The rise of warfare capitalism

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Lobster Issue 54 (Winter 2007/8)

Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing Stephen Marshall (Guerilla News Network, $13.22. Available from and ) The Shock Doctrine: The Rise Of Disaster Capitalism Naomi Klein, (London: Allen Lane, £25.00)   ‘When new (forms of capitalism) emerged in the past …they sparked a flood of analysis and debate about how such seismic shifts in the production of […]

The Business of Death: Britain’s Arms Trade at Home and Abroad

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Lobster Issue 34 (Winter 1997)

Neil Cooper I. B. Tauris, London, 1997, £39.50 This is an analysis of the arms business in the UK, chiefly about the MOD’s procurement system. Not a subject I knew much about, I approached the book expecting little. Discovering it had begun as a PhD reduced my expectations even further. In fact it is a … Read more

Dangerous Men: the SAS and Popular Culture

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Lobster Issue 34 (Winter 1997)

[…] and not by military and industrial power (neither of which Britain has any more). Newsinger’s thesis about the psycho-political uses to which the SAS was put under Thatcher, is undoubtedly correct, it’s just that he has underplayed the extent to which it was built on an older theme in our society. That quibble aside, […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 57 (Summer 2009)

[…] In the last issue I discussed the research by Giles Scott-Smith on the US State Department’s funding of a big freebie trip to the US for Mrs Thatcher in 1967, after the US embassy in London had spotted her as a possible future prime minister. Scott-Smith has more information on the Net. His ‘Searching […]

A load of Balls

Lobster Issue 48 (Winter 2004)

[…] look. Since 1997 house prices have tripled and private debt topped a trillion pounds in July.(5) Thatcherism continued Brown-Balls have simply continued the economic policies of the Thatcher government. Like them they have no exchange rate policy: get inflation under control, they believe, and everything else will follow. Indeed, Brown has warned of the […]

The crisis

Lobster Issue 57 (Summer 2009)

[…] Frank Portnoy, Fiasco: blood in the water on Wall Street (London: Profile Books, 1997) On the wider British issues, the connections between the current situation and the Thatcher years’ obsession with the market and the City, see Peter Wilby, ‘All of us live by the logic of finance’ at . Dan Hind’s ‘Jump You […]

Our leader

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Lobster Issue 48 (Winter 2004)

[…] electoral reform, none of which came to fruition. etc. At the other end of the spectrum Blair was anxious to be seen to take advice from Margaret Thatcher in the early years of his premiership. No such involvement was offered to previous senior Labour Party figures. The point is tellingly made that Blair is […]

Publications and Book Reviews

Lobster Issue 6 (1984)

[…] may turn out to be more interesting than it first appears. And let’s hope that McCoy, now living in Australia, is working on that material . RR Thatcher and Friends: The Anatomy of the Tory Party Ian Ross (London 1983) This might have been a very good book, but inclusion in Pluto’s ‘Arguments for […]

The getting elected project

Book review
Lobster Issue 56 (Winter 2008/9)

From Thatcher to the Third Way: think-tanks, intellectuals and the Blair project Robert Carl Blank Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag, 2003, ISBN 3-89821-277-7 This illustrates the hazards of Amazon’s ‘search inside the book’ feature: I read an interesting couple of pages of this and bought it for about $30 and it isn’t worth the money. This is […]

We The Nation: The Conservative Party and the Pursuit of Power

Lobster Issue 32 (December 1996)

[…] is strongest, as one would expect, in those who have exercised power at the highest levels – among the Men in Suits. From Chamberlain through Heath and Thatcher, each deposed leader retained the support of the Party beyond Westminster. Tory supporters in their associations and clubs felt a great sense of loss and bereavement […]

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