The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] years 8 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 […]

Apocryphylia

Lobster Issue 68 (Winter 2014)

[PDF file]: […] the English political stage seem able to contemplate changes to this. Certainly the efforts of Labour pre-2010 do not inspire confidence. Great store was set by Gordon Brown in 2009 in the establishment of the International Centre for Financial Regulation was announced. Designed to map out the future of responsible capitalism, it came with […]

Gone but not forgotten… (Donald Trump book reviews)

Lobster Issue 82 (Winter 2021)

[PDF file]: […] and the young Miller became ‘a Horowitz acolyte’. Miller ‘was awed by Horowitz’s ideas’, and came to see ‘this country as a white-forged masterpiece, unfairly demonized by brown hordes’. (pp. 6, 7, 75, 77, 78) When he left school, Miller published a condemnation of it on Horowitz’s website as ‘Left-Wing’, as ‘an institution not […]

The Blair Supremacy A study in the politics of Labour’s party management by Lewis Minkin

Lobster Issue 82 (Winter 2021)

[PDF file]: […] end Blair was no match for a Labour Party of entrenched traditions. Let’s reflect on the fact that a mere five years after the departure of Blair, Brown, Mandelson and Gould, the four apostles of New Labour, Jeremy Corbyn was elected as party leader. Today even the Blairite new leader, Keir Starmer, has had […]

View from Bridge 89

Lobster Issue

[…] $2.07 at its peak in 2007). A strong pound is bad for the British manufacturing economy, making exports expensive and competing imports cheap. But Blair (and Chancellor Brown) didn’t care about manufacturing – or simply didn’t understand the impact the value of sterling had on it – or both. After all, we had the […]

In the Thick of It: The private diaries of a minister Alan Duncan

Lobster Issue 82 (Winter 2021)

[PDF file]: […] Balls from Morley and Outwood in 2015 after the New Labour machine had found a second ‘safe’ seat in Yorkshire for the friend and ally of Gordon Brown. Jenkyns, ‘the brainless nothing’, now sits on a Tory majority of 11,267. 1 2 comment . . . . He is an egotistical showman who just […]

The crisis: an historical perspective

Lobster Issue 67 (Summer 2014)

[PDF file]: […] as a result flowed via corporate tax and asset and bond purchases to governments (so helping to finance the expansion of the welfare state under Blair and Brown) and, via banks, building societies and finance companies, both to businesses and to millions of private citizens. Lending expanded, personal and corporate borrowing mushroomed. The most […]

Back to the future (again)

Lobster Issue 75 (Summer 2018)

[PDF file]: […] electoral participation by the young (so noticeable post-1997) was due to a combination of youth culture drifting into slick consumerism and political leaders – like Blair and Brown – not being prepared to do very much, unless they have the agreement of (perpetually) undecided voters. Despite repeated electoral endorsements, the Labour years continued with […]

Angles Morts

Lobster Issue 91 (2025)

[PDF file]: […] territory. I’m telling you now, if you don’t get those squaddies off the roof, none of you will be coming to the Thursday night disco in your brown boots and mufti.19 The firing duly ceased. At the City Hotel, with some tuition by Stanley Bonnett, the international press had perfected a confidential system of […]

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