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

Stanley Johnson doing a bit of work to help his son out

https://youtu.be/BvQpdb2jGgs

brb, off to Siam

Burns beat me to it, d'oh

Ceylon, Ceylon
Oh mighty ship of state

the FO discussing the Nyasaland question, earlier today

https://www.thoughtco.com/thmb/iW5AH7XDKwL7xWrCYDPqv684KmU=/3384x1903/smart/filters:no_upscale()/commonwealth-group-3366649-5b9206a8c9e77c00826ea87b.jpg

https://amp.theguardian.com/football/2020/jun/15/boris-johnson-rejects-marcus-rashfords-plea-for-free-school-meals-over-summer?

bodes well for reconstruction

"(Rashford) has been using his profile in a positive way to highlight some very important issues"...

...that the leader of the Labour Party couldn't be arsed with until today because it was focused grouped and wasn't likely to bring him a 2.7 point poll boost with tory voting cunts and he was trying a forensically constructive approach to Tory-policy child poverty which involves not giving a flying fuck about it.

This is what's coming.

Priti Patel just called Jeremy Corbyn's politics racist in the House of Commons

The home secretary said: "I am saddened that the leader of the opposition has effectively failed to depart from the divisive, hateful, racist politics of its former leader"

— Lizzie Dearden (@lizziedearden) June 15, 2020

hope she said something similar to her dad when he was going to stand as a UKIP candidate

It gets worse.

Labour has sought to avoid being dragged into the debate over trans rights after it emerged that the government is considering scrapping plans to allow people to self-declare their legal gender https://t.co/VFP0E3mt6a

— The Times (@thetimes) June 15, 2020

i'm sure this is just negative spin and the LOTO is not in fact a cunt

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/15/dismay-over-adviser-chosen-set-up-uk-race-inequality-commission-munira-mirza

It is understood that Mirza has said she hopes to recruit Trevor Phillips as part of the commission. Phillips, the former chair of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

even Theresa May was too much of a wishy washy anti-racist for Mirza liking, a real piece of work.

profiles in courage

I mean they are just taking the piss, like when they made Liz Truss the equalities minister, you just know they are pissing themselves laughing at what a top notch windup that is.

OTM "We don't give a fuck, we've got the majority, what are you going to do about it?" New Labour were similarly cocky.

In the oncoming Depression anyone finding themselves out of work could always retrain as a know-nothing gobshite fraud, a profession for which there appears to be limitless demand.

today's US Supreme Court decision makes these Tories look even worse on transgender rights, which I didn't think was possible!

the faux benevolence of Trump's "I can live with it" vs Starmer's "..."

There's probably more silent TERFs likely to vote Labour (in, er, 2024) than there are trans people, so he's figured he's onto a winner!

"Two of the government’s most powerful civil servants have said they were not aware of any attempt to make economic preparations for a possible global pandemic in the years leading up to the coronavirus outbreak.

Sir Tom Scholar and Alex Chisholm, the permanent secretaries in the Treasury and the Cabinet Office respectively, confirmed that although the government simulated an international flu outbreak in 2016, Whitehall did not devise a plan for dealing with the consequences for the economy.

Instead, Scholar told MPs, civil servants devised schemes to help businesses “as they went along”."

lol

https://www.indexoncensorship.org/2020/06/our-free-speech-is-under-attack-in-the-uk-and-across-the-world-and-we-need-to-fight-to-protect-it/

I can’t recall Smeeth’s position on the release of leaked documents outing her as a ‘strictly protected‘ CIA asset but I’m sure she’s in favour.

I get such a huge secondary-school bully vibe from her.

Good to know priorities for censorship include *checks notes* one of the world’s most famous authors who will get published heard wherever she wishes.

