DEM not gonna CON dis NATION: Rolling UK politics in the short-lived post-Murdoch era

It's actually more genetic than appropriate apparently.

Yes, I think I remember the fact that he had a Japanese grandparent being wheeled out as evidence that the Tories' immigration policy couldn't possibly be racist at some point during his leadership.

mustn't...do...General Tojo joke

during his leadership.

Always worth remembering that this numpty was once leader of the Conservative Party

"Never underestimate the determination of a numpty"

Bruce Anderson? I thought that cunt was discredited years ago.

A devout Christian

When was the last time the UK cabinet has two former party leaders in it? Is it unprecedented?
(I guess there are four current or former party leaders in the cabinet if you include Clegg).

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2011/apr/08/jobcentres-benefits-sanctions-targets

I know Douglas-Hume was foreign secretary under Heath, but I can't think of many more.

i'd like to make it clear that it would in no way benefit the nation, nor would it change coalition government policy, and it would be immoral, senseless and illegal for somebody to kick the living shit out of Iain Duncan Smith

Do disabled and EFL claimants have some kind of redress under equalities legislation for when Jobcentre advisers refer to them as 'easy meat'?

i think the short answer is "no", suzy, unless they could demonstrate that they had been discriminated against

Shoulda gone 'Incognito'

http://www.computerweekly.com/blogs/public-sector/2013/11/conservatives-erase-internet-h.html#.UoNkpfI506Y.facebook

One employee claimed the practice had been going on at his office since they joined in July 2009.

(Re: the benefits story) And before that too.

(That story is over two years old btw, so imagine what it's like now)

That Computer Weekly story has gone national now, good work them.

Can't believe the Tories thought this wouldn't backfire on them.

A spokesman said he had referred the matter to a "website guy", who was out of the office.

A+

Conservatives purge old speeches from online archives

I just can't wait to see them try and slime their way through it.
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/11/pre-election-pledges-tories-are-trying-wipe-internet
Nail. Coffin. Call a fucking election or stand down.

i 100% despise these guys and i wouldn't be surprised to the learn it was done for nefarious purposes, but this (removing old stuff from your own website and propagating those changes to search engines using robots.txt so search engines are not full of dead links) is also a totally normal and routine thing for any organization to do, i'm sure the other parties do it, and the computer weekly angle on it is totally febrile and beneath them.

i mean it raises the possibility that political parties should be held to different standards of data archival on the web than they currently are, and that's a good question, but

Computer Weekly said the effect of the changes was "as alarming as sending Men in Black to strip history books from a public library and burn them in the car park".

is just straight up insane.

Can't believe the Tories thought this wouldn't backfire on them.

― Matt DC, Wednesday, November 13, 2013 10:06 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

precisely. kind of thing they would have done more cleverly if they really were thinking book burning. it's just how big websites work.

Maybe common practice for corporations but this is a political party who just happen to be in power at the moment.

no political party has a legal obligation to abide by its election promises, much less to keep them archived. caek seems otm here - let me know if the coalition is deleting government documents or parliamentary records etc

is the robots.txt thing common practice?

yes, it's how the web works, but full marks to computer weekly for making it sound evil per se

http://www.bbc.co.uk/robots.txt
http://www.computerweekly.com/robots.txt

etc. etc.

cool, I didn't actually know that most websites use robots.txt, since so many of them are findable via web.archive.org

you use it to control which pages are findable, generally - though you can make the whole thing unfindable (fsvo 'unfindable'. search engine bots do not actually have to obey the commands of your robots.txt). how i remember the noindex nofollows of my youth.

yeah. not only does robots.txt have absolutely no effect on what can be seen by people: it's can be ignored by the crawlers too. book burning!

no political party has a legal obligation to abide by its election promises

true.

but deleting them is like a kid in a room with their hands over their eyes, thinking they're invisible.

Story has been barely reported and pretty much forgotten already it seems

Really? Have the newspapers not gone for a tale of a big organisation deleting massive amounts of embarrassing data off their internal systems?

# hi robots. you look nice today.
User-agent: *
Disallow:

:)

from http://ilxor.com/robots.txt

i 100% despise these guys and i wouldn't be surprised to the learn it was done for nefarious purposes, but this (removing old stuff from your own website and propagating those changes to search engines using robots.txt so search engines are not full of dead links) is also a totally normal and routine thing for any organization to do

Trimming dead links is good but making a link dead when it contains stuff that should arguably be on public record is nagl and not necessary. "Where are your speeches and press releases from before 2010 that used to be online" "oh we archived them to save space" - bullshit. There may be no legal obligation to keep this stuff but I can't see any reason for removing it other than revisionism.

i'm sure revisionism is part of the reason, it's just not "scandalous" in the literal sense so much as the usual cynical beige we expect from career pols

When you've already been on television and in every national newspaper saying these things it's impossible to think you could change history by adding them to your 'disallow' list. Also the stuff is still there, isn't it? It just isn't being indexed (or did I miss the bit were they actually deleted the content?).

It's possible they were thinking "when people search for our policy on X we want them to find the most recent statements rather than the (completely contradictory) things we said years ago" - which is still shady but kind of makes sense and isn't really the same as deleting your promises from the Internet.

Maybe if we get more scandalised about the usual cynical beige (bilge? Nah I like it) it will become less usual. Well a man can dream.

Labour have just set up a page saying this:

David Cameron’s solution to his cost of living crisis cannot be found

The page you are looking for might have been removed by David Cameron due to its inconvenient (for him) nature, had its name changed by Grant Shapps or is temporarily unavailable.

Please try the following:

· If you typed the page address in the Address bar, make sure it is spelled correctly
· Open this page and look for the information you want
· Click the Back button and find out about the alternative at http://www.labour.org.uk
· Click here to look for the deleted information on the Internet elsewhere

HTTP 404 – File not found
But more information is available here

Tell us which of the Tories broken promises you’re most angry about below:

http://www.reactiongifs.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/unflappable.gif

really excited to vote for one of these parties at the next election

http://us.123rf.com/400wm/400/400/jezper/jezper1206/jezper120600182/14109707-arrows-going-up.jpg

here is the bit where i say i recognise that the pressures of a war zone are unimaginable to a civilian

here is the other bit where i say how fucking bored and depressed i am about hearing how hard it is out there for a war criminal

Touch harsh on Lily Allen

https://twitter.com/CockroachBasher/status/275725820616654848

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/boris-johnson-says-superrich-are-putupon-minority-like-homeless-people-and-irish-travellers-8946661.html

Click the Back button and find out about the alternative at http://www.labour.org.uk

"Our fight for Britain starts here." Do they propose a nationwide boxing tournament?

But we're all in this together

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/labour/10461175/Labour-Well-scrap-benefits-for-under-25s.html

what is even the point of having an opposition any more

People under the age of 25 would be barred from breathing under proposals being considered by the Labour Party.

Cunts.