Ne'er get thee stitched til Booris be ditched: UK General Election 2019

“Why not free water, too?” Justin Webb asks John McDonnell. Why not indeed. #r4today

— Hicham Yezza (@HichamYezza) November 15, 2019

You can just imagine Big John trying to hold back on the laughter

Labour's Magic Broadband Tree

Chris Leslie bravely doing a noble job of defending the corner of consumers that love nothing more than spending money on stuff after reading Which magazine

Amazing if you read his infamous 2015 Guardian interview how he’s actually to the right of the Tories economically now.

Read a thread last night that said if Cooper had won in 2015, he would have been her shadow chancellor. (Burnham’s would have been Reeves and Kendall’s would have been Umunna).

Johnson doing a phone-in on Radio 5.

Q: Parliament should get us out of the EU. And taking no deal off the table is a mistake. Parliament is not fit for purpose. Oliver Cromwell was right 500 years ago. Good luck to you.

Johnson says he agrees. He thinks parliament has been “senselessly” blocking Brexit.

Surely not the Oliver Cromwell who dissolved Parliament and became a dictator?

xp
fucking hell I shudder whenever i see Reeves popping up on my twitter via the friendly melts I endure!

this is also a really important policy for putting on votes in rural areas, where labour currently struggle

The Register finally has coverage of this

https://www.theregister.co.uk/AMP/2019/11/15/labour_pledges_free_broadband_via_partnationalisation_of_bt/

However, Matthew Howett, analyst and founder of Assembly, also said such a move would be extremely difficult to deliver.

"This is a spectacularly bad take by the Labour Party. The almost cut throat competition between broadband rivals has meant faster speeds, improved coverage and lower prices for consumers up and down the country.

Labour will also announce today a proposal for a new Charter of Digital Rights intended to protect data and online rights.

That will include powers for individuals and collectives to challenge algorithmic injustice, where online algorithms cause disproportionate harms to particular groups.

It will also prevent the use of digital infrastructure for surveillance; and hand rights to individuals to protect access to and ownership of their data.

Q: Would you introduce free broadband?

Johnson says what he would not do is introduce “some crackpot scheme that would involve many, many billions of taxpayers’ money nationalising a British business”.

🙄

Labour is saving the future of ILX with this plan.

nationalise ILX imo

Wrt "free water" it's useful to note that Scotland's water was never privatized,and while not free, is cheaper than all the private providers in England

(To be more accurate much of scotland's water provision is privatized but it is delivered by one public company with a monopoly)

The Tories, understandably, are critiquing "free" broadband as impossible. But they're not dealing with proper Labour. They're dealing with Marxists. Everything is horribly, brutally possible. All there in their writing. Corbyn guru Murray's essay "Lenin's Leaps" is a key text.

— Iain Martin (@iainmartin1) November 15, 2019

Free water is the opium of the masses.

Just curious, on water, are these figures on average more or less correct?

if you take Southern Water as an example, and using water AND wastewater as a standard:

One person - £322 per year and £26.80 per month
Two people - £449.40 per year and £37.40 per month
Three people - £576.90 per year and £48 per month
Four people - £668 per year and £55.70 per month
Five people - £740.90 per year and £61.70 per month
Six people - £813.70 per year and £67.80 per month

https://www.moneyadviceservice.org.uk/blog/how-much-is-the-average-water-bill-per-month

Because that's really steep. We pay less than half that over here iirc.

xp lol pom

Yes, that might actually be slightly light but it's in the right ballpark.

https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fmusingsatmidnite.files.wordpress.com%2F2016%2F08%2Fwater-gif.gif&f=1&nofb=1

That's a lot of money down the drain. I pay something like £40 per quarter (two person household). It's semi-nationalized and by law made impossible to be privatized.

Yes I pay more for water than I do for energy. Although the no standing charge gas tariff I was on is about to disappear so need to find an alternative.

Everything is horribly, brutally possible.

The sheer horrific brutality of free public services.

I look forward to the right-wing campaigning under the banner "absolutely nothing is possible, don't even bother thinking about it".

thames water for me (1 person) is £380 a year

Might as well get a sparkling water fountain installed.

the only conceivable possible massive project is leaving the eu no i will not be answering questions at this time

https://yetiblog.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Réaliste-impossible.jpg

Water is free again in Ireland after the water charges were abolished (for most people? deems or someone please correct).

Might as well get a sparkling water fountain installed.

Aside from Perrier and San Pellegrino and the like I have little experience with the stuff (I prefer still).

we're british we demand dull water

Wi-fi-emitting free water.

Eau Jeremy Corbyn

Nice.

Jérémie Corbeau

lol Johnny Mc just comes out with “free broadband will make the UK more competitive”

in all seriousness, the inability to imagine an even slightly radical restructure of society like offering free broadband is literally going to kill us all because it's going to take shifts on a scale several orders of magnitude greater to even start mitigating the effects of climate change

You're on an island, it'll be fine.

This might be interesting dilemma - wondering what govt provider of broadband would do, or could do, about services on public free internet that are not beneficial to the common good, or users who use internet for grim purposes

— Laura Kuenssberg (@bbclaurak) November 15, 2019

laura in full 'JuSt AsKiNg QuEsTiOnS' mode

Jfc she could do with a sabbatical after this GE run is over.

i hear yarl's wood is nice this time of year

she knows as much about how the internet in this country currently works as she knows about shitposting

Mark S, you might want to look into Thames Water discounting schemes - £380 seems a lot for one person, although your cost might be aligned to the size of your flat. I got the discount and paid around £140 for 1 person in a 400sq ft studio flat - up until this year, Camden tenants’ water costs were part of service charges, which dropped by £6/week as a result.

absolute fucking state of boris here

A beautiful depiction of why all politicians, in my view, should be required to undertake mandatory psychotherapy as part of their role.
It is astonishing, though expected, that such a simple question should throw Boris Johnson off balance like this.#Nagapic.twitter.com/JyGk5950DW

— Dr Lauren Gavaghan (@DancingTheMind) November 15, 2019

(i take no responsibility for the accompanying tweet, mind)

At some stage in the campaign someone is going to straight out ask him how many children he has.

Amazing. Write out a transcript of that and it's like a cut-up lit piece by Burroughs.

the only complete sentence in that 2 minutes is straight from the manifesto.