Why do they do this? In the previous issue I referred to the fictitious comments attributed by Tony Blair to a doctor in Africa. They’ve done it again. In February Blair’s spin doctor in chief, Alastair Campbell, claimed to have saved a man from being beaten by muggers, The Mail on Sunday (23 February) traced … Read more
Neil Cooper I. B. Tauris, London, 1997, £39.50 This is an analysis of the arms business in the UK, chiefly about the MOD’s procurement system. Not a subject I knew much about, I approached the book expecting little. Discovering it had begun as a PhD reduced my expectations even further. In fact it is a … Read more
The collapse of Polly Peck in 1990 remains perhaps the single greatest British corporate mystery of modern times.(1) How did a multi-billion pound international conglomerate, which had risen from East End obscurity to become the exemplar of eighties British Capitalism, collapse within a period of weeks? How did a favoured son of the London Stock … Read more
Malcolm Kennedy believes his telephones, email and post are being interfered with. His attempts to obtain answers have met with brick walls, and his situation has been described as Kafkaesque. Soon his complaint will be one of the first to be heard by the recently established Investigatory Powers Tribunal. Background Last Summer, Lobster drew attention … Read more
The Sewer not the Sewage? David Mills, Berlusconi and New Labour Imagine that Robert Maxwell had become British Prime Minister. A similar situation actually obtains in Italy with the premiership of Silvio Berlusconi. I examine below one strand of Berlusconi’s activities, mainly through his relationship with one of his senior lawyers. Until recently, David McKenzie … Read more
9:11 Revealed. Challenging the facts behind the War on Terror Ian Henshall and Rowland Morgan London: Robinson, 2005; £8.99, p/b A declaration of a kind of interest: one of the authors of this book, Ian Henshall, is the Chair of INK, the Independent News Collective, to which Lobster belongs and whose leaflets Lobster has … Read more
Given a WTO-driven free trade regime in a world without enforceable international law and with large accumulations of capital emerging from the supply of consumer wants (including guns, sex, labour, drugs, untaxed goods and unregulated financial services), the lifting of capital controls by the Reagan-Thatcher generation also meant the globalisation of criminality in all its … Read more
Paul Krugman London: Allen Lane, 2003, h/b, £18.99 I only caught up with this at Christmas. Krugman writes a column for the New York Times and this is a collection of those columns. Krugman is an academic economist at Princeton and saw pretty early that Enron and others similar were just frauds, and that … Read more
Wishing and hoping I met Tony Benn only once, while researching Smear! He’s a lovely man with a big blind spot about the politics of the early 1980s in general and the Militant Tendency in particular. Here’s Benn in the course of an appreciation of Arthur Scargill on his standing down as President of … Read more
SIS is dead – you read it first in Lobster – but the funeral has not been announced. Established in 1909, it will not make its centenary. SIS once offered a global brand operating in a market that had been previously divided along the lines of accepted cartels (market fixing). Its market-share, however, has been … Read more
