View from the Bridge 89

Lobster Issue

[…] service of the British people, rather than dictating to them. Margaret Thatcher sought to drag Britain out of its stupor by setting loose our natural entrepreneurialism. Tony Blair reimagined a stale, outdated Labour Party into one that could seize the optimism of the late 90s. A century ago, Clement Attlee wrote that Labour must […]

L0b 92 Bridge copy

Lobster Issue

[…] Walker, Garrick Alder and Nick Must for their work on this issue of Lobster. *new* Saint Tony I didn’t watch the 3 hour TV profile of Tony Blair in mid February. Would it tell me anything new about the man? Probably not. Mr Blair summarised? He and Gordon Brown continued Mrs Thatcher’s destruction of […]

View from the Bridge 89

Lobster Issue

[…] service of the British people, rather than dictating to them. Margaret Thatcher sought to drag Britain out of its stupor by setting loose our natural entrepreneurialism. Tony Blair reimagined a stale, outdated Labour Party into one that could seize the optimism of the late 90s. A century ago, Clement Attlee wrote that Labour must […]

Hack Attack: How The Truth Caught Up With Rupert Murdoch by Nick Davies

Lobster Issue 68 (Winter 2014)

[PDF file]: […] to do to get Murdoch to change sides. As Davies points out, since 1979, ‘no British government has been elected without the support of Rupert Murdoch….Thatcher, Major, Blair and Brown have consistently cleared their diaries and welcomed him to the inner sanctum of their governments (and then disclosed as little as possible of what […]

View from Bridge 89

Lobster Issue

[…] service of the British people, rather than dictating to them. Margaret Thatcher sought to drag Britain out of its stupor by setting loose our natural entrepreneurialism. Tony Blair reimagined a stale, outdated Labour Party into one that could seize the optimism of the late 90s. A century ago, Clement Attlee wrote that Labour must […]

Hoodwinked by the Department of Health? Frank Dobson and the 1997 Jimmy Savile report

Lobster Issue 74 (Winter 2017)

[PDF file]: […] dealings with ‘the machine’. 1 2 Interview conducted at the Cafe Russell, London on 30 November 2017. He famously wrote a memo about the NHS to Tony Blair in 1998, telling the Prime Minister: ‘If you want a first-class service, you have to pay a firstclass fare – and we’re not doing it.’ What […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] See for example Not that this makes a change from NuLab. See James Chapman, ‘Meet Labour’s City cronies: The roll call of bankers rewarded by Brown and Blair’, The Daily Mail 12 February 2009. 9 These are detailed in James Lyons, ‘NHS reform leaves Tory backers with links to private healthcare firms set for […]

The View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] the time of the crash: the market is magic, we need no regulation of the City and the domestic manufacturing economy can be ignored. Messrs Brown and Blair had persuaded themselves in the early 1990s that it was necessary to follow the neo-con (and Conservative Party) line on economic policy to get elected because […]

The long goodbye? Taking on the consultants

Lobster Issue 90 (2025)

[PDF file]: […] in highly technical areas of public services, such as environmental monitoring, finance and digital technologies. This became apparent in the United Kingdom in the aftermath of the Blair/ Brown years, during the period of the Coalition government’s policy to slash spending on consultants. In one instance, a major rail franchise tender was withdrawn because […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] 1974. That narrative says that Labour politicians don’t understand the economy and can’t be trusted with it. This narrative had such power over Gordon Brown and Tony Blair that they spent the period in opposition from 199497 endlessly endorsing it and promising not to challenge its perceived prescriptions. When he was finally Prime Minister, […]

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