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

It has been described as a 'real hammer blow' for landlordshttps://t.co/aSaXp3uQiz

— BBC Wales News (@BBCWalesNews) August 3, 2020

No, a real hammer blow to the head would be good tho

u can't touch them!

we'll take the landlord's stick!

it's emotionally devastating listening to landlords crying and bleating about how the Rona has disrupted their parasitic lifestyle, much empathy to these unfairly maligned bloodsucking leeches in this difficult period!

I Pity The Poor Landlord

we'll take the landlord's stick!

TUNE

The South Bank Centre plans to make 400 of its 577 staff redundant this week, &, when it reopens in 2021, to model itself on a start-up, with 90% of its spaces for rent and only 10% for art.

There's an open letter of protest you can sign here: https://t.co/SPTIqnPrcx

— Tom Wilkinson (@TMOWilkinson) August 4, 2020

This is disastrous. I have no idea who wants a) office space b) event space or c) retail space at the moment either.

Absolutely fuck this shit.

There isn't really anything else that fills the role of the South Bank Centre in London, it's irreplaceable, and as SV points out is just going to add to a glut of commercial space on the market in any case.

"We want to be like a startup" is a horrific red flag for out-of-date and out-of-touch management, if one were even needed here

'We want to be kept on life support by venture capitalists year after year'

They could always ditch the arts and culture altogether and restart up again as a much more profitable insolvency practitioner!

I don't really know what else they can do right now, they clearly aren't going to be selling tickets any time soon and probably not much in the way of food and drink either, it's insufficient support from central government that's the issue.

It might be worth asking Super Rishi instead of certain sections of the commentariat having a jizz fest every time he announces his spotty and often inadequate bailout schemes to huge acclaim

Westminster voting intention:

CON: 44% (+3)
LAB: 35% (-2)
LDEM: 8% (-)
GRN: 5% (-)

via
@Survation
, 31 Jul - 03 Aug
Chgs. w/ 12 Jul

they call him oh-dear-kier

Johnson's ratings are pretty terrible though

YouGov
@YouGov
· 42m
Who Britons would hold most responsible if the UK was to suffer a second wave of coronavirus:

The public: 52%
The government: 31%

it's not his fault!

Johnson's ratings are pretty terrible though

― stet, Tuesday, 4 August 2020 bookmarkflaglink

Yup so they can get rid of him and carry on as normal because people are blaming each other more than the government for covid...as long as the economic fallout isn't severe. And that's a big if.

https://www.vice.com/amp/en_us/article/m7jxvn/corporations-receiving-bailout-billions-have-laid-off-staff-and-paid-investors?

Gordon Bennett, would you Adam and Eve it? Charlie Mullins says stick yer furlough scheme where the sun don't shine.

https://metro.co.uk/2020/08/03/boss-sacks-workers-who-refuse-come-back-furlough-13074431/

Blessed are the wealthmakers

Anybody seriously want to argue that guillotining the likes of Mullins would be immoral?

bleedin' well stick yer grand, could make that in 5 mins just tightening a bolt on Daniel Craig's dripping faucet!

x-post: I'm not going to argue with you on that one, Noodle Vague.

https://amp.theguardian.com/society/2020/aug/04/english-councils-with-highest-covid-rates-launch-own-test-and-trace-systems?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/health-53656852?

So I know it's the BBC but I'd like to be a bit more positive. Only time will tell, and it doesn't get the government off the hook for its messaging.

You simply won't hear a better explanation of what the number of cases around England actually means -- @robertcuffe on the News Channel earlier pic.twitter.com/jGpBvo9NDg

— Catherine Wyatt (@catherinehwyatt) July 31, 2020

The video in here is good as well, along the same lines.

The government is at least taking decisive action here, of sorts, the problem is the obvious inconsistencies regarding pubs staying open in Manchester etc. Thing is that we were always going to end up with regional lockdowns to prevent small regional outbreaks from getting out of control - this is a good thing and immeasurably preferable to another nationwide lockdown, which is where we'd otherwise end up.

That wasn't adequately communicated to the country when we came out of lockdown and the government is atrocious at communicating bad news. It was all sunlit uplands now, normality by Christmas etc etc. That's clearly not going to happen but the danger is that people either panic every time there's a preventative local lockdown or get fatigued and stop believing the government altogether.

