Free as a Dodo: UK Politics Welcomes 2021

TONIGHT: shocking Channel 4 News report reveals how hundreds of overseas students have become destitute in the UK during lockdown, and turned to food banks in desperation.

One food bank in E London caters exclusively for 1700 international students a week, who queue for hours. pic.twitter.com/cvac5vzC04

— Hayley Barlow (@Hayley_Barlow) January 29, 2021

Aaron Bastani is Britain's best political analyst.

Slightly less keen on Walker but he understands the virus and the pandemic better than most.

I've given up on Butler since his last toxic LRB performance.

But Novara overall would seem to be the best thing to happen to UK media since, say, the launch of Channel Four in 1982.

Channel 4 has been a stain for at least 10 years now

Yes, Channel Four is not what it was, and hasn't been this century. But in 1982 it was something distinctive and important.

talking of channel 4, that fucking narcissistic creep Bastadi should have put a red triangle on that bare chested selfie!

Aaron Bastani is Britain's best political analyst.

Let’s get school staff vaccinated and all our children back in school.https://t.co/y0GgUYXrLo

— Keir Starmer (@Keir_Starmer) January 30, 2021

like a fucking dog with a bone this cunt is, vaccinating the teachers doesn't prevent schools being incubation chambers - it just reduces the odds of the teachers dying you fucking ridiculously voiced poltroon.

Looks like someone agrees with you.

Schools absolutely should be the first thing to re-open, but when they do they will be the leading vector of transmission.

In the absence of a Covid strategy like E Asia, with government enforced quarantine measures and effective test and trace, 2021 is going to look like 2020. https://t.co/9RNQfwvwtp

— Aaron Bastani (@AaronBastani) January 30, 2021

it's probably not really funny but I was chuckling the other day when I heard a news report on Duterte reinforcing a total curfew on children with words to the effect of: go home and stay glued to the tv a bit longer!

This'll be fine, nothing could possibly go wrong here

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-55866285

They’re going to get utterly fucked once people can start seeing each other again thanks to the vaccine program

Westminster voting intention:

CON: 41% (+4)
LAB: 38% (-3)
LDEM: 7% (+1)
GRN: 4% (-)

via @OpiniumResearch, 28 - 29 Jan
Chgs. w/ 15 Jan

— Britain Elects (@BritainElects) January 30, 2021

There does seem an incredible over reliance on the vaccine to "get schools to re-open" (though they've never really been closed, messaging that really fucks me off).

There has been no moment where Johnson hasn't lied guessed and fucked us over for the sake of money or just wanting the esteem of idiots, why would the vaccination program be any different?

do we know when zoos will start getting the vaccine?

Hopefully Kieth will sort that himself, starting with the tigers

of all the fucking nonentities on twitter why is it that I let the maths lady from countdown annoy me the most?

Well, we can’t say that there weren’t any warning signs can we, and you can bet there’s plenty of this going round dim celebrity social media now. pic.twitter.com/j7DFgjoETv

— Flying_Rodent (@flying_rodent) January 30, 2021

Something to do with minimally talented semi-celebs having a disproportionate audience for their thick dishonest normie hate speech I guess

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EtBw8nhXMAUL0hz?format=png&name=small

let's harness a block of concrete to this useless arsehole and throw him into a very deep reservoir.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EtBw8nhXMAUL0hz?format=png&name=small

When your legacy is "repeatedly demanded a deadly virus got spread more"

Literally one reference, in passing, to ‘Nightingale classrooms’, without specifying what that means, and nothing else apart from ‘vaccinate teachers and have at it’.

If they are like the nightingale hospitals then I assume it means they will be sham classrooms without teachers, classroom assistants, administration or any purpose at all that sit empty for months. In principle then I agree with Kieth that classrooms need to be empty for months right now.

to be fair he's finally managed to take an actual position on something after like a year, this must be very exciting for him. it's terrible and will get people killed but why would he care

he's taken such a bad position he's in complete accordance with Tony Blair/the covid hawks of the Conservative party and getting outflanked on the left here by Jeremy Cunt

Didn’t the Nightingale hospitals fail because they didn’t have any fucking staff? Fuck this prick

Otoh, you’d have to imagine that things... could only get better?

