bojo is king, brexit is on, stuff is fvcked, tomorrow starts here -- new govt new thread new battle

Michael Gove was so pleased with his attempt at humour at the FREU committee he poured water onto his own phone and papers pic.twitter.com/Jkvj83vipQ

— Alain Tolhurst (@Alain_Tolhurst) March 11, 2020

alcohol duties frozen, business rates cut for pubs, brb off to join the Tory party

it's the party of the workers now

Hoping we'll be so drunk we won't notice the next recession.

Isn't it 60% alcohol concentration that's best? Couple of pints of that and no need to worry about recession or coronavirus.

i like your thinking

it's such a great time to be a semi-impoverished functional alcoholic, if they put up carer's allowance as well I'd be almost ready to switch my membership to the tories!

It will be blamed on the Corona virus but I'm not sure this is right. The economy has been flat for a decade?

Sunak suggesting that the UK is heading for a Corona-recession, cleverly defecting from the fact that the economy was already flatlining before this epidemic.

— Aditya Chakrabortty (@chakrabortty) March 11, 2020

It started growing reasonably quickly when Osborne stoked up another housing bubble around 2013-15 but the referendum result killed that.

I think most of the UK has been in recession for a while, London & SE the exception

https://qz.com/1709904/which-uk-regions-have-had-a-recession-recently/

Apparently not although several regions have. Wales is the big surprise there.

"The North East seems to be particularly recession-prone due to its reliance on commodities."

need to put some Gas in the Gascoigne!

are these the fabled ONS figures that phil hammond said didn't exist?

Raab apparently coughing up a storm in PMQs earlier.

Wales has grown a fairly solid tech / manufacturing base iirc.

Have to laugh at the head on truss
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ES1TyeLWoAAQsxX?format=jpg&name=large

damn, sunak getting the triple JOB-matt forde-richard osman endorsement, he's basically PM already

Slightly unnerved about Laura Kuenssberg’s dry cough on the Daily Politics budget spesh!

failing to remember where I'm getting/confusing the q over regional recession/economy from. I think Hammond having no interest/knowledge of regional figures is interesting and I wonder if they are ropey as well as unnecessary to him given his concerns. there's an interesting distinction between gross value added vs gross disposable household income which I think comes down to the fact that most high earners commute to the city centre from somewhere more scenic, so they create wealth in one postcode and spend their earnings in another.

great to hear McD being scathing on the Tory budget and putting a dampener on some of that "the end of austerity" twaddle. Until Universal Credit is scrapped people can fuck off with that talk.

I only just read that colonialism bit linked earlier and this...

Defenders of empire saw the figures differently. Nigel Biggar, regius professor of moral and pastoral theology at Christ Church College, Oxford, said that the fact that only a minority of 32% said empire was something to be proud of meant that “if the post-colonialists really want to hound imperial flag-wavers, they should go after the Dutch”.

I haven't paid much attention but from what I heard the talk was all about the usual hard-working people guff. Has he ignored the state of the benefits system altogether?

The only thing I've heard so far is the u c minimum income thing for the self employed being temporarily stopped for a year.

almost entirely, from what I can tell. The budget does the core thing of protecting house prices by bumping up the economy while trying to dodge inflation. The poor can continue to get to fuck, except where they temporarily might infect Capital

Proscribe Oxford imo

hey now wait a minute

proscribe Oxford - except for Simon Wren-Lewis

carry on

This is going to be absolutely brilliant!

Everyone should get @peter_nhs @pdkmitchell's new book out with @ManchesterUP early next year...

👇👇👇 pic.twitter.com/jrc69AnGQY

— Kim A. Wagner (@KimAtiWagner) March 11, 2020

May be of interest. Pete Mitchell is a good egg.

West Yorkshire is to get our very own worthless fraudulent showboating cunt of a mayor in 2021 and a £120 m budget of which probably £3.78 will make it to Dewsbury to plug up the leaky roof at the train station with some fucking decorators caulk and put a few vapid photocopied jo cox quotes all over the fucking waiting room from quotes.com

xp

have put that mitchell book on my self-isolation/deathbed reading list.

Yeah looks like a good one

From what I can see the Budget sprayed a load of cash at infrastructure projects - which will at the very least create jobs if we have enough skilled people in the country to do them - but the underlying social contract remains tightly strangled.

It is 100% the sort of Budget that will allow the government to proudly proclaim the end of austerity while doing very little to protect people at the sharp end.

Still probably better than anything turned in by Osborne or Hammond but that's a very low bar.

The UK government—Matt Hancock and Boris Johnson—claim they are following the science. But that is not true. The evidence is clear. We need urgent implementation of social distancing and closure policies. The government is playing roulette with the public. This is a major error.

— richard horton (@richardhorton1) March 10, 2020

Weighing up whether to trust the editor of The Lancet or the guy with Dominic Raab’s spittle on the back of his head.

