Book reviews

Lobster Issue

[…] 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 […]

Debunking the Myth of America’s Poodle: Great Britain Wants War by Nu’man Abd al-Wahid

Lobster Issue 79 (Summer 2020)

[PDF file]: […] are desperately seeking refuge in Britain, in which case they are maligned and abused. (p. 8) Looking back on the invasion of Iraq, he insists that the Blair government was not dragged reluctantly into the conflict – a poodle on a lead, so to speak – but was energetically urging an interventionist policy on […]

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 […]

In The Thick of It: The Private Diaries of a Minister by Alan Duncan

Lobster Issue 85 (Summer 2023)

[PDF file]: […] involved in facilitating the Al Yamamah trade deal between Britain and Saudi Arabia which led to allegations of massive corruption. The investigation was closed down by the Blair government when the Saudis threatened to end their intelligence relationship with Britain if it was pursued.4 He gave hundreds of thousands of pounds to the Conservative […]

Megrahi – You Are My Jury: The Lockerbie Evidence by John Ashton

Lobster Issue 64 (Winter 2012)

[PDF file]: […] terrorist atrocity. These are serious questions raised by serious people, and the world is watching.’ But Mr Salmond, following the precedents of Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron, was adamant in his refusal: ‘They’re looking for an inquiry for the responsibility, ultimately, for Lockerbie. That touches on matters of […]

Climate hysterics: useful idiots or just idiots

Lobster Issue 78 (Winter 2019)

[PDF file]: Climate hysterics: useful idiots or just idiots Dr T P Wilkinson In 1973 a dystopian film, Soylent Green, was released, starring the sincerely gun-toting Charlton Heston.1 The scene was New York City, inhabited by 40 million (only twice as many as Beijing, today), with equatorial temperatures and humidity due to the ‘greenhouse effect’. The story […]

Who let the dogs out?

Lobster Issue 58 (Winter 2009/2010)

[PDF file]: […] by his son Alvaro in Granta in 1991. 12 See however Dominic Wring, The Politics of Marketing the Labour Party, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 13 After the election, Blair sent Penn a signed photograph declaring: ‘Mark, you were brilliant. Thank you.’ In ‘The Price of Spin’, David Charter and Sam Coates, The Times, 25 April […]

Treasure Islands: Tax havens and the men who stole the world by Nicholas Shaxson

Lobster Issue 63 (Summer 2012)

[PDF file]: […] Shaxson London: the Bodley Head, 2011, £14.99, p/b ‘Reading Treasure Islands I have realised that injustice is no perversion of the system; it is the system. Tony Blair came to power after assuring the City of his benign intentions. He then deregulated it and cut its taxes. Cameron didn’t have to assure it of […]

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Lobster Issue

[…] to the former KGB agent Alexander Lebedev’s Italian villa while foreign minister without any aides present? He made Lebedev Junior a Lord? Cameron lobbies for Chinese interests? Blair lobbies for everyone? And this is just allowed?” It was the gap between all the stuff that was happening and the absence of any sanction that […]

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