The Defence of the Realm

Lobster Issue

[…] while trying to stay within their charter, and resisting the siren calls of ‘conspiracy theorists’. In the early 1970’s MI5 had concluded that the ‘threat’ of the Communist Party had declined; and switched resources to what Peter Wright sneeringly called the ‘far and wide left’ – the Trotskyist fragments. MI5’s lack of interest in […]

Still thinking about Dallas

Lobster Issue 74 (Winter 2017) FREE

[PDF file]: […] Oswald owned a Mannlicher-Carcano; and as recent analysis seems to have confirmed, the photographs of him posing with the rifle and American left newspapers, both Trotskyist and Communist, were authentic (despite his claim that they had been faked).13 In his memoir Chauncey Holt tells us that, in the months before the assassination, the weapons […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 58 (Winter 2009/2010) FREE

[PDF file]: […] Hugh Gaitskell, his predecessor as leader of the Labour Party. It claims that Gaitskell, a pro-American, had been assassinated by the KGB in order to install a communist sympathiser as probable future prime minister. Anatoly Golitsyn, a Soviet agent who had defected to the West, claimed that Wilson had been acting as a KGB […]

Lobster review: Sunday Herald, 17 August 2003

Lobster Issue

A  review of Lobster in the Sunday Herald, 17 August 2003.

[PDF file]: […] Larkin. HE Lobster story begins in Edinburgh in 1948 when Ramsay was born, the eldest child of a food chemist father and housewife mother. Both parents were Communist Party members until the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, so Ramsay grew up in a bookish, lefty atmosphere which encouraged a sort of instinctive hostility […]

Get In: The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer by Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund

Lobster Issue 90 (2025) FREE

[PDF file]: […] another, had been schooled in the brutality of grassroots organising by John Spellar, the ageing warhorse of the old right who made a point of reading the Communist Morning Star to learn of his enemies’ activities, and to celebrate if a hard-left organiser of his acquaintance was on its obituaries page. Margaret McDonagh, Blair’s […]

The Lexit delusion

Lobster Issue 79 (Summer 2020) FREE

[PDF file]: […] the left of the Labour Party in Parliament and the constituencies, the large trade unions (notably the Transport and General Workers and the Engineering Workers) and the Communist Party. Their most articulate spokesperson was Tony Benn, Industry Secretary in Harold Wilson’s Labour government at the time. The case made by Benn and his supporters […]

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