This is one of the few things I could see really damaging Johnson. Nobody cares when a couple of hundred houses are under water but if this can convincingly be portrayed in hindsight as catastrophic negligence it’s not the kind of thing you can bounce back from easily.

Returning to the UK, the Labour MP Maria Eagle has asked the health secretary about the decision to allow Atlético Madrid fans to come to the UK for their team’s Champions League last 16 second leg match:

Schools and colleges are closed in Madrid and public gatherings of over 1,000 people banned because there’s a cluster of 782 coronavirus cases and there have been 35 deaths.

Is it really sensible for fans who couldn’t watch their team at home to be able to travel to Liverpool and watch their team play with 51,000 locals? Is that really sensible?

Hancock replied:

We are aiming at the things that have the biggest impact and there are some things that feel right but don’t have an impact at all, and that’s why it’s so important to follow the science and what Public Health England say.

What is it they are doing exactly? Seems to be telling people to wash their hands and focusing on cushioning the economic impact and fuck all else. Still no checks at airports, still a sizeable backlog of tests, still no statement on what would be the triggers for closing schools etc

it's nice to lose Phil's fucking grim pallid dead man's hand deathgrip on the public purse, but anyone saying "austerity is over" should be shot with a virus!

one of the "great" counter-arguments I heard in response to proposed school closures from some twat earlier was "ah they'll all just go play in the park anyway" kicking some science there alright!

Like kids go out and play in the park theses days, hasn’t he heard of e obesity crisis?

Christ, when I was young to teenage years old and there had been the internet back then and the games consoles etc.. self-isolation would have been my religion.

i've been going to work all week on the tube/bus into a building full of about 1000 people and i've got plans to have dinner with a 75-y-o woman tomorrow. i've kind of fucked it up, right?

i've been going to work all week on the tube/bus into a building full of about 1000 people

Ditto. If I don't end up with this it'll be a miracle tbh.

I've been living like a monk and mainly wandering around desolate remote locations, but it probably doesn't make a shit of difference when the taxi driver who drives my son to school probably has contact with at least a few dozen people a day. What can you do? It will drive you insane if you think about it too much or even if you don't bother as well.

from the guardian liveblog:

A cabinet minister is self-isolating while they await test results, a government source has confirmed, thought they would not confirm the identity of the minister.

Raab has said he tested negative, since so many people were asking.

ffs!

Tested negative for sentience?

Raab staving off covid-19 with his choice of lunch
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Dbr__fWWsAAQKtA?format=jpg&name=large

he's still tested DNA positive that he is actually a fucking child of von Ribbentrop.

xp The English disease

Two ministers self isolating on advice of health officials following news Nadine Dorries has tested positive - one is health minister Ed Argar, the other a Cabinet minister (not named)

— Hugh Pym (@BBCHughPym) March 11, 2020

Weighing up whether to trust the editor of The Lancet or the guy with Dominic Raab’s spittle on the back of his head.

It's not this, though, it's the editor of The Lancet v the Chief Medical Officer and the Deputy Medical Officer and CMO Scotland and the Chief Scientific Adviser. Which the Tories have been at unusual pains to stress.

And they're all saying things like "airport testing does bugger all because people are asymptomatic for so long" and most importantly "yes, lockdown, but not yet". With what seems sound reasoning, I think: you need to flatten the curve a bit, not stomp it down so hard that all you do is shift things a few weeks when the arseholes start saying "see? told you it was nothing, I'm off down the pub to lick the gantry" and cause an equally overwhelming spike then.

Effectively they're saying "we are accepting some cases right now, while we can cope, and will time it right to choke them off before we're overwhelmed". Is that playing roulette? To an extent it probably is, but so is saying "if you lock everything down now we will be fine".

I think there's a variety of denial-stage reasoning behind that second line of thought, resisting accepting that this thing has actually happened – it's here, it's spreading, it will have horrible consequences – in favour of "if only everyone would be good then nothing bad will happen and it will all go away".

I don't think that's realistic, especially not the "if only everyone would be good" part. A lot of the data nerd tweeters modelling this stuff are excluding all the messy human factors. Sure, your model shows you can cut cases to 0 if everyone stays home for three months … but it didn't include modelling what happens when society collapses and everyone also busts out with cabin fever.

still a sizeable backlog of tests

This is the bit that has me worried; this and ancedotal reports of people struggling with 111, and struggling to get registered for testing. The execution needs to be way better on this stuff and seems not to be.

That they really don't have a plan of action seems quite obvious rn. Italy already tried that option and it didn't fucking work out very well for them.

No, I don't think that's quite right. They're doing pretty much exactly what they laid out a few weeks ago, it's more a question of how well they're executing that plan, afaict.

And they're learning from Italy: it blocked flights and did airport testing, and that didn't help, so they're not doing it here.

I'm just summarising what i hear on the wireless tbh. but it sounds like a bad plan to me, like as if they waiting for it to blow up before taking any dramatic action. And it is way too soon to be saying what worked and didn't work in Italy as this point.