Historical Notes

Lobster Issue 86 (2023)

[PDF file]: […] (as in the coal industry) or left to market forces. This was a political as much as an economic project, intended to weaken the power of organised labour and strengthen the forces of capital, especially financial and commercial capital, through policies which facilitated the collapse of the material foundations of post-war British social democracy. […]

Book reviews

Lobster Issue

[…] Brown? How the dream job turned sour Edited by Colin Hughes London: The Guardian, 2010, £8.99 The End of the Party: The Rise and Fall of New Labour Andrew Rawnsley London: Penguin/Viking, 2010, £25.00 Ghost Dancers David John Douglass Hastings: Christie Books, 2010, £12.95 The Silent State: Secrets, Surveillance and the Myth of British […]

View from

Lobster Issue

[…] testimonies, opinion polls showing public disgust. My own December 2019 report – “The Jew who laughed last at Corbyn” – followed an Orthodox candidate who beat the Labour leader in his own district and embodied the backlash. The aim was ruthless and explicit: never let voters forget the word antisemitism.6 The ‘London playbook’ indeed. […]

1976 and all that: the IMF incident

Lobster Issue 89 (2024)

[PDF file]: […] 40 years and is thus one of the architects of the disastrous mess the UK is in. In his column of 17 April, ‘Truss’s excuse sounds like Labour in 1976’,1 he considered Liz Truss’s claims that her economic policies were undermined by unelected officials, notably in the Office for Budget Responsibility. He commented: ‘Anyone […]

finklestein 1976

Lobster Issue

[…] 40 years and is thus one of the architects of the disastrous mess the UK is in. In his column of 17 April, ‘Truss’s excuse sounds like Labour in 1976’,1 he considered Liz Truss’s claims that her economic policies were undermined by unelected officials, notably in the Office for Budget Responsibility. He commented: ‘Anyone […]

Historical Notes on British complicity in the Gaza genocide

Lobster Issue 92 (2026)

[PDF file]: […] that over half the population felt that the Israeli response to the events of 7 October 2023 had gone too far.8 All the same, both the current Labour administration and its Conservative predecessor have generally supported the Israeli Government, albeit tempering this from time to time with statements highly critical of its conduct.9 Following […]

A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s by Alwyn W. Turner

Lobster Issue 66 (Winter 2013)

[PDF file]: […] Harold Macmillan, yet he made less impression than any of those figures even at the time.’ A fair point, although his elevation to the premiership certainly had Labour rattled, rightly as it turned out on election night two years later. ‘The Conservatives have found their Attlee,’ said Lord (Douglas) Jay at the time in […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] to me and may explain why ‘fund manager’ Jeremy Hosking is preparing to spend getting on for a £1 million of his money trying to unseat pro-Remain Labour MPs in the election, to prevent ‘backsliding on Brexit’. Hosking said ‘that new Tory MPs from traditionally Labour-held seats would help safeguard a “full, national 5 […]

The View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] out of print’. Secondhand copies can be found on AbeBooks, Thriftbooks and eBay 25 26 or 27 9 money and high-level contacts. Had we access to internal Labour Party emails, I’m sure a similarly intricate picture could be produced – though hopefully there would be no use of fake social media accounts. Of the […]

Livingstone, Zionism and the Nazis

Lobster Issue 71 (Summer 2016)

[PDF file]: […] with which to beat the Left, he played into the hands of those eager to inflict damage by even the most outrageous smears. With the Blairites, the Labour Friends of Israel – urged on by the Israeli Embassy, where the appalling Mark Regev1 is ambassador – and more or less the entire British media […]

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