Bridge copy

Lobster Issue

[…] on the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) as being essentially about economic ideas: the clash between the ‘new’ (but old, pre-WW2) free market ideas of the City/ Thatcher faction, and the ‘old’ (but post-WW2) ideas of the welfare state and social democracy. Lauria’s first omission is the substantial political underpinning to the government’s assault […]

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 […]

The Cuntocracy

Lobster Issue 62 (Winter 2011) FREE

[PDF file]: […] finding out facts. If a trick works once it might just work again. One overlooked aspect of F. A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (the book Margaret Thatcher slapped the table with saying that it had taken over her mind) is in a short section called ‘Why the Worst Get on Top’, where it […]

Operation Chiffon by Peter Taylor

Lobster Issue 87 (2023) FREE

[PDF file]: […] detail he gives on the Maze Prison ‘dirty protests’. Nor how the Brighton bomb affected the UK government’s public stance – including the reinforced ‘obduracy’ of Margaret Thatcher. Nor Taylor’s take on the Miami Showband killings which, I have to say, he gets very wrong. He bizarrely states that: The fact that Crozier and […]

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