Newsinger Bryant copy

Lobster Issue

[…] and How to Do It Chris Bryant London: Bloomsbury, 2023, £14.99, h/b John Newsinger Chris Bryant is a public school–educated former Church of England clergyman, now a Labour MP. He is a committed Christian Socialist and champion of gay rights. He is the author of a number of books, including a history of Christian […]

A Difference of Opinion: My Political Journey by Jim Sillars

Lobster Issue 83 (Summer 2022)

[PDF file]: […] party. After his return to Civvy Street in 1960, injury ended his career as a firefighter but did not hinder his entry into Scottish trade union and Labour party activism. He came under the instructive influence of Ayrshire council leader Danny Sim – ‘a miner, a sea-green incorruptible and a man feared by many […]

The miners and the secret state

Lobster Issue 58 (Winter 2009/2010)

[PDF file]: […] irreparably damaged. But for MI5 this ‘secret’ link to the Soviet Union was too useful a tool for use against the left in the UK, particularly the Labour * This appeared in Granville Williams (ed.) Shafted: The Media, the Miners’ Strike and the Aftermath (London: Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom, 2009) 1 Falber […]

What if…

Lobster Issue 66 (Winter 2013)

[PDF file]: […] it works. No, the nation rather comfortably replies, on the whole, we ain’t. It was a victory for consensus politics and the British way, rather than for Labour. But Labour, the natural party of government, did it all right, with a 21-seat majority and another five years. Earlier that year, Margaret Thatcher had told […]

The devil has all the best songs: reflections on the life and times of Simon Dee

Lobster Issue 58 (Winter 2009/2010)

[PDF file]: […] country went Communist.’ This could only have been an allusion to the possibility that the general election that was due in late 1964 would result in a Labour government that Major Smedley and his colleagues regarded as seriously – even dangerously – left-wing. Sir Geoffrey Crowther went from Cambridge where he had been President […]

View from the bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] time, who knows how many were active? Even so, did the other members of the Soviet bloc and the Soviet Union itself really have another 180,00 agents? Labour Together The group which funded Keir Starmer’s run at the leadership of the Labour Party, Labour Together, was discussed in Lobster 88.16 The essential Open Democracy […]

Various: Political life in Britain by Tom Easton

Lobster Issue 60 (Winter 2010)

[PDF file]: How New Labour stopped listening to the voter and why we need a new politics Deborah Mattinson London: Biteback, 2010, £17.99 People, Politics and Pressure Groups: Memoirs of a lobbyist Arthur Butler Hove: Picnic Publishing, £12.99, 2010 Tom Easton Deborah Mattinson is just one of the many early enthusiasts for what became New Labour […]

Keynes, social democracy and the Great Moving Right Show

Lobster Issue 90 (2025)

[PDF file]: […] on the centre-left. This was reflected in successive Liberal Party general election manifestos after 1929 and became the predominant (though not the only) politico-economic discourse in the Labour Party from 1935 until 1997. It went into eclipse during the era of ‘New Labour’ (barring a brief revival in 2008-10) but was rehabilitated during the […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 84 (Winter 2022)

[PDF file]: […] is what the site’s managers wanted. It is thus a long series of striking claims – for example: ‘Giles Raddice was a CIA agent inside the British Labour Movement’ – with no sources. The site managers have also put copy block on the content; so copying it, or part of it, involves complicated work […]

Newton on Keynes

Lobster Issue

[…] on the centre-left. This was reflected in successive Liberal Party general election manifestos after 1929 and became the predominant (though not the only) politico-economic discourse in the Labour Party from 1935 until 1997. It went into eclipse during the era of ‘New Labour’ (barring a brief revival in 2008-10) but was rehabilitated during the […]

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