Psychoactive Substances: Rolling UK Politics in The Neo-Con Era

ian Duncan smith claimed he attended a university in Italy when in fact he'd taken a week of Italian classes at an unconnected language school in the same city iirc.

main hilarious thing about ian duncan smith is that his name is ian smith and he clearly insists on the use of his middle name at all times because it makes him sound posher, like he had a double barreled surname.

this person is taking the piss, surely

It's Angela Epstein, so, no.

(x-post)

And maybe to distance himself from the other, even worse, Ian Smith.

I think his surname is actually 'Duncan Smith'? his father was this bloke:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._G._G._Duncan_Smith

Hyphenate or gtfo, frankly.

reading IDS's wikipedia page, I had completely forgotten that he published a novel within weeks of being ousted as tory leader

Did anyone read it? (here or in general)

no

now very tempted.

One for ILB.

that telegraph article is full of mistakes and errors…and then that final poll! either epstein is taking the piss or the subeditors are

Possibly the latter, definitely not the former.

The Telegraph is barely even a newspaper any more.

PMs should either: have 12 As at A-level or be the type of person that can't wait to get out there in the Labour Party real world.

IDS' novel has never been published in paperback, so might be hard to find, I'll have a look for it in the British Library catalogue later... not promising I'll read it though!

there's an extract towards the bottom of this guardian article:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/nov/05/fiction.conservatives

http://dl.book4you.org/foreignfiction/767000/0923776b0576ed9e7f7dace9b8b11197.txt/_as/[Smith_Iain_Duncan]_The_Devil's_Tune(Bokos-Z1).txt

You can read his magnum opus at this TXT link, he would require some improvement to get to the level of literary geniuses like say Jeffrey Archer or Morrissey.

you have c+p the link, clicking it wont work

are there any sex scenes in it

enh, not exactly a bonkbuster

Inside, it was dark, save for the television, which flickered in the corner, the volume turned down. Laura pressed herself back against the door as she shut it, breathing hard. As her eyes got used to the light, she saw John sprawled out on the armchair, sound asleep. She walked closer to him. She bent down and smiled, her face just above him. His eyes opened, then she felt a hand reach up into her hair and pull her gently forward. With adrenalin still pumping from the incident in the bar, she lowered herself onto him. His kiss was
passionate and hard.

oooo, ids presidential fan-fiction!

For many, President Carson was considered the most formidable politician of his generation. An even better communicator than President Reagan, he had come from behind to win the Democratic nomination and then the election, two and a half years before. In doing so, he had ended a fallow period for the Democratic party. He had torn it from its obsession with the old principles of redistribution and had broadened its appeal. Now he was seen as a common-sense man, the 'guy next door'. But he had used this image ruthlessly in his dealings with the Republican-controlled Congress. Power was President Carson's driving ethos. He had always believed that simply by his being there, things would be better as long as the public liked it, that was enough. And he had quite brilliantly positioned the Republican-dominated Congress as too ideological when it imposed a new budget on him. By ersuading the public that he had made the best of it, he had positioned himself as the 'anti-politician' defending them against Washington politicians. He fostered the
appearance of an outsider, but he knew how to play the political game with the best of them. The deals, the federal contracts, they were what he was brilliant at.

Now he was seen as a common-sense man, the 'guy next door'.

maybe even... a quiet man?

This definitely deserves its own thread.

He watched her, his head resting
gently on the back of his chair, his hands folded around the sides of
his cup. Her sensuous beauty always held him. Her Madonna eyelids
made her look as though she'd just woken up, particularly as they were
framed by thick black hair falling across her shoulders; she was as
captivating to him in the morning as last thing at night. Thirty years
younger than him, she was for Acquilan, at one and the same time, a
fine work of art and an exacting companion who stimulated all his
senses. He laughed gently and she smiled.

