The Blairs and their Court

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Lobster Issue 50 (Winter 2005/6)

[…] to Beckett and Hencke, in the late 1980s Nigel Lawson could never understand why Tony Blair was a member of the Labour Party rather than of the Conservative Party. This question subsequently occurred to a growing number of Labour Party members and the answer they came up with saw tens of thousands of them […]

Coach into pumpkin: some problems with Paget

Lobster Issue 54 (Winter 2007/8)

[…] International Red Cross campaign against landmines. What would normally have been a strictly humanitarian gesture was given a political dimension by the fact that John Major’s rapidly-deflating Conservative government had stalled repeatedly on banning landmines, whereas Labour was promising a foreign policy with ‘an ethical dimension’. Declassified US diplomatic cables record that ‘Government officials […]

Miscellaneous: Cold war. Disinformation. Elite. Unclassified. G.K. Young, Unison

Lobster Issue 24 (December 1992)

[…] never joined any of the groups Larry O’Hara deals with but has attended their meetings, reads their publications, once nearly joined, and describes himself as a Libertarian Conservative Nationalist, (sic!) I read his article with interested. I noticed a few errors. On page 15 he describes Lesley Wooler as a member of the 62 […]

Perfidious Albion: an end to deceit

Lobster Issue 46 (Winter 2003)

[…] pay to guarantee assured outcomes to his backers: active members, after all, can rock the boat carrying the big donor cheques which keep New Labour afloat. The Conservative party is no better placed and it is difficult to see how they would want to change the direction of foreign policy anyway. Whatever Hutton concludes, […]

Brian Crozier, the Pinay Circle and James Goldsmith

Lobster Issue 17 (1988)

[…] 37, 1982, an article called ‘Victory for Strauss’. The Langemann papers 8th November 1979 Protected source contributions to state security. Personal for the state minister only”The militant conservative London publicist, Brian Crozier, Director of the famous Institute for the Study of Conflict up to September 1979, has been working with his diverse circle of […]

Electronic Privacy and the Encryption Debate

Lobster Issue 37 (Summer 1999)

[…] a number of consultation papers and statements covering encryption and electronic commerce in recent years, the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) taking the lead role.(9) Both Conservative and Labour governments, in their 1997 and 1998 papers, proposed some form of key escrow system, in which a user’s private encryption key is held by […]

At Her Majesty’s Secret Service: The Chiefs of Britain’s Intelligence Agency, MI6

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Lobster Issue 53 (Summer 2007)

[…] made public.’ You can’t buy an endorsement better than that, thanks very much. And if ‘the Establishment’ was cross with ‘West’ it didn’t stop him becoming a Conservative MP; and under Margaret Thatcher, who hated dishers of dirt and secrets. So, for me, ‘West’ has always been a puzzle: a conservative (and Conservative) historian […]

Terrorism and Intelligence in Australia

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Lobster Issue 57 (Summer 2009)

[…] The author’s account also shows a Labour Party dimly aware of all this, making the occasional half-hearted stab at reining in ASIO, which the agency and its conservative allies easily outflanked or overturned. Cain’s account has the familiar virtues and the faults of academic writing on these subjects. On the plus side it is […]

Historical Notes: Wilson and sterling in 1964

Lobster Issue 49 (Summer 2005)

[…] saga certainly played its part in creating the impression that Labour could not be trusted to run the economy competently, a view frequently promoted thereafter by the Conservative Party and then, in the 1990s, by ‘new’ Labour. The criticisms from the right were reinforced from the left by arguments that Wilson, his Chancellor Jim […]

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