Free as a Dodo: UK Politics Welcomes 2021

very un-short king behaviour to hide your manlet size with photo tricks pic.twitter.com/2Cmo917EtB

— joe (@spinningjoe) March 3, 2021

it must great fun doing photos with boss line-ups with Rishi

Corporation tax rise by 6% but only for the 10% most profitable firms and I expect it can be dropped or rendered ineffective by 2023 anyway.

well done Kieth - you managed to nudge him into doing the half-arsed CT rise both parties wanted

either that or it was just a pointless self-clowning Comms nightmare that will send Labour further down in the polls

they call it Great Britain for a reason...

(labour party political broadcast, wasn't great)

So from twitter it looks like Sunak borrowed some of Lab left ideas, and Starmer is like five years behind.

he's such a rank amateur - he's opposed a policy popular with the public that was never going to happen anyway for a week. And then revised his position and looked like a complete joke when the tories get all the credit for doing the watered down version compared to the kite they were flying last week. He's fallen into the most rudimentary of traps set for him - so in other words he's a complete fucking idiot.

🚨Rishi Sunak's own well-off seat has been prioritised for levelling up cash.

He says the fund should invest in areas like "ex-industrial areas, deprived towns, coastal communities".

But Richmondshire is 251 out of 317 on govt's own deprivation indexhttps://t.co/vEAhSakBaA

— Arj Singh (@singharj) March 3, 2021

and 90% of the Towns Fund has gone to towns that returned a Tory MP in 2019 - "naked pork barrel politics".

even the Sheep on the Dales in Richmondshire are tories

All sheep are Tories iirc

this is mainly why I quit vegetarianism iirc

Oh aye you shouldn't sympathise with a shep, he'd eat you without conscience given a chance

There should be an 8ft tall statue of Rishi erected in all these red wall Towns that have being recent beneficiaries of tory largesse

Save money by having lifesize statues - 4 ft tall.

there was interview with the little twerp this morning and has this really annoying stylistic affectation of a 10 - 20 second pause before he answers every question, like as if you need some IBM mainframe pause to spit out glib soundbites and bare-faced lies.

he also carried on talking well after the interviewer had finished. i think they put some kind of delay on his line, shaun-ryder-like, lest he let rip with the f-bombs.

Ah right I wondered why there were a lot of pauses of nothing but site noise ambience - it was better than listening to him talk tbf

that noise, and the delay, was actually the North/South divide

it's almost like the BBC management are worried one of their own might accidentally apply some scrutiny to him and then feign technical difficulties + quickly cut back to Justin Webb

Amusing!

It's good to see ILX poster Calzino highlighting the investigative journalism of Oliver Eagleton. His work has impressed me lately and it's remarkable that he is apparently writing a whole book on KS.

obv he has to be very thorough in his research and cautious when writing a book about a QC but now it's been revealed that Kieth isn't even competent enough to navigate the Labour Party into losing a court case they wanted to lose, then perhaps he can let rip a bit more! It's a shame last year we all somehow missed the stuff about the disgraceful intervention in the McKinion business during his DPP leadership, and all the rendition/torture compliance stuff that he didn't put in his campaign vid.

Feels like a bit of a bad business move tbh, a Starmer post-mortem might be a better bet.

shouldn't be too long a wait.

by the time he's finished writing it he should be good to go

I know it's already been said a hundred times in the last couple of days but kind of ugly does it take to make Theresa May look like a decent compassionate human being? Starmer: hold my pint of tory heartlands wanker beverage a minute

Will Gary Barlow sod off?

I know, wrong thread, but.

well he is a tory tbf!

Some tasty exchanges between Nicola Sturgeon and Ruth the Mooth at FMQs, Sturgeon relentlessly pointing out that Davidson is not standing in the forthcoming Scottish elections because she is about to become Baroness Davidson.

Tories asking other party leaders to resign for lying is it

I'd never heard so much talk about The Ministerial Code on the bbc before the last couple of days - I think Laura K has only just found out its existence.

those days when Bush still had a rep to protect seem a long time ago, now he's reduced to RTing dreadful Tom Hamilton pieces on Starmer. Good for some windup value though.

I don't know Tom Hamilton, but The Critic appears to be an extraordinarily right-wing magazine.

Bush is dire.

I think he's an ex-Miliband advisor so he should know his stuff when it comes to writing about doomed-to-failure Labour leaders. Lol his is piece talking out of both sides of his mouth: Starmer couldn't win an election but he's definitely going in the right direction!

Hedges as ever OTM

Something very familiar about this. pic.twitter.com/DmMNFpYIGi

— Simon Hedges (@Orwell_Fan) March 4, 2021

Tom Hamilton is an absolute waster and a prick.

Latter day Stephen Bush is just appalling, constantly.

I do wonder if the desperate search for pol analysts that aren't frothing-at-the-mouth anti-Corbyn made ppl buy into some pretty poor thinkers.

Not the same thing but the biggest display of blatant careerism in that respect for me was Ben Judah, fresh off some sympathetic coverage of the left, being amongst the first to go in for a huzzah Rishi puff piece.

the biggest moment of national solidarity since World War II

this about hating Meghan?

Yougov has it CON 45 LAB 32

I used to think YouGov were biased and often the outlier amongst pollsters in adding a couple of points to the Tories (apart from crunch time) when Jez was leader. Now I put them at the top of my UK's Most Accurate Pollster chart.

got to hand it to kieth, he is well on his way to opening up that fabled 20-point gap between labour and the tories

https://resize.hswstatic.com/w_290/gif/bungled-personal-flight-attempt-1.jpg

Starmer’s approach of trying to introduce himself to the public as someone they can imagine as prime minister at some point in the future, as a reasonable person who shares their instincts and offers “constructive opposition” rather than constant attacks, and as someone who is distinctively different in approach and style from the previous leader they rejected so decisively, has been sensible.

quoted from the Tom Hamilton piece

*How* exactly is Rishi Sunak bringing austerity back to public services?

✂️

A thread…🧵1/

— Ben Chu (@BenChu_) March 4, 2021

we've a got a tory government blatantly doing continuity austerity but repeatedly saying they aren't doing it in their messaging and then a fuckwitted opposition effectively talking up austerity (with some weak repudiations of it that have zero cut through) and trying to fight them on 2015 terms again.

A senior staffer recently told victims at a Windrush engagement event that compensation is wildly delayed (and has to be squeezed like blood from stone when it does come) because @ukhomeoffice has to be careful, what with it being taxpayer money.

https://t.co/cW9PpJQzE7

— Windrush Lives (@WindrushLives) March 4, 2021

I guess the austerity rhetoric still works for racism. would be nice if someone was challenging either of those things

I take it taxpayers actually means "us" (tories/state/bourgeoisie/etc) but is supposed to be understood as meaning all white citizens- who are themselves trusted to pretend to understand it literally while also pretending to forget the victims would qualify if that were the case- so many layers of shit to the seemingly-gratuitous cruelty here. not even touching the six figures

except to say it obviously makes a mockery of the whole pretense, and also that patel is evil but bullying home office civil servants is extremely good

if you can survive working with Priti it's good money. I'm going to stop playing Euromillions and start applying for every vacancy in the home office.

"An aide in the DWP received a £25,000 government payout after a threatened lawsuit in which Patel was named."

although I've noticed they have one level of out of court settlement for plebs and then the premium one for the billy big bollocks Knight Commander of the Order.

pic.twitter.com/lGFFfptSPe

— P.G. Chodehouse (@mynnoj) March 5, 2021

gif of the week