343 results found.
... its support for war. This was a newspaper which had historically positioned itself on the left of centre and had taken some pride in its willingness to swim against the mainstream. Most famously The Observer had stood out against the British invasion of Suez in 1956, despite courting the scorn of the government and the loss of some of its more conservative readers and advertisers. And yet this newspaper which had thrived on scepticism was seduced into accepting unproven and extravagant claims; this flagship of the left was towed along in the wake of a determinedly right-wing American government; on this crucial, long-running story, the essential role of journalism, to tell the truth, was compromised.' Alton's ...
Terms matched: 1 - Score: 14 - 01 Jun 2008 - URL: http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/online/issue55/lob55-30.htm
... . Then, after Hatfield, costs soared to an unprecedented level. The annual subsidy is now running at several times the highest amount that BR ever received. All aspects of running a railway have become far more expensive...' Why should this be? First, of course, privatisation itself was a costly exercise. At a conservative estimate, the total cost of the process, including the amounts paid out by bidders, was reported to be at least £1bn. For the taxpayer, the direct cost was at least £600m,(3) which only covers the obvious spending such as fees for consultants and lawyers.... The sorry story of ...
Terms matched: 1 - Score: 14 - 01 Jun 2008 - URL: http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/online/issue55/lob55-10.htm
... Their links are very similar, of course, to those of NuLab's leadership. Why would they differ? Both groups of politicians are pro-American, pro-Israeli, pro-globalisation, pro-free market, pro-nuclear, pro-EU and pro-destroying the public sector. The only significant difference is that the Cameroons are linked to a different cluster of corporate sponsors. The NuLab and Conservative parties' use of PR is discussed but that isn't the meat of those chapters. This is the best introduction to real power politics in this society that I have read. Anyone who finds Lobster interesting will find this congenial and stimulating. Large chunks of this book would sit very comfortably in these pages and many themes which have appeared ...
Terms matched: 1 - Score: 14 - 01 Jun 2008 - URL: http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/online/issue55/lob55-49.htm
... continued after his formal retirement from countering 'domestic subversion' as head of F section in 1979. Working with Margaret Thatcher's aide during the miners' strike, David Hart, Elwell used British Briefing according to some sources part-funded by Rupert Murdoch to continue to defame many of his old elected political targets, thus 'raising a favourable wind' for the Conservative prime minister in the miners' strike and all that followed. An earlier BBC political editor When John Cole was narrowly beaten by Peter Preston in the contest to become the editor of The Guardian in 1975 he moved to The Observer then under separate ownership before joining the BBC in 1981. Re-reading his 1995 political memoir As It Seemed To ...
Terms matched: 1 - Score: 13 - 01 Jun 2008 - URL: http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/online/issue55/lob55-18.htm
... month before the alleged Soames phone call (i.e. January 1997), Diana had taken the first (unwitting?) steps towards becoming a political figure by visiting Angola as part of an International Red Cross campaign against landmines. What would normally have been a strictly humanitarian gesture was given a political dimension by the fact that John Major's rapidly-deflating Conservative government had stalled repeatedly on banning landmines, whereas Labour was promising a foreign policy with 'an ethical dimension'. Declassified US diplomatic cables record that 'Government officials immediately scrambled to repair the public relations damage, and issued statements affirming the government's commitment to working toward a world-wide ban on landmines', adding that 'Labour Party officials used the flap ...
Terms matched: 1 - Score: 21 - 01 Dec 2007 - URL: http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/online/issue54/lob54-28.htm
... was plain to me walking thorough Dagenham with Jon Cruddas, that most of the defecting Labour voters were fairly decent people doing the best for their families: community-minded, law-abiding, hard-working, middle-of-the-road. They were victims of the Political Class who had been left with no one to speak up for them, and nowhere to go. Neither the Conservative opposition, nor the New Labour government, is speaking for these people...This estrangement between a tiny governing elite and mainstream British society is one of the overwhelming themes of our age, and it will get more desperate, and more dangerous.' The bigger picture The undermining of democracy is also the theme of the Dinan ...
Terms matched: 1 - Score: 14 - 01 Dec 2007 - URL: http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/online/issue54/lob54-38.htm
... economic control over world trade.' Ha! (And no evidence offered.) p. 27 'the Royal Institute of International Affairs is the foreign policy executive arm of the British monarchy.'(11) Ha! (And no evidence offered.) p. 29 'Lady Thatcher had been dumped as head of state by her own Conservative Party on Bilderberg orders and replaced with trapeze artist (sic) John Major.' Not only is there no evidence that Thatcher was dumped on the orders of Bilderberg and Esulin offers none he has confused John Major with his father, who did work in a circus for a time. On page 58 we are told that Watergate was ...
Terms matched: 1 - Score: 14 - 01 Dec 2007 - URL: http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/online/issue54/lob54-46.htm
... under the Wilson-Callaghan Government in the 1960s and 1970s. The process of withdrawal started with the independence of India and Pakistan (widely celebrated in the UK media recently on its sixtieth anniversary), was confirmed by the failure of the last imperialist fling at Suez in 1956 and reached its coda in the bloody withdrawal from Aden. Even the Thatcher-Major Conservatives restricted themselves to support for UN and US-backed intervention after that date (Iraq, 1990/1991). The withdrawal was logical. The British economy was in no state to maintain the infrastructure for a global empire and modern capitalism no longer required that it hold territory to win markets. As the Treasury has found, military adventures are ...
Terms matched: 1 - Score: 7 - 01 Dec 2007 - URL: http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/online/issue54/lob54-03.htm
... (including in London) and is treated by the mainstream media as a credible intelligence-gathering organisation. In Britain, its agents were not, as one might expect from a hard-line, law and order Home Secretary such as John Reid, arrested and expelled from the country, but are instead welcome guests, mixing freely with both New Labour and Conservative politicians as well as maintaining an intimate relationship with Britain's own security services.(3) The CIA's role in the overthrow of governments is well-known, beginning with the 1953 coup in Iran and the 1954 coup in Guatemala. Since then the organisation has been involved in coups in South Vietnam in 1963, in Brazil in 1964, in ...
Terms matched: 1 - Score: 7 - 01 Dec 2007 - URL: http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/online/issue54/lob54-09.htm
... Kevin Myers had began to attack republicanism as a species of left-wing politics, particularly in the deeply reactionary Irish Independent newspaper. This was in part a consequence of their Stalinist abandonment of working-class politics and in part a response to the tendency of Trotskyist sects to afford left cover to the IRA. Unionists were seen as allies because they were political conservatives and the openly Thatcherite Progressive Democrats praised for keeping the Fianna Fail-dominated government on the 'sensible' path. The environmental movement came in for particular, irrational, attack by both Harris and Myers. At one point, Myers argued that there was no difference between the Irish Left supporting Cuban Stalinism and the Irish State and Catholic Church supporting Franco ...
Terms matched: 1 - Score: 5 - 01 Dec 2007 - URL: http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/online/issue54/lob54-33.htm