Fuck it, coming clean, I did this pic.twitter.com/7PQZYUvyTv

— Sanitary Naptime (@SanitaryNaptime) January 30, 2021

Home office in being cunts shocker, but the brazenness of the ideology is breathtaking.

The assessment states that destitute asylum seekers are “not analogous” to British citizens and other permanent residents who are in need of state welfare assistance, and that the “less generous” support provided to this group is “justified by the need to control immigration”.
“Any provision of support over and beyond what is necessary to enable the individuals to meet their housing and subsistence needs could undermine public confidence in the asylum system and hamper wider efforts to tackle prejudice and promote understanding within the general community and amongst other migrant groups,” it states.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/asylum-seekers-napier-barracks-home-office-b1793951.html

Ending discrimination by jailing refugees

we need more discrimination in order to prevent more discrimination- one of powellism’s sneakiest rhetorical tricks, beloved by new and old labourites as much as by tories and (other) fascists

this would be easier to argue against if the necessity for ethnic cleansing wasn’t already common sense which even lifelong antiracists have been unwilling to challenge in a general sense

is this the line the undercover lads take nowadays?!

I dunno seems like a cop out

Fuzzy logic

thread police vs plodding poster

We live in hell https://t.co/75zmc7QGaY

— Dawn Foster (@DawnHFoster) January 31, 2021

jesus fucking christ

ah well it's not like anything matters

boris laser-focused on finding work for this evil fuck in destroying what’s left of the uk’s already deeply-cursed media hellscape

Novara are fucked now.

well it’s the FCC model. just plug in whatever partisan you want to, with one objective: line the pockets of your media allies and punish who you perceive as your enemy. and frankly no matter what pro-business tory the bbc has as DG or chairman, the bbc will always be a threat to the profits of commercial media in the uk.

Doesn’t the Ofcom job relate more to broadcast media?

the BBC website is pretty popular!

and there’s lots of crossover anyway i.e. times radio

the papers threw an almighty fit when bbc news launched its website in like 1997 - days it wasn’t in the bbc’s remit

“days” = “said”

This is the horror of it - ofcom’s remit is really broad. Includes broadband and all the comms areas that used to be done by Oftel. Putting Dacre in there is genuinely a most Trumpian move, in the sense of putting people in charge of quite specialist areas who both know absolutely fuck-all about the domain and are happy to wreck it.

Did this take strike either of you as inaccurate or wrong headed?

Keir Starmer, recently announced plans for a UK-wide constitutional commission to consider how power, wealth and opportunity can be devolved to the most local level. Advised on by Gordon Brown, it will be the boldest project Labour has embarked on for a generation.

Arse Sarwar thinks a proposed commission by Kieth and overseen by Broon is just the radical type of stuff to put the brakes on increasingly popular calls for indy ref2.

i don’t know enough about it to say, really, but i like its optimism! it is true that ofcom and broadcast media are a different beast than the papers, which basically do what they want.

xpost

I think Moses underestimates the power of a wrecker in a role like that. A chair who wants to undo regulation (like the requirement for news to be impartial) will have a lot less opposition to prevent them.

The risk for the BBC in particular is in how Ofcom enforces decisions and where it chooses to apply market-value tests - both of which can tie up decisions and plans for literally years, and both areas where the chair has more freedom to operate

It was a Ofcom decision to severely restrict the size of the catalogue that essentially wrecked iPlayer’s lead and gave Netflix a year’s advantage against it in the UK. And that was with a broadly well-meaning chair.

So yeah, I think Dacre will find it a job he mostly hates but that also probably won’t stop him causing long-lasting damage.