"we'll change the things that need changing and that's all we'll change": the paSUKification of post-brexit politics 2021

thing is if I understand the British system correctly something that gets voted down in the lords just goes back to the commons and if they really wanna make a point of it they can pass it again, right?

sounds about right, I always get lost when looking through the process of 2nd readings .. 3rd readings ..amendments blah blah.

Seeing fewer masks worn is bad but seeing fewer Union Flag masks worn is not bad.

haha, saw my first example of that today!

Clause 38 on the face of it seems to criminalise rescue of asylum seekers at sea by removing "for gain" from an existing offence. A lot depends on the meaning of "facilitates". Organisations which "aim to assist asylum seekers' and do not charge for services are exempt, though. pic.twitter.com/IfXn8XptxM

— Colin Yeo (@ColinYeo1) July 6, 2021

Also apparently it only applies if you're male?

haha, saw my first example of that today!

Ditto. Let's hope it was the same person.

for quite some time most places i've been have been primarily maskless. I went to a busy supermarket a couple of months ago where i only saw one other person wearing a mask.

I've been going to supermarkets, two or three or more times a week, all thru the pandemic and mask wearing has gone from 10% to about 90% in that time. It increased steadily but after it was made compulsory pretty much everyone started wearing one.

... more like 95%.

I'm talking Morrisons not Waitrose btw!

I mean I think the big Sainsbury's made it to about 80% but about 50-60% today

I would say it's 95% in Sainsbury's, only maybe 60% in Asda.

Mask compliance pretty thorough in all the supermarkets I use: Waitrose, Sainsbury’s, M&S, Lidl, Aldi.

it only takes one person with no mask to come close to put you off a place or situation. I bet my local ASDA is 95% compliance but the woman who coughed beside me without a mask on six months ago has guaranteed I'll be doing online shops for the foreseeable future.

I've been in a supermarket once since 2020 and don't plan on going to one again unless it's completely necessary

offys and the like have a much lower mask take-up than the chains, too - obv they don't have security

An old work colleague of mine says a big group at his company watched Saturday's England game at some club in Mexborough where it turned out there were four people present with the rona. By Monday there were 15 people off work + self isolating. Then by Wednesday there were 20 people off work all tested as positive. He didn't mention the vacc status of these people, but I'm imagining most of them must at least have had their first shot.

yeah, wembley tonight is actually a government sponsored Pox Party, trying to get susceptible people ill and into hospital whilst it's still relatively quiet.

Whoever runs the @England TikTok account, I'll have what they're having pic.twitter.com/aH8Jd92GCo

— Joey D'Urso (@josephmdurso) July 7, 2021

^ V political post

Marxism is a hell of a drug

<I>“Gareth Southgate and the squad will have the whole nation behind them tonight. Both on and off the pitch, they have shown the best of England. There’s been only one song featured in our house since Saturday — it’s coming home.”</I>

Generally speaking I don't discuss Starmer much because it's wasted effort, there's nothing there, but occasionally a particularly large iceberg of "how is he so bad at this?" detaches from the polar cap.

Generally speaking I don't discuss Starmer much - but when I do I like to include a little failure of my own, as a tribute.

Cannot imagine anything more likely to put a person off the England team than being subjected to Three Lions on repeat for four days

I'm not really seeing the Tories indulging in any of this btw. They're happy leaving this clown to step on each and every rake that's strewn around.

has anyone told Kieth that the England players understand social democracy correctly from a Marxist viewpoint?

Day one: hope they lose now

Day four: hang draw and quarter Broudie Baddiel and Skinner in the centre circle

Tbf some of us have been on day four for a couple of decades now

“only one song featured in our house” is some pretty choice how do humans talk content

Wouldn't disgrace a Michael Jackson (Tom D.) at 12:43 7 Jul 21
I'm not really seeing the Tories indulging in any of this btw. They're happy leaving this clown to step on each and every rake that's strewn around

Today is the day.

Come on England! 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 pic.twitter.com/x4lhG92mrp

— Boris Johnson (@BorisJohnson) July 7, 2021

Gareth Southgate and the squad will be looking forward to their half time orange. They will chop up the orange and chomp on the inside of it.

Boris looks like he is doing some amount of work mustering the strength to hold up a shirt.

How do you do, fellow soccer fanatics?

Kieth is the irl Roger Nouveau, much more embarrassing than Boris imo

Kieth is embarrassing, Boris is something worse because you remember that lots of people actually like him

I was thinking about this a couple of days ago but I really don't know..

It's just going to be total chaos. I honestly think the economy is going to take a major hit as a result, not least because people won't want to go out when there are 100,000 cases a day. Let's see what happens, but I'm expecting some kind of u-turn / reimposing / lockdown.

— Ellie Mae O'Hagan (@elliemaeohagan) July 7, 2021

It's more about a new variant that beats the vaccine, but that can be imported from elsewhere anyway, like Delta

I'm not sure either just what level of disruption there will be from hundreds of thousands of cases – it's not like you're either dead or fine, even with vaccination an awful lot of people are surely going to be sick enough to need to stay off work. The risk of that affecting entire teams/floors will also make halfway sensible companies want to continue WFH etc

Reckless reopenings seem to be a trend p much everywhere I have connections to - Portugal, Germany, Belgium (not France yet I don't think?). Portuguese govt falling over itself to reopen everything to avoid another year without much tourism revenue, results are that Porto and Lisbon are already back under some lockdown measures. Of course most places don't have our vaccine count so the chaos springs forth quicker.

