I don’t think so. Parties of the traditional left believe in state control - hence Labour introduces thousands of new offences. Parties of the traditional right believe in personal freedom - hence Thatcher freed working people from the closed shop, rigged union votes, financially supporting a political party they did not politically support, etc.

“I have a gut feeling that cutting back on public spending during a recession is exactly the wrong thing to do”

I would say that it has to be done with a lot of care. - Necessary capital expenditure (especially on projects that are under way) probably should carry on. - Unnecessary capital expenditure (e.g. rebuilding schools that are okay) should never have been undertaken and clearly should be stopped. - Current spending should be squeezed considerably but without causing a panic. Stopping recruitment is an obvious step - but still too hard for Brown & Darling who permitted 20,000 new civil servants to be taken in Q42009.

“(cutting back on most public spending is nearly always the wrong thing to do, of course)”

That is plainly barking. When you are spending £4 for every £3 of income you have to cut back.

Also all of the people in the public sector who are doing non-jobs (e.g. diversity managers) can be sacked without any adverse impact on the service and all of those on inflated salaries should have their salaries cut.

Interesting, you don’t worry about a, IMHO, totalitarian act by a party that has state control of everything (including the people) in its DNA but you do worry about how it would be used by a party that has individual freedom in its DNA.

Reading this I was from the start prepared for the copout you describe, but while the reality of the story is undermined by the postscript, the reality of said postscript is undermined from within as well. The ambiguity remains, which I personally like better than either the copout or making absolutely clear that yes, this is real.

I just read that in late December myself. I decided to catch up on my Robson before Novacon, as she was guest of honour & I was on a panel with her.

I rather enjoyed /Mappa Mundi/ and /Silver Screen/ had its moments. /Natural History/ is a strange, hallucinatory space opera with possible contact with a possible other intelligence which is possibly on another planet possibly in another galaxy. And has given us or possibly we have accidentally found a sort of FTL star drive thing that is also an AI or the alien or something.

It’s very hard to tell. It’s confused, self-referential, barely explains its own background or setting.

Kinda fun if you don’t mind being permanently confused.

Then I read /LNDTTGOL/. This borrows a couple of references from /NH/ and makes passing reference to the primary Plot Device™.

I found /LND…/ almost unreadable, myself, and very hard work. It’s a confusing morass of a book with no discernable primary plot, & a whole bunch of the primary viewpoint characters who are basically nothing but dei ex machinæ. They can do whatever they want whenever they want to anyone they want, be anyone they want, except when they randomly can’t, and nobody can stop them. But people love them anyway. Sometimes. Except when they hate them.

Deeply irritating book with no real redeeming features.

/NH/ is confusing but all right. You sort of mainly know where you are & what’s going on most of the time if you don’t mind doing some guesswork.

But it has no bearing on /LND/ and /LDN/ as no bearing on it. It’s hard to believe they’re the same authoress.

/LND/ reads, to me, like one of those wretched Gwyneth Jones things which is all about “questioning the nature of identity” or some balls like that.

As for Ms Robson, stick to the one-off novels or the current robo-elf-pr0n series. They’re actually quite fun.