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

Peerages for Evgeny Lebedev, Eddie Lister, Dame Louise Casey, ex-Brexit Party MEP Claire Fox, Boris's brother Jo, Ken Clarke, Philip Hammond, Nick Herbert, Mark Lancaster, Patrick McLoughlin, ex-Corbyn staffer Katy Clark, & many more

A knighthood for Theresa May's husband Philip

— John Stevens (@johnestevens) July 31, 2020

How could you Ken? After all your resistance to Brexit?!

All the others are like fine and expected, but it's the Claire Fox one that is just the most real, most pure one of the lot.

Gisela Stuart too.

(xp) Yeah, Dame Claire Fox, what a joke, I assume we can see more Provo supporting ex-Marxists being ennobled in the future.

L. Prague - We received an email at work, from being on an OCC mailing list for something.

It was essentially this news story:

https://news.oxfordshire.gov.uk/oxford-residents-urged-to-follow-social-distancing-to-avoid-local-control-measures/

Unhelpfully, if you go to their news page, the story has been bumped down the page. I have to confess I'm anticipating some form of local lock down.

This tweet really highlights the madness of it all:

In Manchester, you can be sacked for refusing to go and sit with someone in an office, fined £100 for sitting with them at home, and given a money-off deal to sit with them in a busy restaurant.

— Old Git (@toooldforit) July 31, 2020

The worst thing about this is the suggestion that Rishi Sunak is a tall man https://t.co/NM7FDWmi74 pic.twitter.com/53eprI9PNj

— JJ (@boringdystopian) July 31, 2020

Googling to find out how tall Sunak is and the press is saying he’s 5’7”, lollllllll

we are going to see Lord O'Neill and Lord Furedi before the end of this parliament aren't we?

"Boris's brother Jo."

I'm feeling trolled by this government.

The guy who literally resigned for saying his brother wasn't up to running the country.

Staycations .... UKations ... this is the year to find your inner explorer and discover the U.K.

🎧 https://t.co/fZ2jS8SX1n 🎧 pic.twitter.com/fFHX9FCMSs

— Esther McVey (@EstherMcVey1) July 31, 2020

What the fuck is going on???

Sorry i*m late, not reading back, but Claire Fox is the most naked evil bullshit of all time

we are going to see Lord O'Neill and Lord Furedi before the end of this parliament aren't we?

Baron O'Neill and Count Furedi.

That McVey video is unfortunately good not bad.

Not even wearing a fucking seatbelt. Peppa Pig all over again.

Rishi has never seen 5"7 and to be more precise (and lol when you type his name, height is at the top of the google search tree) he is 5"57743 although he might round it up - I'm a stickler for accurate decimal places!

the old Lowry cartoons of Stalin made him look 6"4 as well, but even that diminutive Georgian towered over Rishi.

not Lowry I meant David Low obv!

Dame Ruth Davidson.

McVey: complete lack of dignity and/or Cummings made her do it.

It's absolute violence to my ears when I hear London based tories refer to Kirklees like it is a town or a city

I'm with you. Same down here when they report on the news an incident in Newham or Havering or Haringay or whatever. Those are just made up names of councils. If something happened in East Ham or Romford or Tottenham, just say that.

https://www.redpepper.org.uk/how-corbyn-unmasked-comedy/

little summary of why all British comedy is bad by Juliet Jacques, the recurring theme is when faced with the prospect of a centre-left government they all (including Stewart Lee) shit the bed and revealed themselves to be a bunch of posturing establishment lackey arsewipes. Not much of a reveal but correct.

Josie Long erasure.

I've got no idea who she is, but no doubt will have heard her on R4 at some point when I'm having an apoplectic fit of laughter!

Not mad at anyone who doesn't find her funny, just saying she's a name who stayed 100% pro Corbyn through the whole time and deserves credit for that.

ah I see

Iannucci and Brooker. I would happily take them both out NKVD style bullet through the back of the head, although my hatred of Brooker predates Corbynism.

for balance i would like to add that Mark Thomas never knowingly made anybody laugh ever

Chris Morris dismissed him as "just someone who bullies receptionists" which was probably correct!

Geoff Norcott makes being a Tory his USP, like as if he works in a field full of lefties/radicals and openly being a Tory twat makes him a real enigma.

I saw Mark Thomas a couple of years ago in Stratford. It wasn't comedy, though, it was a staged history of his attempt to start a comedy club with Palestinian refugees in Jenin. Two of them had come with him to do the show. I thought it was incredible and parts were very very funny.

Jeremy Hardy(RIP), Alexei Sayle, Josie Long.. that's probably the shortlist covered!

Mark Thomas’ bit when he was going up against the serious organised come and police act cane round on the BBC recently, and I still think it’s funny although memories of simpler times.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007760g

Not mad at anyone who doesn't find her funny

Well that's me off the hook then.

yes we are aware :)

was just about to post that redpepper piece

Rob Delaney's probably had the biggest pro-Jez uptick of any comedian I can think in the leftysphere.

yup

Mark Thomas is a thing apart.

There's a double cd of his tales wrt Palestinian refugees and all sorts, it's stunning stuff.

I've been reading quite a lot of Swift this year and it occurs to me that saying "both Corbyn and Johnson are terrible" is very much a kinda world-gone-to-hell thing that satire (at least Swift's) often does. That disgust of the state of things, perhaps? I'm still processing Swift tbh, but I think that's what all these people were aiming for.

And if you cross with FBPE and Europe being the only thing in your imagination then it's unlikely you'd be able to distinguish sides.

Also the piece is just working through grief to me, something from before the 13th December, and now I just don't care. We have lost badly. And Ianucci can do something on Cummings, not Johnson...

xp this gives them all far too much credit

More Jonathan Pie than Jonathan Swift tbh.

Pie is so brutal that you're not even sure what he's supposed to be satirising

also just because satire has come to mean light entertainment with zingers about celebrity politicians that doesn't mean that's what satire is

Oh yeah it's doing a thing that is far, far removed from the source, and it's unlikely that it wasn't that either. But it's that conservatism of the world going to the dogs position...when one option really wasn't that xps

I was reading it more in a working through my hatred mode rather than grief. I get that it's all over now in terms of parliamentary politics, it hurt like fuck in December and when that melt piece of shit won the leadership election but grief is probably too strong a word, more like hatred and anger but not grief. I quite happily spent the first 40 years of my life never registering to vote and not giving a flying fuck about Labour and can easily go back to that without slashing my wrists!

fwiw and this isn't the thread for it but who cares my reading of Swift is not that he reached a "the world has gone to hell" position, certainly not consistently. partly he was involved in politics and he had a side, church and party. partly i think you have to look at individual works as individual interventions in contemporary politics, much of which is obscure to us now.

(side note here: the Bickerstaff letters more or less invented cyberbullying and are maybe the funniest Swift stuff of all, and his target really can't be justified in terms of political importance. it's just sometimes being mean to a dick is very very funny)

mainly my reading of Book 4 of Gulliver's Travels is as a satire of misanthropy. poor empty Gulliver becomes so obsessed with the grown-ups in the room, the rational uber-centrist Houynhnhmns, that he becomes this unfeeling inhuman douchebag who bans himself from human society, not to his own credit.