brexit negging when yr mandate is is trash: or further chronicles of a garbage-fire

Should be 'likeability'

Yep, the advocate my partner had from the CAB was a complete piece of garbage and almost like a bystander for much of the appeal hearing. And then just coldly said: You've lost, taxi is coming in 5 mins - so go wait outside.

I've still never heard a justification for this system. It's nonsense in common sense, medical, and political terms. I know what the Tories are wanting to do - cut money - but I have no idea how them make that presentable.

Half of the community I'm part with is military, and right wing - but none of them defend this.

Most people try and dismiss the post ATOS assessment dead disabled people as hyperbole or as on last night's QT where the Tory voter is naming Chakraborty as "the Donald Trump of the Guardian" for mentioning them.

Even some liberal types are a bit: This talk of dead disabled people isn't quite helpful.

They would probably have died anyway.

Yeah - it's just the lack of affirmative support that's interesting. I've heard people downplay it, or 'what are you going to do?' it.

I don't think people want to hear about it or think about it, even now that they've begun to realize austerity hasn't worked.

The statistics are damning enough, but individual accounts of the some of the deaths are truly horrifying. I suppose that may be a bit "awkward" for some people.

"all schools to be converted to academies", remember that one? ... the proposal died in ignominy

― illegal economic migration (Tracer Hand)

it's still the aspiration!

If you’re determined to point to rising penury, and can find no other data to sustain your hunch, you’ll jab at whatever you can. “Food bank use is at record levels!”. Yes. So is smartphone use, and for the same reason: neither existed 20 years ago. Innovation spreads.

Brain genius Dan Hannan.

Indeed, and he's virtually considered an intellectual in the modern Conservative Party.

He also likes to get irrationally angry about the continued existence + popularity of the NHS, and blames it on "hardline leftist brainwashing". He'd send a T-800 terminator back to the 40's if he could, to kill the NHS - Not Hitler!

Many xposts. I usually lurk but I'm hoping this is useful for you a hoy hoy http://www.cpag.org.uk/content/personal-independence-payment-assessment

heh

Second edition @EveningStandard: senior sources in Government have told our @JoeMurphyLondon today that Boris’s job is now “on the line” pic.twitter.com/6WL8CMkWOr

— George Osborne (@George_Osborne) November 10, 2017

Oh so Gidzy isn't just addressing headlines directly to his own Mum at this point.

that dan hannan comment sv posted is giving me a migraine

more and more people are turning to the convenience and variety of food banks

If foodbanks can be "uplifting" + "innovative", maybe we need to start re-branding homeless people as "transient pioneer pathfinders" or something.

Evening Standard are forever printing adverts for super value food banks on their front page too.

food banks keep the big supermarket chains on their toes, and consumers are the winners

I've been dealing with a pantry moth infestation and one of the first results I found of someone giving advice on that was a woman who'd gotten the moths from food she got from a food bank

food banks: increasing biodiversity

Thanks for the advice guys. We have got the gf's mum to contact the professional who helped her with her pension forms, who knows the situation, to help her with a lot of it and they are meeting Monday. The gf also contacted her brothers carer and he has given assurances he will spend the whole assessment day with him and make him do as much as he can (Aaron hasn't left the house in 2 years and barely lets his mum or this carer in his room so this is the most important part). I've passed on all the links you gave and snippets of advice like maybe getting his carer to record it.

I think he'll be ok, is he having to go to the assessment? Because you can insist they come to him at home if he has trouble coping coping with new environments. At least that is what I'm doing when my son's assessment comes up next year. He has meltdowns and can seriously self-harm these days and taking him to an unfamiliar place where there isn't a swimming pool or a trampoline arena definitely won't be a productive experience.

doubling coping there for some reason!

I rewatched that QT clip last night and Stella Creasy visibly winces when Chakrabortty mentions the deadly effect of assessments. She absolutely winces, because of course it was one of her pals that brought in ATOS in the first place. I appreciate she has done some good work recently, but I'm so glad her wing of the party is fucked rn.

PIP deaths are the UK's version of spree shootings - 'how dare you politicise this tragic death that obviously has nothing to do with government policy'.

not nearly as extensively covered in the media tho

yeah, just the same levels of self-deception at work, when cause + effect is blindingly obvious.

I don't know what this woman's done to annoy the Tories but:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/nov/12/michael-gove-jailed-briton-iran-nazanin-zaghari-ratcliffe

Gove is far more concerned with building Boris bridges than unequivocally stating she was on fucking holiday, this morning. What a cunt, seriously, there won't be enough gulags.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/nov/12/is-this-britains-worst-postwar-government

crossfile to 'is the guardian worse than it used to be' thread, which really needs renaming

'is the guardian more in hock to the right than it was two years ago'

It could only get worse after Heath’s defeat. Harold Wilson returned, inflation rocketed, culminating in the humiliation of the IMF bailout in 1976 and Denis Healey being forced to return for a meeting of finance ministers to face public wrath.