Oh my god ... they are ... *rubs eyes* they really are guarding the statue of George Eliot in Nuneaton. pic.twitter.com/i7yiSEjZ46

— Helen Macdonald (@HelenJMacdonald) June 16, 2020

marcus sitting therese coffey on her arse

I’m concerned this is the only tweet of mine you acknowledged. Please, put rivalries aside for a second, and make a difference #maketheuturn

— Marcus Rashford (@MarcusRashford) June 16, 2020

Thank you for your opposition at this difficult times Marcus:

1. When you wake up this morning and run your shower, take a second to think about parents who have had their water turned off during lockdown #maketheuturn

— Marcus Rashford (@MarcusRashford) June 16, 2020

feel bad for mata but marcus has my heart now

maybe those white middle-aged men are just all fans of Middlemarch?

the war memorials thing bothers me. have they (the protectors) really confused statues of slavers with war memorials? or are they doing it deliberately to cast, without basis, the BLM people as anti-"our-finest-hour"?

fwiw:

https://labour.org.uk/press/labour-calls-on-the-government-to-fund-free-school-meals-over-the-summer-holidays-rebecca-long-bailey/

xp bit of 1 but mostly 2

tho churchill statues are kind of a grey area

http://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/glee/images/9/96/Porque-no-las-dos-o.gif/revision/latest?cb=20140406155354

It's absolutely a deliberate strategy from Johnson down.

Also bunch of booze and testosterone fuelled lads who are lockdown stir crazy and looking for a ruckus.

It is incredible how a lot of the people who were saying we absolutely must get children back to school as quickly as possible so they can eat properly are the same people apparently unwilling to feed them in any other capacity.

Wouldn't be surprised if the government u-turned on this one - you can ignore Labour comfortably but ignoring England's Marcus Rashford is more difficult - and Rashford is potentially exposing himself to a hate campaign that would dwarf anything faced by Raheem Sterling in its virulence.

Someone I went to school with was doing the whole "disgraceful, these people died for our freedoms" thing on Facebook over a picture of a defaced monument of some Confederate general with minimal impact on modern Britain but he was getting such a virtual shitkicking from several of the black people who went to our school that I just sat there and watched and then quietly defriended him. A lot of people will just kneejerk into these kinds of arguments and they can be prompted to do so with extreme ease, as the government has realised.

Someone on Twitter described the mobilisation of nationalist thugs in the service of a controversy entirely generated by the government as 'weapon testing', which has a grim ring of truth about it.

Be interesting to see the reception rashford gets from the crowd at spurs oh wait

Rashford is the right colour for a hate campaign, true

It certainly doesn't help when you get grandstanding Labour idiots like Sheerman fuelling the braindead culture war by angrily responding in the local rag to a tweet by a nobody with 7 likes saying hey lets take the H Wilson statue down!

my former childminder sharing a post on Facebook by some army cunt doxxing a woman for "supporting graffiti on the churchill statue" - I try to report it for harassment and it asks me "who is this post harassing?" with the two options being "me" and "a friend" - tried the second and it gave me a dropdown list of my Facebook friends. so apparently doxxing is fine on Facebook.

maybe those white middle-aged men are just all fans of Middlemarch?

Wait till they discover George identifies as a woman.

The horrifying thing is right now we have a group of people who are absolutely convinced that they are an oppressed minority under siege, a government very happy to encourage that idea, and an economic situation that is about to lead to rapidly spiraling unemployment.

With people like Andrew Marr throwing phrases like 'culture war' around.

Yeah it’s grim as fuck.

there was a good piece by Charlotte Higgins the other day that pointed out that if Boris was even half as polished a classicist as he pretends to be, he'd know that the Romans were absolute buggers for cancellation culture, taking down statues and monuments, altering them to erase people who weren't cutting it in the political milieu of their era any more.

One export that we can rely on:

New Zealand ends Covid-free run with two cases from UK https://t.co/jxiFnmnf3P

— The Guardian (@guardian) June 16, 2020

Tory backbenchers are coming out against the government in support of the school meals thing now by the way. If that rebellion grows, and if the policy is playing well in former Red Wall seats, then the government might fold. Labour strategy appears to be trying to split Westminster Tories off from the government on specific issues and it does seem to be effective in terms of forcing individual policy changes.

On the Mirza appointment:

i think maybe bc i have to deal with them more i’ve seen more contempt for longer, including what doesn’t hit press. eg a home office official asking me post-windrush whether it was simply my organisation’s view that the human rights act applies to migrants.

— gracie mae bradley (@graciemaybe) June 16, 2020