Back to the future (again)

Lobster Issue 75 (Summer 2018)

[PDF file]: […] equivalent of Janis Joplin but never enjoyed comparable success. 5 Peter Hain had, originally, been a very active (and visible) campaigner for the Liberal Party but joined Labour in 1977. 6 Jenner organized a set of festivals in Hyde Park in the late ‘60s and initially managed The Pink Floyd. He also thought Strummer […]

The View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] broke up as it lost state support in the era of detente in the 1970s. In the context of a counter-movement against detente, former intelligence officers and labour activists attempted to develop an epistemic community around a theory of intelligence that would provide a basis for renewed state support for political warfare. This theory […]

Bullingdon Club Britain: The Ransacking of a Nation by Sam Bright

Lobster Issue 87 (2023)

[PDF file]: […] the rich, rather than a mass participation event. In the early 1950s, three million people were Conservative Party members, while more than a million belonged to the Labour Party. Now, the two main parties can count barely 600,000 members on their books combined. (p. 139) Once again, he seems to have a somewhat rosy […]

The Starmer Project: A Journey to the Right, by Oliver Eagleton

Lobster Issue 84 (Winter 2022)

[PDF file]: […] Starmer Project: A Journey to the Right Oliver Eagleton London: Verso, 2022, £12.99, p/b John Booth First impressions can mislead, but the more I discovered here about Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer the more I became convinced that my hunches based on personal glimpses of him were correct. I saw him initially when as […]

View from the bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] voice pointing out that his apparent aim of rebuilding the US manufacturing economy behind tariff walls is not a million miles from the central idea in the Labour Left’s Alternative Economic Strategy of the 1980s.1 In the USA domestic manufacturing is around 10% of the economy. In the UK around 9%. Both countries went […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] our own; we do not see what we are not already predisposed to see.’ 36 The wrong kind of member The EHRC report on anti-semitism in the Labour Party found . . . not very much;37 what they did find hinged on debatable definitions of anti-semitism; and most of it was the responsibility of […]

View from the bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] force. These underworld members were loyal to the right-wing cause and, importantly, should senior figures see an outright coup d’état necessary in the event of a militant Labour win at election, they were well outside of government control. Which is what Peter Sanderson described in Lobster 81. In that piece, I quoted a section […]

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

Lobster Issue 82 (Winter 2021)

[PDF file]: […] ‘forensic’ Leader of the Opposition with an arsenal of ammunition that Rumpole of the Bailey could only dream of after his third bottle at Pomeroys. Here’s the Labour leader’s starter for 10. ‘Has the Prime Minister, known for his voracious appetite for new experiences, yet dipped into the diaries of the former Member for […]

View from the bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] force. These underworld members were loyal to the right-wing cause and, importantly, should senior figures see an outright coup d’état necessary in the even of a militant Labour win at election, they were well outside of government control. Which is what Peter Sanderson described in Lobster 81. In that piece I quoted a section […]

View from the bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] force. These underworld members were loyal to the right-wing cause and, importantly, should senior figures see an outright coup d’état necessary in the even of a militant Labour win at election, they were well outside of government control. Which is what Peter Sanderson described in Lobster 81. In that piece I quoted a section […]

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