Been seeing VISIT KOREA all over London buses, like, surely the amount of potential tourists who can afford a trip like that yet are ok w/ quarantines is vanishingly small? And why would South Korea want them right now anyway?

Did they specify it was S. Korea?

A new, vaccine-resistant variant would radically change things but that’s always going to be a risk.

If you want to guarantee cases get down below the rate they currently are, idk how that can be done without closing schools and reimposing a strict lockdown and there is zero political (or likely public) will to do that in a country close to 100% vaccinated at 18+.

WFH where possible will likely continue for the foreseeable though.

Trying to separate bits of the economy:

- Loads of companies will continue to work from home or part-working (as stet says there are continued risks), which will be more permanent or to be used to extract cheaper rents on office space. In any case, think there will be less ppl in the City.

- Do think international travel will be reduced for the foreseeable, yes. Too much of a risk unless you can afford, as Daniel says.

- Staying away from shops. Perhaps, there has been a switch to online anyway. Retail has been fucked for a while even before the pandemic. This will radically change the look of our streets, perhaps.

None of these trends will be changed by the government's announcements this week apart from:

- Entertainment. This is what we'll find out.

Brady's re-election is also a reminder of why Johnson is dropping masks and nearly all other Covid restrictions on July 19: ministers privately say the government no longer had the Tory votes to keep the measures in place. Relying on Labour would have been v difficult for the PM.

— Sebastian Payne (@SebastianEPayne) July 7, 2021

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jul/07/keir-starmer-labour-muslim-voters-red-wall-islamophobia

this is the best Chakrabortty piece I've read in a long time on the hollow opposition playing racially divisive games or as some idiots would have it "voting for hope" sad lol

It is a good piece. It could also have thrown Labour's new 'Buy British' procurement strategy into that mix....

After the banking crash of 2008, David Cameron and George Osborne pretended that the fault lay with Labour’s “pile of debt” – its spending on Sure Start centres and the like. It was politically cynical and economically illiterate, yet Ed Miliband’s team felt they had to go along with it, and never made a convincing case for the transformation that state investment can bring. The result has been over a decade of destruction of our public services, flatlining wages and the sour, angry, zero-sum politics we have today.

Can’t be repeated often enough.

I'd have also added that they got twice the number of votes in B+S in GE 19 with unambiguous anti-austerity messaging and without pandering to racists. And how austerity does disproportionately affect ethnic minority communities in the UK. But Kieth isn't interested in these voters anymore.

Once may be a gaffe; twice is becoming a habit. The comments to the Times reappeared in the Guardian and all over social media, except this time the party made no apology. To the best of my knowledge, it was only when I raised the remarks with Labour that it officially condemned them. Just a few years after Jeremy Corbyn so disastrously dealt with Jewish complaints about antisemitism, his successor is fast developing a new race problem.

It’s the same race problem. You can’t berate cynical right-wing Labour members for painting Muslim voters as bigoted and dispensable without acknowledging that a substantial chunk of the antisemitism allegations directed towards members were little more than the targeted harassment of Muslims and an attempt to dislodge a leader perceived as too sympathetic to them.

Freeland wouldn't have been happy if Aditya dropped too much truth in one Graun opinion piece

for me the most important point aditya makes in that article is insisting on the larger repercussions of starmerism, not just within the labour party but beyond. i think there's a lot of discussion that narrows its focus to the labour party itself, from a kindof 'forget it jake' exasperation from the left (im sure every single one of us in this thread have espoused this position in the starmer years) to the the salt-the-earth realpolitik of the labour right. Often, even in discussing how drearily internecine this all is, what gets weirdly lost (though we all know it) is that the front line of left v right in this country is not between labour and the tories but something that runs through the labour party itself. I'm not saying that this will always be the case but the pasokification is frustratingly drawn out, seemingly precluding the emergence of any alternative, something that seems like a real pipe dream now (but then who would have anticipated the corbyn-led opposition in 2014?).

I think this is the frustration you see everywhere, or at least its a frustration I feel so I might be simply projecting, that its somehow impossible to abandon obsessing about what Starmer is doing. Particularly given how 'bipartisan' norms (to the extent they are adhered to) are largely structured around tory v labour, to relinquish the party to the radical centrists is to abandon to 'consensus' all the overton-chasing dogwhistles (and worse) that this coalition of wingnuts and cynical opportunists will insist with various degrees of sincerity makes them electable.

The depressing record of the labour right in matching the tories in racism and authoritarianism seems already to be in full swing as evidenced in b&s and this has I think really dangerous implications for where the 'consensus view' is going. Idk, this is all very circular and I feel very hopeless about a lot of things right now, but Labour's response to the mishandling of covid by the government shows how disastrously consequential it is for all of us to have such an inconsequential opposition and it is deeply frustrating to be pulled back, again and again, into a mainstream discourse bounded to the left by this man:

Let's call the Delta variant what it is: the Johnson variant.

The Prime Minister left our borders open and hasn't fixed test & trace.#PMQs #JohnsonVariant pic.twitter.com/Domv8E5IF3

— Keir Starmer (@Keir_Starmer) July 7, 2021