ForenSix Opposition - Politics in the Soon To Be Former UK in Autumn 2020

Chilling. pic.twitter.com/Tb2Ib6oix7

— Ghostface Kafka (36 Chambers) (@TheKafkaDude) October 27, 2020

Van Morrison for leader of the Labour Party...

The UK is my home. My business, directly and indirectly, provides employment for thousands of people each year. Imperial College, UK Govt and NI Executive have plunged us into lockdown destroying those livelihoods. It’s time they provide the roadmap back out.

— Van Morrison (@vanmorrison) October 27, 2020

"The Roadmap Back Out" has always been one of my fave Van deep cuts

Jon Stone seems okay. His Twitter account completely disappearing, apparently over this, though is utterly bizarre.

you don't fuck with big Keith, plenty of space for more shallow graves at his donkey sanctuary!

He seems like a good guy. Looks like he just got fucked off after a pile-on but when he spent yesterday getting into an increasingly involved argument with all manner of random reply dudes over whether or not it was morally acceptable to drive any car in inner London I did wonder what the hell he was getting into and who he thought was going to benefit from it.

Second thought was being told "we can all see you're dicking around on Twitter, do some work" but they still employ Rentoul who is apparently never off it.

If some of these Starmer cultists were as passionate about socialism as they are about defending big fuck-off posh tory bastard, fuel guzzling 4-wheel drives, then they wouldn't have voted for the creep in the first place!

Probably a hefty subset of War On The Motorist types in there as well.

it was a perfectly reasonable comment he made, anyone driving around London in one of them things is a total dick. At least some of the local Tory cunts in my locality have the argument that lots of the unadopted bits of road that lead to their converted farmhouses turn to advanced quagmire from the autumn onwards. but fuck them as well tbf!

I've scrolled past the tweet now but I noticed this morning that that someone's calculated that the cost to government of a week of feeding the hungry weans at Christmas equals half a day of eat out to help out.

Super Rishi economics are just amazing, no wonder he's been vaunted as the next PM elect

also eat out to shit out has had no long term benefits for the hospitality industry

It's weirdly fascinating how the Telegraph can run with "second wave predicted to be more deadly than the first" as the exclusive front-page splash and still fill the paper with opinion columnists dead-set against national or local lockdowns at any cost.

hey, not many people ate out to help out but every one who did formed a bubble

There was a quote from a Tory MP, probably a disgruntled one briefing to a journalist, from early in the summer that was basically "by the time we get to November, no one will be talking about whether we should have closed the pubs a week earlier, it'll be how we got into this bloody awful recession". Eat Out To Help Out makes sense in the context of that, they basically thought it would be all over by now despite all evidence pointing to the contrary.

The whole thing might have been delayed a bit if it hadn't pissed with rain throughout the Bank Holiday weekend but we'd have ended up back here anyway.

There has been no real strategy for exiting lockdown properly since the start and there still doesn't seem to be one beyond "hope the Oxford vaccine rides to our rescue soon".

this is why the government's management of the situation has been a glaring disaster that should transcend party politics in a world where anything mattered

It's weirdly fascinating how the Telegraph can run with "second wave predicted to be more deadly than the first" as the exclusive front-page splash and still fill the paper with opinion columnists dead-set against national or local lockdowns at any cost.

I've read the report now and it's saying - with the source probably coming directly from Number 10 - that the government is expecting a lower number of deaths every day for a much longer period of time. Which is another way of saying there won't be a national lockdown this winter.

(Until they realise the death rate is much higher than they predicted and once again they shut the stable door after the horse has bolted).

so the cyclist Kieth ran over is a Deliveroo worker

i'm sure deliveroo's famously robust worker protections will ensure that their employee isn't financially as well as physically ruined by their encounter with kieth's suv

i'm sure Kieth will take a stern forensic line on shady companies who don't look after their low-paid employees

Yeah the thing about him supposedly uturning in the middle of the road and his spokesman claiming he was “trying to park”, wtf was going on there like

a while back (actually probably a couple of years lol) i passed on the yorkshire ranter's suggestion that as well the the grammar-and-clarity sub editors the broadsheets should have subs specifically trained in stastics and how data and figures and diagrams can confuse (even unintentionally), and that their corrections and advice should be entering the system alongside the spelling correction, with stories very evidently based in misreadings of data checked and corrected before publication

(and that usage and practice should be look-uppable somewhere and also publicly contestable)

at the time i think matt scorned and squelched the idea -- as merely leading to more gaming the system i think? or that a rentoul tantrum would override a subs-desk finger-wag? i forget exactly the problem flagged and didn't argue back at the time, so we may simply just have been talking past each other

but 11 months into a pandemic where vital information is being presented daily in all kinds of unclear ways i still think the idea is good not bad:

I just got a Guardian notification giving the reported numbers today as deaths in the last 24 hours. I know this can be confusing but this is a huge media organisation with massive reach and it's *October*

— Daniel Howdon (@danielhowdon) October 27, 2020

Yes, this is bizarre:

A further 367 people have died in the UK in the last day

We all know, and have known for months, that there's a gap between deaths and reports of deaths.

