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

GET-BREXITDONE
LEVEL-UP-THE-REGIONS
FIX/WHITEHALL

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn%3AANd9GcSOlkK9Q99uFf6ZGdZw6BZWZsKeVJqMqhdDZGYgp9MqIq1NteDU&usqp=CAU

EXCLUSIVE: Police break up illegal #lockdown birthday party at Tory MP's house#Coronavirus #DominicCummings #Cummingshttps://t.co/Y7Svhied2j pic.twitter.com/V8m2S1O31d

— Mirror Politics (@MirrorPolitics) May 26, 2020

Mail moves Cummings off the front, Telegraph puts him on.

a) the fuck is that guy only 40 and b) he has the most minimalist Wikipedia entry I have ever seen on an elected representative. Basically it says "this guy exists".

he has that great aged well tweet in the early days of corona

I can't get the face of that tory mp out of my head, he looks like they are lancing piles from Boris's arse and raising them in a petri dish where they are never ever told they shouldn't do something until they are released into parliament.

large adult mp

He’s basically a rung below a fictional American baseball player with that name.

He looks like he's been raised on an unregulated battery farm

Bit of a shit story from the Mirror however, although the party was at his house he wasn’t actually at it

he's basically Baron Harkonnen after a pustule removal makeover

It was his wife’s birthday!

Should have driven her to Barnard Castle as a treat and everything would have been fine.

tories can have a little barnard castle, as a treat

Conservative poll lead cut by 9 points, the biggest sudden drop in a decade pic.twitter.com/KBxD6r4XCJ

— Jim Pickard (@PickardJE) May 26, 2020

Amazing
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EY-QmdeX0AEjW9n?format=jpg&name=large

chefkiss

lmao

oh god I hope that's real

It’s real

I am actually going to buy the daily star tomorrow, what strange times we live in

now more than ever, we must do our part to support quality journalism

Lads Rob Roberts’s twitter profile contains the phrase “real person”

NEW: Poll in tomorrow’s Daily Mail (that well known left wing paper) finds 66% of people think Dominic Cummings should resign.

But most damning of all, 55% of Conservative voters say he has to go. pic.twitter.com/vUuqjmHmWA

— Paul Brand (@PaulBrandITV) May 26, 2020

YouGov / Times poll

Conservatives: 44% (-4)
Labour: 38% (+5)
LIb Dems: 6%
Greens: 4% (-1)
Brexit: 2%

9-point drop in the Tory lead since last week.

— Adam Bienkov (@AdamBienkov) May 26, 2020

Sorry, I'll knock it off on the tweets after this

One final comment this evening on my firm's new poll.

This is the most consistently one-sided political topic I have ever ran a poll on. I expected nuance, there was no nuance. Public completely united in their views https://t.co/jaTdkhB7QF

— James Johnson (@jamesjohnson252) May 26, 2020

This might still all be forgotten in a few weeks but I think the people itt and elsewhere who are confidently claiming it will be, or claiming it's of no real significance, don't seem to have factored in the unique situation literally everyone in the country is living through.

I always said The Star was the last bastion of the mofofucking fourth estate!

Oh here comes Cap'n-Save-A-Dom Claire Fox

https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/poorer-mersey-councils-crisis-funding-18314443

be interested to see more comprehensive figures for this if anyone can find the labour report mentioned in this article

Liam Thorp does very admirable work on The Echo.

makes u think

https://scontent.fgba1-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/fr/cp0/e15/q65/100073450_10157430796873443_700210146059485184_n.jpg?_nc_cat=1&_nc_sid=8024bb&efg=eyJpIjoidCJ9&_nc_ohc=3zCLaLYS7fAAX9EaWWu&_nc_ht=scontent.fgba1-1.fna&_nc_tp=14&oh=c5219e399e22740f738336cc993d3b86&oe=5EF3CD25

Difference between two rounds of virus crisis government funding:

Liverpool (Labour) - cut of 32%
Knowsley (Labour) - cut of 39%

Wokingham (Tory) - increase of 83%
Buckinghamshire (Tory) - increase of 41 %https://t.co/bKytzkVneB

— Liam Thorp (@LiamThorpECHO) May 26, 2020

that's the punishment you get for being the most anti-tory region of England, mind you it's probably the same levels of cuts in some of the red wall constituencies that voted for that knave to get brexit done and for a bit of the old leveling up.

They hate Scousers.

I hate Scousers as well tbh even though my best pal is one, but he's a Berlin Scouser and also hates Scousers! Totally jealous of the boycotting Murdoch rags and hating Tories thing they've got going on though.

Scousers are good, change my mind

Ken Dodd

Bread

Carla Lane

The *******

Tarby, Cilla, lorra lorra celebrity Scouse Tories.

Jimmy Tarbuck

Cilla Black

Esther McVey

Esther McVey. Case closed.

John McDonnell outweighs all that lot

Grew up in East Anglia though. God, a Scouser in East Anglia, talk about a big fish in a small pond.

This is good

BREAKING: HUGE RISE IN TRADE UNION MEMBERSHIP

🔺91,000 in the last year
🔺170,000 female members in the last year
🔺Almost 200,000 in two years
🔺Third consecutive year of rising membership
🔺Highest female membership since 1995

There’s power in a union. Join yours today.

— Trades Union Congress (@The_TUC) May 27, 2020

my Scouse friend Dave is from a public school background. But his family fell into abject poverty when his dad got sent down for fiddling the books at his accountancy firm to cover up loads of money his business partner had stolen off him. It's basically a plot from Brookside!

Cilla has done terrible things

this video about how cilla black used to eat oranges covered in oxo does not end where you expect it to pic.twitter.com/9Ksx6WBQy0

— hoops (@itsmatthooper) May 8, 2020

This has been a thing for the best part of a decade - poorer councils have disproportionately borne the cost of austerity compared with richer authorities which tend to be in Tory areas.

Funnily enough it was Liverpool back then as well.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/most-deprived-english-councils-suffer-biggest-cuts-in-spending-power-10045665.html

yes, council funding formulae are boring but v important. the first round of crisis funding factored in deprivation & the second round didn't, I'm guessing due to pressure from Tory councils

liverpudlians love it when you remind them that they had a significant Tory vote until the 60s

The Court of Session has found in favour of ex-Scottish Labour leader @kezdugdale in the defamation appeal brought by Wings Over Scotland editor Stuart Campbell. The appeal has been refused, ending a long, expensive legal drama that goes back to March 2017.

— Michael Gray (@GrayInGlasgow) May 27, 2020