The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] 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 […]

1976 and all that: the IMF incident

Lobster Issue 89 (2024)

[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 […]

Knightley

Lobster Issue

[…] in explaining Soviet policy and thinking just at the point when the Soviet Union was cracking up, thus smoothing to way for the Gorbachev relationship first with Thatcher and then with the Americans. ‘Decisive’ – maybe not; but not insignificant. The cry that intelligence services are useless is a variation on the more specific […]

And in 5th Place? The long march to Freeport UK

Lobster Issue 80 (Winter 2020)

[PDF file]: […] . . . I’m also anti-German. Anti-all-Europeans actually Oh yes – if I had my way I’d form my own party far more right wing than Margaret Thatcher I’d bring back National Service, the Scaffold, Reflecting on the who’s who of the Grand Bahama Port Authority, one is struck by how out of his […]

Asil Nadir: another victim of the arms-to-Iraq conspiracy?

Lobster Issue 66 (Winter 2013)

[PDF file]: […] letter he had written to the attorney-general in support of Asil Nadir. Mates was a poll tax rebel and a key figure in the removal of Margaret Thatcher. He had given a watch to Nadir, a Tory donor, engraved, ‘Don’t let the buggers get you down’. Mates was a defence witness at Nadir’s 2012 […]

Knightley

Lobster Issue

[…] in explaining Soviet policy and thinking just at the point when the Soviet Union was cracking up, thus smoothing to way for the Gorbachev relationship first with Thatcher and then with the Americans. ‘Decisive’ – maybe not; but not insignificant. The cry that intelligence services are useless is a variation on the more specific […]

lob61-parish-notes

Lobster Issue

[…] Secondly, when Lobster began in 1983 I had just joined the Labour Party, and the events of the 1960s and 70s, which led to the disaster of Thatcher, were still fresh in the collective party memory. The pursuit of the covert state operations against Labour governments, the Labour Party and wider left seemed politically […]

The Richer, The Poorer, by Stewart Lansley

Lobster Issue 86 (2023)

[PDF file]: […] shallow and temporary. (pp. 2/3) The author traces this well-footnoted and indexed history with academic rigour and journalistic anecdote. He shows how the free-market evangelists of the Thatcher and Reagan era repeated the myth that the great prize for a widening gap would be faster growth and a new economic dynamism that would raise […]

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