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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

View from 93

Lobster Issue

[…] in their faces in 2008 (he died in 2005) and we can’t know if could have risen further. As for Jeremy Corbyn, by becoming leader of the Labour Party he achieved far more than anyone (including himself) ever thought he would. Of course there is pressure on British politicians to support Israel but this […]

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 […]

View from

Lobster Issue

[…] 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 from

Lobster Issue

[…] 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 from

Lobster Issue

[…] 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. […]

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