The economic crisis

Lobster Issue 59 (Summer 2010) FREE

[PDF file]: […] part of the Faustian pact that got New Labour into power in the first place. (“What you in the City have done for financial services,” enthused Gordon Brown in 2002, “we as a government intend to do for the economy as a whole.” He got that right.)’ 2 City lobbying H ow this has […]

A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s by Alwyn W. Turner

Lobster Issue 66 (Winter 2013) FREE

[PDF file]: […] to hold most of the cards and boast the better spokespeople. Major’s Chancellor Kenneth Clarke could make a united Europe sound as British as roast beef and brown ale, Major’s deputy Michael Heseltine gave it the aura of an exciting business enterprise and Tony Blair bestowed upon the project the glitter of a chic […]

Broken Vows: Tony Blair the Tragedy of Power by Tom Bower

Lobster Issue 71 (Summer 2016) FREE

[PDF file]: […] received view of New Labour’s rush to the till-deathdo-us-part section of those vows has at its core the perpetual 1 Sunday Telegraph 3 March 2002 acrimony between Brown and Blair, which paralysed decisionmaking and split the party, the Parliamentary Labour Party, and the Civil Service. Of course there is ample evidence to support that […]

My Turn: Hillary Clinton targets the presidency by Doug Henwood

Lobster Issue 71 (Summer 2016) FREE

[PDF file]: […] the poor and the trade unions was electorally popular way back in their days in Arkansas. For a British reader this tale has resonance, for the Blair/ Brown faction within the Labour Party copied the Clintons’ ‘New Democrats’ strategy right down the line,1 the only real difference being that the opposition to the changes […]

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

Lobster Issue 84 (Winter 2022) FREE
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[PDF file]: […] Bernard Connolly, The Rotten Heart of Europe (London: Faber and Faber, 1995) John Laughland, The Tainted Source: The Undemocratic Origins of the European idea (London: Little and Brown, 1997) Christopher Booker and Richard North, The Great Deception: The True Story of Britain and the European Union (London: Bloomsbury, 2003) 6 5 globalisation. Most recently […]

Tittle-Tattle

Lobster Issue 70 (Winter 2015) FREE

[PDF file]: […] South Shields, deep within New Labour’s North-East redoubt. Balls, with no journalistic background, landed a leader-writer job with the Financial Times before becoming Treasury adviser to Gordon Brown. Then, like Miliband with no experience of electoral politics, he was parachuted into a former mining seat in Yorkshire in 2005 near to the one his […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 81 (Summer 2021) FREE
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[PDF file]: […] the economy than Labour.43 The lack of confidence in Labour is apparently the result of the economic crash of 2007/8. But the then NuLab government of Gordon Brown was following Conservative polices at the time of the crash: the market is magic, we need no regulation of the City and the domestic manufacturing economy […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 74 (Winter 2017) FREE
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[PDF file]: […] big problem no-one wants to discuss – but we do apparently make some nice weapons. And Saudi Arabia buys them. The late Robin Cook, Foreign Secretary while Brown was Chancellor, had access to the same information and resigned in opposition to the approaching war. He said in his resignation speech: ‘Why is it now […]

View from Bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] 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.3 It was all […]

Dangerous Hero, and, Boris Johnson

Lobster Issue 81 (Summer 2021) FREE

[PDF file]: […] Wapping picket line, standing alongside the sacked print workers, ‘every morning for nine months’. (p. 94) Bower does not have that much to say about Blair and Brown, although it is worth noticing his explanation for the great financial crash. Gordon Brown, we are told, ‘borrowed excessive amounts so he could distribute welfare benefits, […]

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