I think Acquilan is the bad guy, having skimmed this

Good god

next level from the BBC
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CSboWjvWsAAzvP4.png

the actual story, reported on the guardian
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CSboWkKWcAAIvhq.png

the DUP, still a class act

you know youre backward when your statelet has a more bigoted marriage policy than the republic of ireland

do find it sort of funny that it's the party of the former gunmen that have the best lgbt policies in ireland

I know right

people outside NI think that the abortion laws are almost uselessly strict in NI because something something Catholics, but no, it's mainly because the DUP are a bunch of godbothering woman-hating loons iirc

If there is a hell it will definitely contain Ian Paisley jr and Ian Duncan Smith "In 2010, the Catholic magazine The Tablet named him (IDS) as one of Britain's most influential Catholics".

Well Played

The fear of being purged is keeping many Labour people quiet

Not quiet enough unfortunately.

Good to see Labour protests to the IP Bill are being documented here *lol*

lo; @ grainy photo of Seumas Milne doing 'clockwork orange' type stare

... which looks like it was taken in a prison.

capitalism is a prison iirc

This is fairly damning.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/11/david-cameron-letter-cuts-oxfordshire

Not too surprising.

That's a great piece.

His constituency falls within that county council, and presumably Oxfordshire's Tory councillors all gave enthusiastic assent to the government's economic programme in May. It's classic 'one rule for me, one rule for everyone else' - we'll be seeing that a lot when ministers react furiously to cuts to their own departmental budgets.

I'd dispute whether he's really that ignorant of how deep his own cuts go, he just doesn't want to look like he's shitting on services in his own constituency.

yeah it does have a vibe of "pull your socks up" type admonishment to pin blame on the councils themselves. like if they were more canny savers everything would be grand. which prob works in people's minds. i mean i dunno if councils have a good image generally because i live in tower hamlets, but i doubt it.

I imagine he only wrote the letter in the first place because of a question in the Commons or an irate and, more importantly, vocal constituent, got to be seen to do the right thing even when you don't give a fuck. What's with the Guardian, this is like proper journalism, there's articles comparing Jeremy Corbyn to Mark E. Smith to publish.

wonder how austerity measures at council level are affecting contracts with private sector partners. you'd imagine that more stuff would be outsourced up to a point and then some of those contracts would start to get chopped away as service levels were reduced. fuck services for children and the elderly, maybe it's once there's more potholes than road *and* the cheques stop rolling in to clancy docwra, that's when cameron will start hearing noises from the sorts of people he pays any attention to

It reminds me oddly of a management technique I encountered first about ten years ago, in the context of a small financial services company that had been bought out by a large financial services conglomerate.

My boss had had the fear of god put up her by this... team-building retreat thing she was forced to go on when the company was bought out. They had forced her and her team to do bean-counting exercise, and the way that they "motivated" them was that if they failed at the bean-counting exercise the first time, they would be forced to do it again, but with one fewer team member, and less resources. And this had motivated her to work 60 hour weeks and drive her staff to do the same, with this lecture of "if you think this is hard, it'll be even harder with less staff and less money, which is what will happen if we don't perform!!!!"

And she honestly had bought the logic that this was the way to motivate people.

I just looked at her like "that is completely non-logical. The way to solve the kinds of issues *we* face, is to have spare capacity to take up the slack during extremely busy periods." I could not work out the logic of how accomplishing a task with fewer people and fewer resources was supposed to do anything except demoralise what staff there were left. But this was what the overlords demanded.

Ironically, the overlords, in their process of asset-stripping and "cost-savings" and "trimming the fat" were one of the financial entities that were absolutely *fucked* by the financial crisis, and had to be bailed out by the government and essentially nationalised. (The company I had been "fat-trimmed" from, for having a bad attitude, was re-purchased by its founder for pennies on the pound.) But their entire model clearly did not work, and had to be bailed out - it is by its design only going to work if there is a government safety net to bail them out when it becomes unsustainable below a certain point. And yet it's people who have clearly been to this school of unsustainable management who have been put in charge of the actual government safety net?

But, y'know, this is an actual school of management. Which people are taught at expensive staff retreats. And they continue to apply even in the face of evidence that it just doesn't work.

About 169,000 results for Cameron "more with less"

Blairites, the reasonable wing of the Labour Party.

I'd never noticed Cameron's little pointed peg teeth until that Downing Street press conference today.