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 In one instance, a major rail franchise tender was withdrawn because […]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 88 (2024)

[PDF file]: […] 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 Tony Blair reimagined a stale, outdated Labour Party into one that could seize the optimism of the late 90s.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 […]

Not the Chilcot Report by Peter Oborne

Lobster Issue 72 (Winter 2016)

[PDF file]: […] is well written and burns with hot logic. His criticism, from careful examination of the material available to Chilcot, is not only directed at Prime Minister Tony Blair. He concludes: ‘I have found no evidence that David Manning, foreign policy adviser inside Downing Street as war loomed, ever tried to correct Tony Blair. Neither […]

Consultants Challen

Lobster Issue

[…] 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 In one instance, a major rail franchise tender was withdrawn because […]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

[…] on economic policy, which in turn was required to demonstrate a break with the perceived failure of Labour’s economic record of the past.’ (emphases added) So: the Blair government had to demonstrate to the City its ‘fitness to govern’ and thus acquired ‘permission’ to do so. Why is this necessary? Because of the ‘perceived […]

Brexit Revisited: Europe Didn’t Work, and, Brexit Unfolded

Lobster Issue 84 (Winter 2022)

[PDF file]: […] grip of German bankers intent on preaching protestant rectitude to ill-disciplined countries – which amounted to every country apart from itself, and even itself at times. Thatcher, Blair and Brown The policy choices that the UK made and then induced the EU to follow, were promoting globalisation and reducing protectionism through Thatcherism, and then […]

The Unravelling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq by Emma Sky

Lobster Issue 70 (Winter 2015)

[PDF file]: […] that working for the Occupation changed her. How does she deal with this? The narrative device she employs is to make a joke of it. When Tony Blair visited the country in May 2007, she was invited to meet him at the British Embassy. The Embassy was ‘rocketed….minutes before Blair arrived – he was […]

Books on New Labour

Lobster Issue 59 (Summer 2010)

[PDF file]: […] New Labour, he really gives the game away. While he sources more in this book than in his weekly Observer column, there’s still too much referenced as ‘Blair inner circle’ and ‘interviews, senior officers’ to accept this as anything like a historical record. What it does manage to do is confirm the New Labour […]

Deception in High Places: a history of bribery in Britain’s arms trade by Nicholas Gilby

Lobster Issue 69 (Summer 2015)

[PDF file]: […] problem for business – in which ‘commissions’ are commonplace – but it has been for politicians, especially members of the Labour Party whose official ethos before messrs. Blair and Brown was something vaguely along the ‘merchants of death’ line. The Labour government of Harold Wilson solved that problem in 1966 by creating an insulation […]

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