The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney and the Crisis of British Democracy

Lobster Issue 92 (2026)

[PDF file]: […] Unsurprisingly, it has not been reviewed in the mainstream media.1 So be it. In these tumultuous times, who is interested in the story of how the current Labour leader was propelled into office? More people I suspect are now more interested in how soon he will be propelled out of office. Having said that, […]

Beyond Business by John Browne

Lobster Issue 62 (Winter 2011)

[PDF file]: […] and Management Studies expanding (nearly one in four US students studies Business or Management subjects).1 It is worth remembering that the Review was set up by New Labour with the personnel appointed to produce exactly that outcome. There was no student representation on the panel (something the LibDems actually condemned at the time – […]

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 […]

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

[…] 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

[…] 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 […]

Tittle-tattle

Lobster Issue 60 (Winter 2010)

[PDF file]: […] in Israel. (Lord Reid, as well as being a leading advocate of the Iraq invasion and toughness in the ‘war on terror’, is a longstanding member of Labour Friends of Israel.) Then turn to The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein and read this about Israel’s economic trajectory in the past five years: ‘Much of […]

Off Message, and, Standing for Something

Lobster Issue 63 (Summer 2012)

[PDF file]: […] per cent of the British people believe that Blair should be tried as a war criminal. I am one of that number’. Obviously the memoirs of any Labour MP with such admirable views are worth a look and Bob Marshall-Andrews’ extremely witty, indeed laugh-out-loud volume, Off Message, does not disappoint. He recalls the heady […]

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