The View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue 61 (Summer 2011) FREE
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[PDF file]: […] the Guardian (19 March 2011), ‘Thatcher papers reveal how she stoked rightwing rebellion in war against “wets”’, notes that Thatcher’s private secretary, Ian Gow MP, met with Labour MP Neville Sandelson, six months before Sandelson joined the SDP when it went public. Gow’s report includes this paragraph: ‘Sandelson says that his remaining political purpose […]

View from Bridge copy

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[…] in 1977 but had been forgotten. See . 4 1 lose. They would not defeat the British state.5 This was clear to the rest of the British labour movement’s leaders and, in part, explains the reluctant support for the NUM by the TUC, most individual member unions and the Labour Party. The Ridley Plan […]

Climbing the Bookshelves

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[…] could possibly quibble with that reasonable-sounding voice when the Foreign Secretary appears barely old enough to vote? But then I read Climbing the Bookshelves by the former Labour Cabinet minister who helped launch the short-lived SDP in 1981. Sure enough the wise words I’d heard on the BBC were there. But so was her […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 58 (Winter 2009/2010) FREE

[PDF file]: […] Wilson. The Times sections are italicised A KGB plot One conjecture connects Harold Wilson to the sudden death of Hugh Gaitskell, his predecessor as leader of the Labour Party. It claims that Gaitskell, a pro-American, had been assassinated by the KGB in order to install a communist sympathiser as probable future prime minister. Anatoly […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 91 (2025) FREE
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[PDF file]: […] these paragraphs: Excessively high interest rates maintained by the Bank of England following independence in 1997 were blamed, largely accurately, for further waves of deindustrialisation under New Labour. The pound was held at a value that made manufacturing exports uncompetitive: 1.5 million manufacturing jobs went, largely ignored at the time, between 1997 and 2009. […]

View ffrom Bridge 89

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[…] rather than dictating to them. Margaret Thatcher sought to drag Britain out of its stupor by setting loose our natural entrepreneurialism. Tony Blair reimagined a stale, outdated Labour Party into one that could seize the optimism of the late 90s. A century ago, Clement Attlee wrote that Labour must be a party of duty […]

The view from the bridge

Lobster Issue 76 (Winter 2018) FREE
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[PDF file]: […] his book on the financial crises of the last decade,7 Adam Tooze notes on pp. 191/2: ‘Less charitably it might be said that since the 1990s, New Labour, like the Democrats in the United States, had entered into an enthusiastic partnership with the City of London.8 It was, therefore, no coincidence that it was […]

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[…] 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. […]

View from the Bridge 89

Lobster Issue

[…] rather than dictating to them. Margaret Thatcher sought to drag Britain out of its stupor by setting loose our natural entrepreneurialism. Tony Blair reimagined a stale, outdated Labour Party into one that could seize the optimism of the late 90s. A century ago, Clement Attlee wrote that Labour must be a party of duty […]

Tittle-tattle

Lobster Issue 65 (Summer 2013) FREE

[PDF file]: […] 1987, Jordan and Aaronovitch crossed the Thames with him, leaving their old friend Peter Mandelson, now Lord Mandelson of Foy and Hartlepool, in south London as the Labour Party’s director of communications. Aaronovitch, after executive positions at the BBC, left to become a columnist in turn for The Independent, The Guardian and now The […]

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