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Lobster Issue

[…] Pursuing this, it is getting into bed with the big tech companies. Lucas Amin and Peter Geoghegan noted: New figures obtained by Democracy for Sale reveal that Labour ministers and senior civil servants met with tech industry executives and lobbyists an average of six times a week during the government’s first six months in […]

Holding Pattern

Lobster Issue 72 (Winter 2016)

[PDF file]: […] much of all this was known to Prince Bandar’s good friend in the Oval Office, and when. Smith’s myths The campaign to elect Owen Smith MP as Labour Party leader has been making claims that do not accord with verifiable facts, but the media are reporting them unquestioningly. Chief among these is the claim […]

Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad by Michela Wrong

Lobster Issue 84 (Winter 2022)

[PDF file]: […] – or perhaps because of – the Kagame regime’s wholly justified reputation for repression and murder. The grim reality is that both the Conservative government and the Labour opposition are very much in bed with the Kagame regime, and have been for many years now. Indeed the next Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in […]

The Clandestine Caucus: a minor update

Lobster Issue 88 (2024)

[PDF file]: […] the spooks in British politics, with an interest in the history of the Tory right triggered by the arrival of Mrs Thatcher. And I was interested in Labour Party history. (I was a member in the 80s and 90s.) I haven’t methodically revisited CC since but relevant odds and ends crop up. The latest […]

The Story of British Propaganda Film by Scott Anthony

Lobster Issue 90 (2025)

[PDF file]: […] – and a Colonial Film Unit that made films about the UK, for showing in the colonies, and films about the colonies, for showing in the UK. Labour invested heavily in this. Predictably, the Tories cut its budget in 1951, only to increase it substantially post-1956. By the 60s, the COI were producing work […]

Mad Mitch’s Tribal Law: Aden and the end of Empire by Aaron Edwards

Lobster Issue 68 (Winter 2014)

[PDF file]: […] – but it was in the blood. His view of most English politicians was highly negative – ‘squeamish’ and ‘old women’ are two characteristic descriptions – especially Labour ministers of course, who ‘with less of a feeling of the “White Man’s Burden” on their shoulders’ (that’s Edwards) were quite happy to begin the ‘scuttle’, […]

South of the border

Lobster Issue 80 (Winter 2020)

[PDF file]: […] sat on his hands and let our current PM make a predictable hash of things. I am distinctly reminded of Tony Blair and his position in the Labour Party – at least during the idyllic, pre-war criminal days. Blair was seen as a soft-right (within Labour) and Stewart espouses many soft-left (for a Conservative) […]

Historical notes on the four freedoms

Lobster Issue 88 (2024)

[PDF file]: […] The point was not lost on Roosevelt and the informal coalition of progressives, Keynesians, socialists, social-democrats (‘liberals’ in US political discourse), communists, left-wing populists, farmers and organised labour which supported his administration. They were committed to a ‘New Deal’ for the American people, a break from the old politics which had generally avoided (outside […]

Keenie Meenie: The British Mercenaries Who Got Away with War Crimes by Phil Miller

Lobster Issue 79 (Summer 2020)

[PDF file]: […] of the path-breakers in helping create this new political world. Let us start with the difficulties he encountered doing his research. In early 1979, under the Callaghan Labour government, John Percival Morton, an elderly British counterinsurgency veteran, was sent to advise the Sri Lankan government on how to suppress Tamil rebels. He was ‘an […]

View from Bridge 87

Lobster Issue

[…] not the researchers steered away from an hypothesis which could only benefit the Republicans. Getting rid of Corbyn As we approach the next general election with the Labour Party safely in the hands of people who are no threat to any of society’s vested interests, the defenestration of the previous leader, Jeremy Corbyn, is […]

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