The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 85 (Summer 2023)

[PDF file]: […] he served, this country did not have a trade deficit. It was the decimation of the manufacturing base by her policies and those of her acolyte, Tony Blair, which produced the ‘huge trade deficit’. When he was a young man, Hague was in the McKinsey management consultant company, spreading the gospel of free markets […]

Malcolm Kennedy (1946-2013)

Lobster Issue 67 (Summer 2014)

[PDF file]: […] the overturning of the murder convictions of the Birmingham Six in 1991. More recently, there have been the revelations that a Metropolitan police officer most probably killed Blair Peach at Southall in 1979, and South Yorkshire Police conspired to blame Liverpool fans for their deaths at Hillsborough in 1989 in order to deflect attention […]

Decades of Deceit: the Stalker Affair and its Legacy

Lobster Issue 90 (2025)

[PDF file]: […] the availability of this weaponry allowed loyalist killings to exceed republican killings by 1992. Cory ordered that independent public enquiries should be held into the killings. The Blair government responded by passing the Inquiries Act (2005), something strongly opposed by Cory, who noted ‘For example, the Minister, the actions of whose ministry was to […]

Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics by Peter Geoghegan

Lobster Issue 80 (Winter 2020)

[PDF file]: Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics Peter Geoghegan London: Head of Zeus, 2020, £8.99 Colin Challen Ever since the birth of ‘democracy’ it has been for sale. Influence pedlars, bribery, blackmail, fraud, honours touting – these are all as common as the ballot box. A whole library has been written about these less […]

View from the bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] say that the free market moves since 1979 have all been a mistake. Even if Mr Starmer thought it, this would entail criticising Mrs Thatcher’s acolytes, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and he won’t do that. To judge by Chancellor Reeves’ Mansion House speech in November, she isn’t going to entertain any deviant ideas.53 […]

The Army of Afghanistan: A Political History of a Fragile Institution by Antonio Giustozzi

Lobster Issue 72 (Winter 2016)

[PDF file]: […] the war in Afghanistan was not of any great concern to the British government, as long as fealty to the American Empire was faithfully demonstrated. As Tony Blair once remarked, it was sometimes necessary to cement the ‘special relationship’ in blood – other people’s blood. But why has the war gone so disastrously wrong? […]

In Spies We Trust: the story of western intelligence by Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones

Lobster Issue 66 (Winter 2013)

[PDF file]: […] to ‘democracy’. It seems that in the early 2000s the British intelligence community raised serious doubts that Saddam Hussein had WMDs, which were disregarded by Bush and Blair because they didn’t fit in with their presumptions. America’s problem after 2001 was not that it had no loyal intelligence allies, but that they were, as […]

Historical Notes

Lobster Issue 86 (2023)

[PDF file]: […] anniversary of the war approached, a number of significant media outlets started running articles explaining that although it had turned out Iraq had no WMD, Bush and Blair could be forgiven for believing that it did. This is because throughout the period up to March 2003 Saddam Hussein and his government were bluffing that […]

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