Socialist Renewal publications

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Lobster Issue 42 (Winter 2001/2)

[…] 70 page, perfect (glue) bound pamphlet, part commentary on and part supplement to George Monbiot’s book The Captive State. It covers all the main agenda items: the Blair administration’s obsession with big business; PFI spreading throughout the public sector; the government’s Task Forces dominated by business personnel and the role of groups such as […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 53 (Summer 2007)

[…] was shown by the Daily Telegraph’s report on 7 April: headlined ‘Africa becomes vital front in war on terror’, the story by the Telegraph’s diplomatic correspondent David Blair told us that ‘Meanwhile, a belt of countries in the Horn of Africa and on the southern fringe of the Sahara could, say US officials, become […]

Lobster goes to the movies!

Lobster Issue 57 (Summer 2009)

[…] Armani-clad ‘blue skies thinking’ ex-head of the BBC renowned for his unfathomable managerial gobbledygook (regularly reproduced in the pages of Private Eye). His ennoblement by the Revd. Blair is widely seen as a result of his friendship with Peter Mandelson, a former colleague at London Weekend Television.Here’s a bit of Birt biog that may […]

Spinning the Spies: Intelligence, open government and the Hutton Inquiry

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Lobster Issue 49 (Summer 2005)

[…] not ‘feed into the intelligence process’. But how can they not? How could they not in the case of the Iraq war? Everybody and their cousin knew Blair had agreed to support a US attack; and supporting the Americans is the political consideration which is always in the intelligence process. The authors tell us: […]

America, Israel and the Israel lobby

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Lobster Issue 57 (Summer 2009)

[…] as for Britain? Very little mention is made of the UK having any role of influence on either US or Israeli-US policy. The authors positively discount Tony Blair playing any significant part one way or the other in either Middle East events or the Iraqi war. They do state, though, that Israel gets access […]

Hidden Agendas

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Lobster Issue 35 (Summer 1998)

[…] at a dead-end: believe it or don’t. Assertion plus documentation opens doors, empowers. For example, in a really splendid and splenetic assault on Our Great Leader (T. Blair) he quotes extensively from the material on the British American Project for the Future Generation and TUCETU in Lobster 33. But the source is not given. […]

Tittle-tattle: New Labour – old Spooks?

Lobster Issue 42 (Winter 2001/2)

[…] Alan Petty (aka author ‘Alan Judd’) an ex-MI6 officer and member of MI6’s secretariat – in effect, the Chief’s private office – is a friend of Tony Blair. ‘Judd’ was briefly the motoring correspondent of the Spectator. In one of his early columns, he joked that in his previous occupation he’d had to changes […]

Secrecy and Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq

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Lobster Issue 49 (Summer 2005)

[…] Democrats willing to take before they conclude that attack may be the only form of defence? Notes I haven’t read the party’s history before 1960 and don’t know. A great deal of this critique of the Democrats – fear of the spooks and the media, for example – applied to the pre- Blair Labour Party.

Reflections on the ‘cult of the offensive’

Lobster Issue 57 (Summer 2009)

[…] fabricated WMD claims as the ostensible causus belli. Reality though, returned to haunt the crippled Bush administration with a vengeance. And if Bush and Cheney (and Tony Blair) had remained true to the last in cheerleading Israel’s chaotic reinvasion of Lebanon of August 2006, plans for the most ambitious Israeli pre-emption yet – the […]

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