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

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.

xp
Good grief! That is fucking shameless xo==, not surprising though.

By far the most striking section is on patriotism ... "How dare Cameron’s Conservatives pretend that they speak for Britain. We stand for this country’s greatest traditions: the suffragettes and the trade unions, the Britain of Mary Wollstonecraft, Shelley, Alan Turing and the Beatles"

Corbyn will say that his leadership will be based on three pillars: a new politics, a new economy and the Beatles.

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2015/11/16/uk-france-shooting-britain-syria-idUKKCN0T50KG20151116

Has Cameron specified what he wants to bomb that isn't currently being bombed by Russia, France, the US, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Canada, the Netherlands, Turkey, Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates or Australia?

Is there a secret bit of Syria that only we know about?

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/5/54/Shelleydvd.jpg/250px-Shelleydvd.jpg
" the Britain of Mary Wollstonecraft, Shelley..."
For goodness sake Jez, stfu about The Beatles please!

tell Jeremy Corbyn to fuck off

No

Mind boggling at the gall of Osborne lecturing us that 'the internet has become a vector of crime, espionage, attack and harm' weeks after arselicking the world's most prodigious cyber attackers, the Chinese government, and handing them the British nuclear programme on a platter.

Good to see the press, the BBC and Labour MPs united in condemning the single greatest threat to the lives of and limbs of British citizens, at home and abroad, Jeremy Corbyn.

He could make things easier for himself.

You don't have to be evidently armed to be shot dead here but it probably helps.

It's an odd one as there have been no changes to the law, no obvious changes to policy and no apparent disagreement on the interpretation of the law but still enough room for the press to hang him.

Given the Menezes murder Corbyn's views are perfectly reasonable.

Don't trust the reporting of these meetings or the LOL "sources" that keep saying how shambolic all of it is - the reporting of the Monday night PLP meeting is becoming a platform for plenty of juicy gossip and 'journalism'.

I have seen several reports that JC doesn't really respond with challenges - all of this has to be seen in the context that 90% of the PLP don't think JC should be anywhere near the leadership. Hard to tell whether he wants to engage or whether he thinks its a waste of time or what. But isn't that what the right of the party were doing to their members? I am enjoying this reversal of sorts.

Do you think it would be pandering to the press to say 'yes if the same thing that happened in paris were to happen here a shoot to kill policy would be justified'? Or they would crucify him anyway?

That's the law as it stands and he has said he doesn't disagree with it. There's no situation in which police fire guns that they don't shoot to kill.

Wrong. After the Lee Rigby murder the police shot only to maim and incapacitate

I didn't hear the interview but 'a Labour aide clarified that Corbyn was “committed to what the existing law is"' - so someone else shut the stable door on his behalf.

Wrong. After the Lee Rigby murder the police shot only to maim and incapacitate

Yes, this is a bit more nuanced than i suggested. The Rigby killer didn't have a firearm iirc though.

The police officially shoot to neutralise a threat but they are told to fire repeatedly at the torso when someone has a gun or at the head when someone is suspected of having a bomb. This is why they've repeatedly called "shoot to wound" a fiction.

Haven't heard the interview either but yes it was the aide that gave the 'easier' answer. This is all similar to the nuclear 'debate' with JC being cast as a madman for appearing not to be as hawkish or what have you.

Distracts from austerity, where the Tories are not looking so good.

Not sure how Corbyn's approach to this, i.e. to support the law of the land, is different from, errrrrr, the Prime Minister, the Home Secretary etc. Still any excuse for a bit of Corbyn-bashing.

The levels of hatred displayed towards Corbyn by Mad Dan Hodges, Rental et al are really quite astonishing.

For Rental read Johnny 'Psycho' Rentoul.

The sooner we tune this stuff out and talk about things other than how beastly people are being to Corbyn the better imo.

As far as I can see there is basically no reason for the UK to join in with air strikes other than as a symbolic gesture, one that would doubtless increase the risk of an attack here even further. It's not like ISIS are going to stubbornly resist an onslaught from Russia/France/the US only to crumble as soon as plucky Britain gets involved, although propagating that myth is almost certainly why Cameron wants air strikes in the first place.

Honestly I don't know what I would do in Hollande's situation, and I'm deeply suspicious of anyone who claims to know, with 100% conviction, what should be done in Syria, but Cameron's situation is not Hollande's by a long shot.

The whole business is mysterious. I think Russia is clearly privy to intelligence that the others aren't but idk what France, the US, etc are bombing at this stage that they haven't bombed a dozen times before. It's performative, though - the UK needs to be seen to be doing something.

it's almost as if he thinks there's political capital to be made from the threat or occurrence of terrorist attacks

Increased military action in Syria will see the Tories retain a slight majority in 2020. By which point Corbyn will have established a lunar base occasionally waving forlornly.

the UK needs to be seen to be doing something

Hence an extra billion pounds out of nowhere to fite cyberdoom and a proposed increase of 1,900 security and intelligence staff - suggesting these measures were on hold until a new attack could 'justify' them rather than something that could've been introduced to help prevent said attack.

Or that there is actually a lot more money around anyway and the cuts are being carried out on a whim.

Tom D - Rentoul did apologise for that tweet. Blaming it on the social media pressure cooker.

The UK's chances of being attacked are surely the same whether the UK joins in strikes or not - you could say its bigger if the UK don't join in, as ISIS would perhaps want more countries to attack it, increasing recruitment.

A hogpile of lifestyle journos were talking about how Corbyn's intelligence is somewhat limited, possibly to make themselves feel better/clever for disagreeing with him, or thinking themselves somehow 'realist' because they're considering bombs--->Syria and he is not.

It's very telling that these PLP meetings only started being covered by reporters fairly recently, and not during Blair, Brown or Miliband's tenure.

'Realism' seems to be the latest Conservative Central Office endorsed buzzword.

Some idiot on the news yesterday explaining that the Prime Minister has said last week that there was a half-dozen plots already foiled, and someone else (Osborne?) has said at the start of October that there had been five foiled, so reading between the lines there must have been one foiled in the last month.

need one of these for foiled terror plots

http://simpsonswiki.com/w/images/thumb/c/cb/Royal_King_Trailer_Park.png/250px-Royal_King_Trailer_Park.png

Egregious nonsense in the Economist: http://www.economist.com/blogs/bagehot/2015/11/corbyn-labour-and-paris?fsrc=gp_en%3Ffsrc%3Dscn%2Ftw%2Fte%2Fbl%2Fed%2Fcorbynssensiblesarestartingtopushback

(perhaps, in many cases, as a protest rather than a positive endorsement)

LOL

Stop the War can gtf tho

the patrician tones of the anonymous author make that post particularly infuriating