Though iirc the live blog once claimed that 6000 people had died in Switzerland in the last 24 hours so small mercies.

Yes I remember scorning that suggestion! In my defence we were talking about qualitative data in a political polling/election context which is notoriously unreliable and prone to being spun multiple ways (although lots of the things that the data pointed to, and we dismissed, in 2017 ended up actually happening in 2019, to the transparent delight of many commentators).

That seems very different to being able to interpret and report basic factual data properly (like how many people have died in a period of time and how they're counted). It still amazes me that anyone in hard news in a national broadsheet isn't adequately trained to do that, see also that line about the London hospitality industry supposedly accounting for a quarter of the UK economy, isn't that just basic fact checking? (It also harks back to former Ilxor Dave B talking about how football journalists constantly fuck up because they can't read balance sheets).

Once again this probably comes round to the slashing of editorial budgets.

Was the 367 deaths only reported by The Guardian?

People now reporting 300+ more today.

Scotland was, during the decline of the first wave, showing a fraction (adjusted for population) of the number of deaths compared to E&W but reported 28 deaths today which puts us on par now with these figures. Not that we were far behind in total during the first wave but we did manage to get our collective arses in gear and beat the numbers right down towards the end of the first wv. It all seems so fucked.

exciting news everybody

https://www.politics.co.uk/comment-analysis/2020/10/28/polling-deep-dive-shows-labour-taking-first-steps-towards-po

Chaminda is fucking stupid.

I’m almost certain we share at least twenty mutuals because that’s exactly what I think every time I read his name. Incredibly bad work for the most part.

Well I've seen his tweets but even so all that has happened is some Lib Dems have gone back to Lab. Overall it's far too early to say anything because Brexit hasn't happened, and covid is not over, it's long-term impact on the economy on commercial rents, for example, has yet to work through.

The writing itself of this nothing story was v bad

www politics dot co dot uk is an outlet that big dunty also writes for betimes

settiing the bad opinions and analysis aside dunty's essays are also generally badly written and organised (i dirst wrote "always" and then thought i have not read all of them and very much do not intend to)

i conclude this outlet has no competent sub editors and once again grind my teeth in under-empoyed frustration

Bitter lol at me reading the EHRC report & there being repeated recommendations for training when someone does something antisemitic, which was roundly mocked whenever Corbyn and the party suggested it.

it seems to bear out the 2016-18 period was a shitshow but obviously omits the internal ratfucking that led to this. fair enough for the report not to mention this as its not really relevant who or why is responsible, its the party as a whole that is under investigation, this combined with the party settling with the panorama accusers, means this framing is vaguely discredited will be conveniently lost in the analysis over the coming weeks. seems like the usual, nothing there that anybody didn't know already and will ultimately be little more than a rorschach that allows you to go along with whatever framing you want (guardian: starmer can now draw a line under this terrible period. theJC: this is not the end but the beginning etc).

I’m on page 35 and choked reading “before 2018 there was no reliable system for recording antisemitism complaints”. Everyone was saying that!

It’s a fairly dry read because it’s about procedural issues and the scope is very limited.

i'm just jumping all over the place but ctrl + f returns nothing for some key people you might expect

it feels perfectly designed to allow everybody to say exactly what they already said but more vociferously

might easily have missed it but there's similar accounting, as in the chakrabarti report, of comparable levels of antisemitism in the wider party or accounting for whether or not instances rose or declined under corbyn. In fact it seems to accept chakrabarti's findings but faults the party for not taking up her recommendations quickly enough or fully enough.

it still allows the guardian to now refer to the corbyn years as an ugly stain on the history of the labour party and publish unverifiable claims about 'earlier drafts'

xp wasn’t that Formby’s criticism of the previous chair

whoops, earlier post miswrote, meant to say there's NO contextualising comparisons of levels of AS in the party compared to general population in this report (unlike iirc?) the chakrabarti report and (iirc other studies) that found generally lower levels of AS attitudes and declining levels under corbyn

sorry do any of my posts make any sense ugh

there will be calls to punish those responsible but there is an implicit suggestion that labour has just paid out tons of money to party officials (unnamed in the report) who contributed quite a bit to the procedural failings outlined

If reporting on this was accurate then yeah, that might be a question asked!

oh cool, i see we're onto the 'should jeremy corbyn be booted out of labour' part of the discourse now

anyway i assume the reaction from the conservative party to the ehrc report into tory islamophobia is every bit as self-flagellating when it's eventually published