Good John Burn-Murodch visualisation of where different parts of the country are now. None of the areas currently under restriction are anywhere near where Leicester was when it was locked down (including Leicester itself).

NEW: I’ve updated the chart of new cases in England & Wales to show two critical parts of the story:
• Differentiating between places with an isolated cluster (Swindon’s Iceland depot) vs community spread
• Showing where Leicester was when it locked down https://t.co/RlJcg1x4JG pic.twitter.com/ayu7KRFHDu

— John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) August 3, 2020

https://russss.github.io/covidtracker/map.html

Just leaving this here as well.

The New Statesman has done something genuinely useful for once and launched a local authority covid tracker that let's you know the number of cases in the past week, whether they're rising and also the risk of local lockdown - but it's also paywalled. Currently only Swindon looks like its at risk of lockdown but these things change quickly.

FIASCO: 50 million face masks bought by the UK govt, part of a £252m contract, can't be used because of safety concerns. Procured through Horlick family-owned Ayanda Capital, controlled through Mauritius, with 5 employees and £44,509 of tangible asset.https://t.co/7KPHyzPYBs

— Prem Sikka (@premnsikka) August 6, 2020

the stench of crony capitalism, one dodgy fucker who advises the board of a dodgy shell company owned by Tory donors and also advises the UK board of trade, in this case seemingly his "advice" was to piss away a lot of money on cheap tat masks he'd procured from China that are not fit for purpose for the NHS.

Was reading Maugham's twitter thread on it this morning.

Arsenal cutting off 500 employees. Surely the first of many of these announcements across football.

Even if it's not outright corrupt (and it certainly looks dodgy af), the government's procurement procedures are clearly a mess. Given the vast sums of money currently being printed, not to mention flowing in from bond investors, and the speed at which the government needs to do things, anyone with a plausible-enough looking Powerpoint presentation and an office in the Bahamas is going to be trying to siphon a few tens of millions off here and there.

Is the woman in the middle of that awful painting supposed to be Angela Rayner?

I think she is supposed to be the QT audience member who flipped from being a tory voter to someone who enthusiastically campaigned for Corbyn after an epiphany.

No she’s from a daily sport story iirc

Lol there is my complete misunderstood interpretation then!

that prem sikka tweet sounds eerily like the opening to the vanity fair article about the scrapping of a nationwide testing plan in the US:

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/07/how-jared-kushners-secret-testing-plan-went-poof-into-thin-air

Charlie Mullins saying furlough needs to be ended from his holiday home in Marbella feels like a perfect metaphor for late capitalism pic.twitter.com/FkXIP4P93P

— 'Client Journalism' Expert (@ClientJournoExp) August 6, 2020

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/aug/06/covid-jobs-crisis-rishi-sunak-safety-net

Nothing to see here, we've been discussing for months but it's goo to see this written up

Most were vastly overqualified, and a good number had PhDs. All were now fighting for part-time work in retail. “It made me sad,” Pringle tells me. “That’s not why they spent so long studying. But it says a lot about the state of the jobs market.”

there are a number of illuminating subtexts here that i would like to unravel sometime somewhere else when i've finished internally screaming FUCK YOUUUUUUUU at the author/quotee

Even the melts are losing patience with kier leader https://t.co/cdACJTOFjH

— Bort van houten (@DaleMur88720086) August 6, 2020

hah! Kier's gently gently style of non-opposition is even trying the patience of prominent melts now

My friend buries her sister today. Her body was found decomposed after her Universal Credit was suspended and her only source of contact, her telephone was cut off. She couldn’t visit her due to ‘the advice’ from @BorisJohnson #BorisHasFailedTheUK

— Christina Farrell (@CFarrell2009) July 28, 2020

Dear God don't read the replies

👍

Oh to have such faith in anything

He is being forensic and luring Johnston into a false sense of security.

— Doctor Neutopia (@oceanclub) August 6, 2020

Lol while also luring too much (to be 20 points ahead) of the electorate into thinking he's a useless milquetoast tory twat, clever game!

One dimensional draughts on a ZX80

That reveals all the scumbag donors that Starmer was too embarrassed to reveal tells the real story

That thread..

xxp I follow that account and it’s definite sarcasm!