love* in the time of plague (and by love* i mean brexit* and other dreary matters of uk politics)

Extraordinary analysis from #DowningStreetBriefing pic.twitter.com/rFbqedGDUM

— JamesClayton (@JamesClayton5) May 6, 2020

so if i’m only getting 80% of my salary does that mean it’s “increased over time” since i didn’t have a job for the first 16 years of my life?

Nadia Whittome MP sacked from her care home job for speaking up about lack of PPE in the sector. Fuck this sideways.

ffs

Sickening

Was just coming here to post. Cunts. Cunts!

EXCLUSIVE Labour MP Nadia Whittome sacked as carer for speaking out about PPE shortageshttps://t.co/teMzfMJlFD pic.twitter.com/d1aMponf7V

— Nicola Bartlett (@NicolaRBartlett) May 6, 2020

What exactly were they expecting when they hired an Opposition MP?

didn't she previously work at this care home before she was an MP?

Starmer holding the government's own graph at Johnson when Boris was waffling on about not comparing the death rate to other countries was pretty funny, mind. Forensic my arse, it was an open goal but it did at least require some composure in the moment.

In general Johnson just seemed like it hadn't even occurred to him to prepare an answer to this most predictable of all questions but he did at least manage to get "stay at home, protect the NHS, save lives" in there so everyone will be convinced he has the best interests of the nation at heart.

Spiegelhalter, tweeted: “Polite request to PM and others: please stop using my Guardian article to claim we cannot make any international comparisons yet. I refer only to detailed league tables-of course we should now use other countries to try and learn why our numbers are high”.

the statistician boris was quoting out of context at PMQ is politely telling him to stfu

In general Johnson just seemed like it hadn't even occurred to him to prepare an answer to this most predictable of all questions

Yes, his 'near death' experience hasn't changed a thing, still winging it like a lazy arrogant cunt.

there is a self-congratulatory arsehole cop story doing the rounds in Yorkshire about a nipper who accidentally phoned 999. when the police did a welfare check they found a mother and child in a house with zero food and starving. Thanks to the goodhearted generosity of lots of virtuous law-abiding Yorkshire tory voters they got some supermarket brand dry foods and a few tins of beans from a foodbank. it just warms my heart so much, hope all concerned clapped themselves off afterwards!

Re: Nadia Whittome - the care home she worked for Tweeted this last month:

**URGENT PPE APPEAL**: Please help by donating or sharing the message. We are in desperate need of PPE to help #ExtraCare safely care for our vulnerable residents during the COVID-19 outbreak. Spread the word. #COVID_19 If you can help, email: sta✧✧✧.old✧✧✧@extrac✧✧✧.o✧✧.u✧ pic.twitter.com/3ICczn6YF9

— ExtraCare (@ExtraCareOrgUk) April 7, 2020

the fuck

it is possible that somebody might've applied some discreet pressure re: charitable status and politics

nb: of course this is crap and they can gtf

If you're a care worker who has faced pressure, threats or disciplinary action for speaking out about PPE, contact my office *in confidence*.

We're collecting evidence on how care workers are undervalued, underpaid, and fear speaking out due to precarious employment status. pic.twitter.com/8x2dY3k0ug

— Nadia Whittome MP (@NadiaWhittomeMP) May 6, 2020

Today's 'ah well, nevertheless...' news:

Last month, amid dire warnings of shortages of personal protective equipment for health workers, ministers publicised the imminent arrival from Turkey of a fleet of RAF cargo planes bringing in a “very significant” shipment of PPE for the NHS.

More than a fortnight later, it has emerged that every one of the 400,000 protective gowns that eventually arrived has been impounded after being found not to conform to UK standards.

Can't wait til these lads start tieing up the big trade deals

can't Truss 'em

ugh when you accidentally hear 30 seconds of Norman Cunt Cunt Cunt Lamont opining on the radio

It's not so much the quality of the PPE than the fact that it was successfully procured in the first place. I think that's something we all need to recognise, rather than focusing on negativity.

Michael Gove, what have you done with Matt #2?

^^^

missing the "mood"

Don’t tell me @Keir_Starmer isn’t equipped to take on Johnson.
He does it in ways Boris doesn’t like. He KNOWS he’s met his match.
With Corbyn, he knew he could ridicule a characatured figure of the left that the majority would recognise.
Not so Starmer.
Just watch this grow.

— Reece Dinsdale (@reece_dinsdale) May 6, 2020

I used to quarrel with this lad on a HTAFC forum when he was stanning for Owen Smith. He's still full of shit and still thinks winning the PMQ pantomime is far more important than having a transformative manifesto and Crobym was bad because he misspelled pantomime twice! He fucking absolutely despises McD as well. He's not as thick as Eddie Marsan in the bullshit melt-actor field he inhabits and he tactically picks his arguments with the idiot division of leftish twitter so he has a better win rate. Threads still rules tho!

I'm disappointed that diversity in all forms has such a low priority especially with the leaked report still hanging over Labour.

