The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 57 (Summer 2009)

[…] possible future prime minister. Scott-Smith has more information on the Net. His ‘Searching for the Successor Generation: Public Diplomacy, the US Embassy’s International Visitor Program and the Labour Party in the 1980s’(1) shows how the US cultivated the leaders of NuLab. ‘This article looks at the influence of US public diplomacy in the UK, […]

Operation Brogue

Lobster Issue 4 (1984)

In the mainland UK press the bugging of a house used by Seamus Mallon, deputy leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party, was presented as (merely) another mysterious and rather inept example of ‘dirty tricks’ in Irish politics. (See eg Guardian 20th February 1984) A brief story appeared and then vanished again. But […]

Faking it

Lobster Issue 44 (Winter 2002/3)

[…] reported academic research showing that the UK’s apparently low unemployment rate is achieved by having 2 million people on the long-term sick list. Welfare fraud figures ‘ Labour ministers have persistently exaggerated welfare fraud by a minority of claimants in an attempt to distract attention from difficult questions about improving economic security for the […]

Sources

Lobster Issue 32 (December 1996)

[…] about the post-war Tory Party and its links with the secret state – in this case, almost exclusively MI5 – and various disinformation and smear campaigns against Labour Party politicians and union leaders. Some of this will be familiar to anyone who has read Smear!, say, but there is quite a bit of information […]

Notes From the Underground: British Fascism 1974-92

Lobster Issue 23 (1992)

[…] identified as part of the capitalist segment of the conspiracy leading to an ‘authoritarian world government’. (5) Far from contemplating a role in the overthrow of the Labour government, in 1974 the NF had only just been rebuffed by the Monday Club and seen the break-down of ‘the bridge’ between the racists in the […]

John Maynard Keynes and the Anglo-American Special Relationship: a Reinterpretation

Lobster Issue 36 (Winter 1998/9)

[…] economic imperialism in order to achieve trade surpluses. The post-1919 system had generated deflation, had wrecked efforts to sustain international cooperation such as those of the 1929-31 Labour Government in Britain and had prevented the full exploitation of the wealth-creating potential afforded by technological progress. This was why Keynes argued that it was ‘ideas, […]

American Friends: the Anti-CND Groups

Lobster Issue 3 (1984)

[…] (CPS) was formed in the autumn of 1981, its main activists being Dr. Julian Lewis, its ‘Research Director’, a Conservative who spent a brief time in the Labour Party defending Reg. Prentice in his dispute with the Newham Northeast Constituency; Edward Leigh M.P. (3), now M.P. for Gainsborough, who was principal correspondence secretary for […]

The getting elected project

Book review
Lobster Issue 56 (Winter 2008/9)

[…] of this and bought it for about $30 and it isn’t worth the money. This is a detailed account of some of the intellectual processes behind ‘New Labour’, focusing on IPPR and Demos in particular. The author has read the documents, articles and pamphlets produced by the little group of intellectuals who paved the […]

New Labour, new fascism?

Lobster Issue 38 (Winter 1999)

[…] indeed, even the Mosley of the 1930 Manifesto or the New party. The majority of the Blair quotes date from after 1990; approximately half since he became Labour leader. I have left each quote unidentified except by a number. The reader may thus speculate on who said or wrote what. (Readers seeking clues should […]

Economic Fundamentalism: a Laboratory Experiment

Book cover
Lobster Issue 31 (June 1996)

[…] them.(1) In New Zealand, a bunch of true believers imposed this catastrophic nonsense on their own country. This was allowed to happen because the politicians in the Labour government, which let this process begin, didn’t know enough about economics (as was true in the UK at the same time); because the opposition to these […]

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