284 results found.
... are demonstrably not working. Thinking kindly, we might call them people in the grip of theories (though perhaps mostly theories about their careers). If he wasn't so irredeemably old Labour for them, Denis Healey's dictum, if you are in a hole, stop digging, would be worth their consideration. All our yesterdays Alastair Campbell's The Blair Years (London: Hutchinson, 2007, h/b , £25) has been widely reviewed elsewhere and, like most reviewers, I found it tedious and oddly fascinating at the same time. While I read/skimmed it I marked the bits that struck me. Minus the section on Putin discussed elsewhere in this issue, ...
Terms matched: 1 - Score: 56 - 01 Dec 2007 - URL: http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/online/issue54/lob54-07.htm
... the party of the state, the nation and the domestic economy; in effect the British national party. The leadership began moving away from this in the late 1980s when they decided that opposing the forces of globalisation and neo-conservatism meant they would never win a general election.2 0 Changes begun under Neil Kinnock were continued by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown when they became more or less joint party leaders in 1994 and then took office in 1997. Several wars, the banking crisis (and the longest recession since WW2), and about four million immigrants later, the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader apparently marked the end of Labour as a neo-con party. ...
Terms matched: 1 - Score: 56 - 10 May 2016 - URL: http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/free/lobster71/lob71-view-from-the-bridge.pdf
... alongside - and possibly replacing in time - Alastair Campbell in running the Prime Minister's spin machine. Blair's chief of staff is former Washington embassy diplomat Jonathan Powell. Recruited to the BAP in 1991 along with new TUC general secretary Brendan Barber, Powell has praised the organisation for 'taking the working out of networking'. Another BAP figure important to Blair in the Iraq crisis was Matthew Rycroft, his private secretary responsible for foreign affairs. In the Cabinet Office, Allie Saunders (BAP 2001) has responsibility for defence and overseas affairs. Between government and its citizenry lie the important 'opinion formers' and the BAP was well represented here during the war. Defence specialists Col Bob Stewart ( ...
Terms matched: 1 - Score: 56 - 01 Jun 2003 - URL: http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/online/issue45/lob45-13.htm
... he lost interest in the Tribune Group and developed a strong dislike of Diane Abbott after her election in 7 The Hackney South and Shoreditch CLP had actually decided, in the interests of unity, to reselect Brown, only to be told by Brown at the meeting that he had 'a little lifeboat' and was joining the SDP. 8 Anthony Blair was a keen Bennite in Hackney South – a pose he noticeably avoided whilst simultaneously seeking selection in various locations in the North East of England 1980-1983. Hackney North and Stoke Newington in 1987, considering her to be lazy. Not surprisingly the major media obituaries avoided narrative complications like this. However, it should be noted that ...
Terms matched: 1 - Score: 54 - 24 Jul 2015 - URL: http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/free/lobster70/lob70-brian-sedgemore.pdf
... Kennedy, Campbell (and Huhne) in quick succession, can we say that by late 2007 the tectonic plates of UK domestic politics were starting to move? Certainly by 2008 there was a receptive audience at the highest levels of the Civil Service for a government that would 'take decisions'. Such opinions should be seen in the context that Blair had already admitted that he spent his entire first term (1997-2001) learning the job and Brown's priorities appeared to be endlessly gauging his immediate political advantage and calculating how to remain in control.8 Wilson 6 During Campbell's spell as Liberal Democrat Leader (2006-2007) the party won the Dunfermline and West Fife bye- ...
Terms matched: 1 - Score: 54 - 26 Jul 2012 - URL: http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/free/lobster64/lob64-running-britain.pdf
... ....the whole unedifying story is likely to enter folk lore as an awful warning of what happens if you let politicians fiddle with intelligence. ' On the final day, the one-day session tacked on at the end, Sir Kevin Tebbitt, Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Defence, very carefully stuck the knife into Blair telling Lord Hutton that Blair had chaired the meeting which decided to identify Dr Kelly to the media. This statement told Hutton that Blair had lied; for on 22 July, on a plane between Shanghai and Hong Kong, Blair told reporters: 'I did not authorise the leaking of the name of Dr Kelly. ' However Blair did ...
Terms matched: 1 - Score: 53 - 01 Dec 2003 - URL: http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/online/issue46/lob46-14.htm
... by reading it.(2 ) Not inspired to avoid that kind of covert operation, but apparently inspired to emulate it in the struggle with the Jihadists. And there are still people in the Labour Party who think Brown is a lefty! Guff central During his last appearance at the House of Commons liaison committee on June 18, Tony Blair declared that democracy and freedom are 'universal values of the human spirit and always will be. ' Even if I knew what 'the human spirit' meant, this is manifestly falsified by the slaughter-strewn history of the 20th century. A spook by an other name In the New Statesman of 27 September (3 ) there was a ...
Terms matched: 1 - Score: 52 - 01 Dec 2007 - URL: http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/online/issue54/lob54-26.htm
... , and internecine struggle between two gangs, Brown's and Blair's, it useful to be reminded of the centrality of Geoffrey Robinson's money which funded John Smith's office; provided a flat in London for Brown to use; funded McCauley Hobsbawm, the PR agency of Brown's wife; and bought the New Statesman, saving it from being absorbed by the Blair gang. On pp. 69/70 he tells us that Brown met Bill Clinton at Baden-Baden in Germany. From the context this is 1989. (Bower is vague on the details.) I think this is wrong. Brown met Clinton when both attended the Bilderberg meeting at Baden-Baden in 1991. At that ...
Terms matched: 1 - Score: 51 - 01 Jun 2005 - URL: http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/online/issue49/lob49-40.htm
... one of the chief architects of the economic mess we are in. This chapter shows how. Robin Ramsay Chapter 8 Into office 'It is scarcely credible that Britain should once again be crucified on an excessively high exchange rate. ' – Wynne Godley, The Observer (Business) 23 August 1998. By the time Labour took office Brown and Blair had promised to toe the conservative line on economic policy: no income tax rises, no increased public spending, no attempts to use government to direct the economy; and no reacquisition of the privatised state assets, the roughly £100 billion of taxation- created assets flogged-off for around £50 billion during the Thatcher years. ...
Terms matched: 1 - Score: 49 - 27 Oct 2014 - URL: http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/free/lobster68/lob68-new-labour.pdf
... , of course, was consumed with anti-communism. Both he and others were reluctant to give up the British Empire lightly. Yet others were concerned that all this pro-UN, anti-war stuff might make the party appear electorally 'weak'. Even the notions of 'humanitarian interventionism' and 'preventive wars' go back long before Blair: Phythian for example quotes Kinnock wanting to finish Saddam off preemptively in 1991; and there's a clear if minority 'humanitarian interventionist' tradition in the party that goes back to the 1900s. (Then it was called 'liberal imperialism'. Phythian goes back some way before 1945 for the 'roots' of the ideologies he is describing, but ...
Terms matched: 1 - Score: 49 - 01 Jun 2008 - URL: http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/online/issue55/lob55-46.htm
