Collapse of stout party: Eden, Suez and America

Lobster Issue 74 (Winter 2017)

[PDF file]: […] behest of the US and their local supporters? Have there been others? The general election of 1970 that resulted in a surprise Wilson defeat inevitably comes to mind. The US – and many within the UK’s intelligence and military – wanted Wilson out in 1970. The election that year was characterised by an extensive […]

The Super-rich Shall Inherit the Earth by Stephen Armstrong

Lobster Issue 59 (Summer 2010)

[PDF file]: […] ‘affordable’ colour-changing fibre-optic carpets (currently very ‘in’) become available, although if platinum taps hit Homebase any time soon, the billionaires will have to up their game sharply. Mind you, even with this trend it will probably be a while before any of us mere mortals are shopping for helicopters and submarines, as many of […]

A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s by Alwyn W. Turner

Lobster Issue 66 (Winter 2013)

[PDF file]: […] game to remember victims of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan in March 2011. The state ideology and the folk religion sometimes overlapped subconsciously in the public mind, as in this splendid vignette from Mr Turner from shortly after the 1997 election : ‘Giles Radice was surprised to be visited at his constituency surgery […]

Brexit beginnings

Lobster Issue 87 (2023)

[PDF file]: […] force, whilst remaining outside the single market, implies importing a substantial workforce from countries further afield than Europe. Perhaps this is what she and Starmer have in mind. 13 Part of which is the continued belief that the UK has one of the richest economies in the world. Frequently described as being the ‘5th […]

All In It Together: England in the early 21st Century by Alwyn Turner

Lobster Issue 82 (Winter 2021)

[PDF file]: […] (combined with the failure to find any of the ‘weapons of mass destruction’ that had been used to justify the invasion) tainted Iraq irredeemably in the public mind. Back home, the political scene is viewed through the lens less of the big parties and of ‘Westminster bubble’ stories than by telling the stories of […]

A Radical History of Britain by Edward Vallance

Lobster Issue

[…] Lord Falconer, Lord Chancellor at the time of the Iraq invasion, told him ‘that whatever the size of the march the Government would not have changed its mind.’ Which is what we all suspected anyway. Tony Blair, Dubya’s political catamite, knew what was expected of him and was determined to deliver it. 199 Summer […]

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

Lobster Issue 85 (Summer 2023)

[PDF file]: […] 24 September 2017 he is recording that ‘I have lost my respect for him. He is a clown, a self-centred ego, an embarrassing buffoon, with an untidy mind and sub-zero diplomatic judgement. He is an international stain on our reputation’. And to make matters even worse, he ‘thinks he is the next Churchill’. (p. […]

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