Everybody now loves widgets!

Lobster Issue 63 (Summer 2012)

[PDF file]: […] protectionism. I have no interest in going back to those days.3 What I want to do, however, is to ensure the British Government supports British manufacturing….The next Labour government will put British design, British invention, British manufacturing at the heart of our economic policy. When I talk about how we need to encourage productive […]

Falling Down: The Conservative Party and the Decline of Tory Britain by Phil Burton-Cartledge

Lobster Issue 84 (Winter 2022)

[PDF file]: […] Election. It returned to office in 2010 as senior partner in the Conservative-Liberal Democrat administration and since 2015 has governed alone. It won a thumping victory over Labour in 2019, a return of 365 MPs on 43.6 per cent of the popular vote providing it with a handsome Parliamentary majority of 80 seats over […]

South of the Border (updated 4 Aug 2022)

Lobster Issue 84 (Winter 2022)

[PDF file]: […] year’s Bilderberg meeting.1 The two names that stood out for me were those of Tom Tugendhat and David Lammy – respectively leading MPs for the Conservatives and Labour. It is nice to see that a blessing from Bilderberg is still an advantage if you are desirous of your party’s leadership. I offer my sincerest […]

The View from the Bridge

Lobster Issue

[…] 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 […]

Climbing the Bookshelves by Shirley Williams

Lobster Issue 58 (Winter 2009/2010)

[PDF file]: […] 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 […]

Climbing the Bookshelves

Lobster Issue

[…] 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 93 (2026)

[PDF file]: […] power was centralised, economic power privatised, large parts of the country deindustrialised, and they still haven’t recovered. The Telegraph’s response was predictable, of course: look at the Labour economic disaster in the 1970s, it said; inflation, over–mighty trade unions, IMF loan, the Winter of Discontent. And then Maggie came along and saved us. Thus […]

Shirley Williams

Lobster Issue

[…] 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)

[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 […]

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