Free as a Dodo: UK Politics Welcomes 2021

I'm pro public health authoritarianism that prevents a runaway disease causing a huge population die-off, it's a difficult line to tread because unfettered power is like a drug to governments, the slippery slope etc... but fuck knows!

Yeah, it's obviously something everyone on the left has to struggle with at the moment, but measures such as closing down restaurants, venues, making masks obligatory in public spaces, even curfews can and have been done by other govts while maintaining the right to protest and assembly.

https://c8.alamy.com/comp/ENR810/victory-in-europe-day-70th-anniversary-street-party-residents-of-a-ENR810.jpg

remember in 2020 when the cops had a more liberal approach to the freedom of assembly

both of those Owen Jones tweets are OTM, it's dumb to play this as a binary

― Daniel_Rf, Sunday, 14 March 2021 bookmarkflaglink

This is the nuance OJ is incapable of hence why he posted like that.

https://gal-dem.com/closed-borders-covid-sensible-but-under-tories-asking-for-trouble/

Labour have now announced they are voting *against* the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill not whipping to abstain pic.twitter.com/l1XWTuly1J

— Dawn Foster (@DawnHFoster) March 14, 2021

Oh noes what will the Red Wall think?

it's amazing how much compromise there is in Kieth when the party is dying in the polls and local Elections are coming up. It might have finally clicked that many of those who voted Corbyn and who despise him or are generally unimpressed with his leadership are still much more likely to vote for him than the much smaller subset of grunts in the Red Wall are.

Until an hour ago, Labour MPs were being told to abstain on Tuesday's Police Bill.

That's just changed. They now say it's "a Bill that is seeking to divide the country. It is a mess, which could lead to harsher penalties for damaging a statue than for attacking a woman." pic.twitter.com/a62lgX2eUb

— Rachael Venables (@rachaelvenables) March 14, 2021

joke party

That Debbonaire reply to Diane comes off so snipey. Joke party indeed.

not much of a "gotcha there!" from Debbonaire when the same shadow home sec was calling for the bill to go much further than it does only 5 days ago.

Approval of the job Johnson is doing has increased by six percentage points to 45% over the past fortnight, while 38% disapprove – down three points. Starmer’s ratings have held steady, with 34% approving, up one point, and 29% disapproving, also up one point.

the forensic ratio, as it's known

"getting deeper into the shit" = the new "holding steady".

Keir Starmer says despite Met Police's handling of the Sarah Everard vigil: "I don't think Cressida Dick should resign".

just another "moment" nothing to see here

I don't know why they bother asking him, he doesn't think anyone anywhere should ever resign for any reason whatsoever.

more damning evidence that he is not a real Arsenal fan

I'm sure if someone had asked him he'd have insisted Neil Lennon could still turn things around this season.

Now to take a big sip of coffee and google who’s next in line should Cressida Dick get sacked.

In July 2020, in an appearance before the London Assembly's police and crime committee, House defended the police officers who stopped, searched and handcuffed the athlete Bianca Williams earlier that month and the officers who fired a stun gun at an elderly man in his own home the previous month. House said the officers involved had been treated unfairly and that widely-shared videos of each event failed to present a "full picture". While House claimed that the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) had exonerated the officers in the latter case, the IOPC said it had not considered the case.

Love that impartial BBC - "Maintaining public order at protests is one of the hardest jobs in modern policing." as a subheadline on the front page.

Chants of 'fuck Starmer' at the Sister's Uncut protest today at New Scotland Yard do not bode well for his future as Labour leader

— Jason Bond (@Bond_JasonBond) March 14, 2021

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/14/conservatives-party-england-tories-populists

Playing the old tunes again, though it's interesting this chump doesn't even comment on Labour's fucking the flag strategy.

The Tories will always be the party of England now. 2017 conveniently forgotten.

Meanwhile other things are happening:

Police have come back into the crowd to stand around the Winston Churchill statue. Heard from a legal observer that a commanding officer told his colleagues “protect Churchill at all costs”. Chants of “protect women not statues”. pic.twitter.com/WJlVr18sfK

— Sian (sh-arn) Bradley (@sianabradley) March 14, 2021

Stupid fucking country.