And before anyone makes a negative comment there are plenty of people qualified to be in the leaders office who are African Caribbean or Asian etc. https://t.co/GVrZLW6qKL

— (((Dawn Butler))) (@DawnButlerBrent) May 7, 2020

vanilla Sir Kier surrounds himself exclusively with white people shocker

there is a number of bame people in there but in low profile positions and his leadership team is all white, there won't be no grime4kiermit that's for sure

The idea that the Tories were always entirely confident in beating Corbyn doesn't really stand up to any scrutiny. I think they were pre-2017 - they were not even remotely scared of him - but that result shook them because it suggested something in the wider country they just didn't understand. You can tell by looking at the way a Boris Premiership was perceived by Tory MPs in 2016 (a bit of a joke, perhaps outright dangerous and something to be blocked) vs 2019 (pretty much their only hope). In the short term it looked like the 2019 lot were vindicated but all the 2016 reservations will turn to be vindicated by history if he carries on like this.

There's probably a wider discussion to be had about what it means to keep a government with this kind of majority accountable in this situation. If PMQs doesn't matter now then when does it? Still, I don't think it's especially controversial to believe that Corbyn's questions, no matter how important, were pretty easily batted away even by a politician as limited as May with some standard-issue "bringing us back to the 70s blah blah Venezuela" bluster with a load of people braying behind them. Boris has never been good at PMQs and seems outright lost without the braying mob to play up to.

Whether it makes a difference or not is the question. Most people don't watch any more of PMQs than the twenty seconds that get shown on the news or fly on social media - so if Starmer can win that specific bit of it then it might make a difference. But at the same time, people don't like or even vote for the reality of Boris, they like the *idea* of Boris, and a lot hinges on whether he can keep that balloon flying. And if Johnson was especially concerned by facing Starmer at PMQs then he might have prepared better, so presumably he thinks he just doesn't need to, and he might be right.

There was some Twitter post doing the rounds last week saying that if you actually watch the Blair-Major exchanges then Blair would go hard every week and would be going all out to savage Major. Obviously we weren't in the middle of a lethal pandemic then and the Parliamentary circumstances were completely different but the guy was making the point that the don't-rock-the-boat-too-much consensual approach is a fantasy of Blairism that's built up in Labour centrist circles over the last decade rather than reflective of the real thing.

I like the last point - 1990s Labour in Opposition would be interesting to revisit.

yep the right of the Labour party have a very selective and curated version of Blairism that is nowhere near reality. But on the other hand Major did say if he ran against himself he would have still lost in '97. The Tory party were completely spent at this point in history.

I just watched an exchange out of curiosity and yeah Blair is just taking the piss out of him, Major stakes everything on highlighting Labour divisions over Europe and hey he turned out to be right about that, just a couple of decades out.

Even a spent and humiliated Major was much better at it than a victorious Johnson fwiw.

Alastair Campbell and gentlemanly consensuality don't really sit together too well.

images of him playing bagpipes behind a nurse who he is following and at Charlie Kennedy's grave would suggest a new kind of stalker/serial killer - a real sick bastard!

I feel a two-part ITV crime drama starring David Tennant coming on.

Johnson has been routinely terrible at answering questions on TV. No reason this would be any different in the HoC. And does it matter in his case? Clearly not.

Yes, as Matt says, the idea is more important than the reality.

The Telegraph has now announced the end of the lockdown four times, to no avail pic.twitter.com/wX7oBqmSbv

— Will Davies (@davies_will) May 7, 2020

death by repetition

BBC were pre-announcing it this morning, looks like something's going to happen

Many dozens of people in the park sunbathing yesterday tbh

it pains me that there ought to be a sensible approach to letting people be outside but any slackening on the government message will probably lead to people being dicks and another spike

then again most of the people who are actual dicks are already being dicks so shrug i dunno

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8296289/Black-people-FOUR-TIMES-likely-die-coronavirus-white-people.html

"and that's ok"

I think that introducing ambiguities into what can and can't be done is almost inevitable and is going to be a problem later down the line. I have zero confidence in the government to communicate it clearly - or at least without a load of unnecessary faffing around first. At the same time I am absolutely desperate to be able to at least sit in the park this summer.

There are going to be big problems with smaller and more popular green spaces as well. It's going to be impossible to open up London Fields on a hot day with any degree of social distancing, for example.

totally privileged viewpoint here but my god getting some kind of kid-playdates back (even attempted socially-distanced ones like the new Irish rules suggest) would ease perhaps the worst bit of this lockdown for me

The problem with all this stuff coming out via leaks is that there's not much opportunity get a sense of how the government is going to message 'if we hadn't locked down when there were 700 new cases per day, we'd have had a huge spike' at the same time as 'relaxing the lockdown when there are 6000 new cases per day doesn't risk a huge spike'.

pic.twitter.com/ci7LXOLcPA

— jack (@jrc1921) May 7, 2020

a bit of hand-waving, random mumble, cheeky grin, wiff-waff, sorted

Yeah, fanciful dreams aside I'm not sure exactly how significant the weekend's announcement can actually be in the immediate term beyond "when we hit point X we'll do Y". xp