Off Message, and, Standing for Something

Lobster Issue 63 (Summer 2012)

[PDF file]: […] origin of New Labour is to be found in the historic defeats that the Thatcher government inflicted on the labour movement in the 1980s. Without these defeats, Brown would have remained on the left and Blair would never have become party leader. Marshall-Andrews’ own particular concerns are with New Labour’s colonial wars and its […]

Wilson, MI5 and the rise of Thatcher

Lobster Issue 11 (April 1986)

[PDF file]: […] of, the Kincora situation. This report listed a wide range of Loyalist politicians and other personalities, including Sir Knox Cunningham QC MP, Mr Clifford Smith, Mr David Brown (editor of the Rev. Ian Paisley’s newspaper, the Protestant Telegraph), Mr Thomas Passmore and the Rev. Martin Smyth, both key figures in the Orange Order. There […]

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 […]

Survival of the Richest: escape fantasies of the tech billionaires, by Douglas Rushkoff

Lobster Issue 85 (Summer 2023)

[PDF file]: […] by Epstein, launched his One Laptop per Child project in 2005. Addressing education and literacy in the non-developed world, and endorsed by many politicians (including notably, Gordon Brown), it ended in 2014 without coming anywhere near meeting its objectives. Similarly, a Global Hackathon involving Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Microsoft and many others, to ‘solve’ the […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 78 (Winter 2019)

[PDF file]: […] and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.’ Ambition Lord save us from people who just want to be the big I-am. We had Gordon Brown, who wanted to be the Big Yin. Gordon joined Labour and apparently was a socialist. Then he sniffed the wind and realised that he had to […]

They were the less pleasant side of capitalism

Lobster Issue 93 (2026)

[PDF file]: […] of market competition in Britain starting in the 1980s. The success was dramatic and to its credit, ‘New Labour’ under the leadership of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown embraced the new freedoms, tempering their party’s historical Fabian socialist ethos with a fresh emphasis on opportunity. Britain has welcomed foreign investment and takeovers of British […]

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

Lobster Issue 63 (Summer 2012)

[PDF file]: […] had the air of a depressed man, knowing it may be too late to rebalance the UK economy and defeat the forces given freedom by Thatcher, Blair, Brown and successive governors of the Bank of England. Despite a positive reception and widespread reviews the book has not fired up resistance. But it has become […]

The Land Where Nothing Works; How Britain Lost The Plot by A. G. Hopkins

Lobster Issue 93 (2026)

[PDF file]: […] South became an enclave with only weak links to the rest of the country. (p. 199) And so, under the ‘light touch’ financial regulatory regime of Gordon Brown: I discussed this in ‘How Labour embraced the City’ at . 3 3 Irresponsible lending on a global scale culminated in the financial crisis of 2008. […]

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