Has anybody ever even made a credible threat against that Churchill statue or is it just an ongoing paranoid fever dream caused by what happened to the Colston statue?

I hope some enterprising individual chains him to a vehicle and speeds away under cover of darkness one day, anyway

My immediate thought was I hope someone blows the cunt up.

churchill statue is absolutely equated w the mythology of churchill & the fear of its destruction is the fear of the de(con)struction of that myth & by association the whole legitimacy of empire (/britain). it can't go soon enough

MS Paint is a free application that allows you to pic.twitter.com/u7KFaUbVO8

— Max Tundra (@MaxTundra) March 14, 2021

I was watching The Living Dead the other night and the same cursed statue popped up in the Curtis interview with the thick Thatcher loving copper who had campaigned to get a spotlight on it and he comes out with a right humdinger, he says: Everyone has wanted to give us a good hiding since year dot guv.. the Romans failed miserably really ... they never even really managed to conquer all of England.

lol

Bayeux fuckin' Tapestry, ya walloper.

edstone is actually less vague & more ambitious than anything currently on offer

who's this wanker

ACAB was used by criminals, punks, and Rick from Young Ones. In this context it’s weird. Are people really saying they hate all cops? Or do they actually want police to change?

— Max Daly (@Narcomania) March 14, 2021

Apparently it's the guy who does the rant in the middle of Power In The Darkness?

The Living Dead also covered the covert operation to successfully bury and hide a load of the Nazi regime's/Kaiser Wilhelm's/Fred The Great's fave statues for decades, preventing them from getting dynamited after the war. Not that any of those leaders who ordered them to be destroyed would suddenly start questioning the validity of their own celebratory monuments to slavery, colonial wars of conquest and annihilation etc. Although I bet there would have been plenty of the British establishment who would have preferred shipping them back to the British Museum as spoils of war trophies.

who's this wanker

his twitter bio says 'drugs editor at Vice' which might literally be the funniest job for someone making this particular complaint to have (I know that 2021 Vice is not 2006 Vice but still)

the prissiness seems like a bad fit for both edgelord vice and SJW vice

also the 70s-80s UK comedy portrayals of leftism feel way more pernicious than they used to now thanks to how they're used

the drugs correspondent from Vice: If you want to know the time ask a nice bobby

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2021/03/owen-hatherley-i-really-hoped-grenfell-metropolitan-elite-debate-would-just-die

Really good interview, and total flip to the John Harris guff.

The Met police told women they couldn’t come together for a vigil. This is the response. pic.twitter.com/yw007qm5yr

— Aamna Mohdin (@aamnamohdin) March 14, 2021

Why is it so important for her to go into politics? “If moderate people don’t go into politics then you leave it to egotistical extremists who are happy to lie. Moderates have got to go in. I’m a radical and a moderate.” In what way? “I do radical things, but my politics are moderate. I perform in French, German and Spanish as well as English when I’m a standup, so that’s slightly radical. And I’m radical because I came out as transgender. I’ve run about 130 marathons for charity. That’s slightly radical.”

Eddie Izzard's self declared radicalism summed up as her being a trans woman and her multilingualism and running lots of marathons and aligning herself with the biggest bunch of cross-party transphobes in the UK. All these decades of being a vacuous Blairite arse-kisser and serial dabbler in NEC politics and she still is seemingly incapable of ever articulating anything explicitly political and still just talks in mindless babble speak.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/mar/15/sarah-everard-vigil-organiser-met-chief-should-not-resign-cressida-dick

Lol @ Reclaim the streets putting the demo together and then not attending and now going onto say Cressida Dick shouldn't resign over her role of policing the event they did not attend.

(xp) So modest too.

Runs a lot of marathons for charity, doesn't like to talk about it. Actually wasn't there once another colourful celebrity/personality who famously ran a lot for charities?

Now then

isn't being a radical centrist effectively just a moderate Tory?

she's a UNICEF ambassador I think, so that requires sympathetically visiting places we've bombed to rubble, doing photos with war orphans and never criticising Blair.

Disclaim the Streets