The Conversation

Lobster Issue 86 (2023)

[PDF file]: The Conversation Colin Challen It was a word salad of mind-numbing banality, replete with boilerplate platitudes (“national renewal for a new national purpose”), management-speak gibberish (“delivery-focused crosscutting mission boards”) and meaningless drivel (a more “empowering, catalytic” government). These are not the words of an Opposition leader connecting cleverly with the British people and on his […]

Knightley

Lobster Issue

[…] Cold War there have been occasions when the intelligence services, the CIA and SIS for example, actually did provide intelligence of substance. The first that springs to mind was the Cuban missile William Blum’s The CIA: a forgotten history, Zed Books, 1986, illustrates this was well as any single volume can. There has been […]

The Gloucester Horror

Lobster Issue 70 (Winter 2015)

[PDF file]: […] at Halfpenny Green Airfield, Staffordshire. Thirty seconds after takeoff, witnesses saw the prince’s plane ‘drop out of the sky’ and explode on 8 It is to my mind plausible that the disease itself is the actual origin and ‘calling card’ of European royal houses (royals being jocularly known in Britain as having ‘blue blood’), […]

Gordon Brown: in the country of the blind…

Lobster Issue 60 (Winter 2010)

[PDF file]: […] (George Robertson was selected and elected instead) and also declined Leith when a last minute vacancy arose in February 1979 (he was unable to make up his mind). The seat went instead to Ron Brown.9 With hindsight these were clearly significant miscalculations. Although Callaghan duly took Labour down to an arguably unnecessary defeat by […]

Collapse of stout party: Eden, Suez and America

Lobster Issue 74 (Winter 2017)

[PDF file]: […] behest of the US and their local supporters? Have there been others? The general election of 1970 that resulted in a surprise Wilson defeat inevitably comes to mind. The US – and many within the UK’s intelligence and military – wanted Wilson out in 1970. The election that year was characterised by an extensive […]

A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s by Alwyn W. Turner

Lobster Issue 66 (Winter 2013)

[PDF file]: […] game to remember victims of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan in March 2011. The state ideology and the folk religion sometimes overlapped subconsciously in the public mind, as in this splendid vignette from Mr Turner from shortly after the 1997 election : ‘Giles Radice was surprised to be visited at his constituency surgery […]

Books on New Labour

Lobster Issue 59 (Summer 2010)

[PDF file]: […] assembled on his premiership records a fall from grace summed up by its title. ‘The demure public image was the front of a woman with a steely mind who was fiercely protective of her husband and family. She formed a strong, and to some at No 10 surprising, alliance with Damian McBride and Charlie […]

Tittle-tattle

Lobster Issue 60 (Winter 2010)

[PDF file]: […] lot of research and was about to produce a report on how to rein in the City and support the domestic manufacturing economy, when Kinnock changed his mind in 1988, took the first steps towards accepting that there was no alternative to the established City-dominated economic system, and ignored the committee’s work. With the […]

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