By the way, Callaghan's government got inflation down to under 10%, when Thatcher got in it, to coin a phrase, rocketed up to near 20%.

that was a broad cross-section of public opinion

surely "LBC radio drivetime presenter" is a position that automatically renders yr opinion less than worthless?

The prime minister’s popularity is higher than Jeremy Corbyn’s The prime minister’s popularity is higher than Jeremy Corbyn’s The prime minister’s popularity is higher than Jeremy Corbyn’s The prime minister’s popularity is higher than Jeremy Corbyn’s The prime minister’s popularity is higher than Jeremy Corbyn’s The prime minister’s popularity is higher than Jeremy Corbyn’s The prime minister’s popularity is higher than Jeremy Corbyn’s The prime minister’s popularity is higher than Jeremy Corbyn’s

With who?

BBC news running Gove's comments this morning as "it's still not clear why Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was in Iran". unfuckingbelievable, these people are vermin.

There’s something really fishy about two cabinet ministers blatantly trying to wind up the Iranian judiciary, and unforgivable that they’re happy to toy with a woman’s life. Are these two arseholes especially keen on Saudis, or is this weird shit with Johnson and the ‘professor’ leading to anything? Could May kill Johnson off by suddenly deciding his behaviour was so egregious (either sex pestering or something relating to his ministerial role) that she would withdraw the whip?

maybe the Tories are confused because she didn't arrange a dozen business meetings while on holiday

Meanwhile Nazanin's husband says she is on the verge of a nervous breakdown. And Gove, who downgraded Climate Change in the national curriculum, now relaunching himself as a Green pioneer, fucks up the situation even more. The self-interested mendacity of both of these arseholes in the face of such a serious situation should be enough off their careers ffs!

to finish off*

the whole thing is such a clusterfuck of incompetence and mendacity that it’s hard to get straight what the hell theyre playing at.

what prevented Gove just saying “she was on holiday” rather than “we don’t know what she was doing out there, but if her husband says that’s what she was doing then we have to believe that’s what she was doing”?

Johnson has already given his weaselly and mealy-mouthed non-apology, so there’s no need to haver so pathetically, and of course the effect of doing so is to double down on Johnson’s original words.

it also leads to the further absurdity of Gove’s argument that we should be focusing on Iran’s desire to use “a democratically elected minister’s words” for “their own ends”. this is such palpably insane chop logic that it reflects very badly on Marr (yes i know) that he isn’t able to get any sort of hit on Gove.

using the principle of cui bono? doesn’t really get you much further than “boris johnson, sort of, certainly not gove” and certainly not Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe. that is, unless you open up a mare’s nest of covert international agendas.

going back to johnson’s original words at the select committee is equally grotesque:

https://youtu.be/Vt1vIeriink

directly before saying he thinks she was working training journalists he stresses the importance of care in escalating these consular cases and avoiding a big public campaign is that it “strengthens the hand of people using these cases for their own ends”.

this disgusting and incompetently mannered man, with his imbecile habits of expression, should certainly go on any grounds - incompetence, mendacity or both - and so now should gove, though i’ve simply no idea what that pompous windy arsehole thinks he’s doing.

srsly gove’s look of smug self-satisfaction at his own cleverness when he’s just being a dim patsy is one of the most irritating sights in britain today. along with johnson’s hunched, defensive and deliberately unclear bluster.

Boris should not get sacked, he should be out there and get it sorted. Then get relieved of his position.

That's pretty naive, firstly it assumes he's capable of doing so without doing any more damage. Secondly it suggests that having exacerbated this situation (which I think is likely to have been through incompetence rather than mendacity) he isn't now trying to prolong it to turn it to his advantage (which is where the mendacity comes in).

He clearly knows that it's a lose-lose situation for May - if she sacks him she creates a Brexit martyr and the spark of a leadership challenge. But the longer she keeps him around the weaker she looks. If he does somehow manage to resolve the situation then he returns with his reputation enhanced even if he's taking credit for other people's diplomatic work - a near certainty in that scenario.

What Gove is playing at here is harder to work out. Apparently having decided that Boris would be a disastrous PM in 2016 he's now decided that's alright now? The most obvious interpretation is that he knows that Murdoch has tired of May and wants to replace her with what he sees as a genuine Brexiter. But that isn't Boris, who could end up being the useful idiot here, but who wins in the leadership clusterfuck is anyone's guess.

Meanwhile I keep imagining what it must be like being Richard Ratcliffe and knowing your wife is in an Iranian prison and your daughter is stuck out there and then turning on the news and seeing these two blundering around all over the place. Murderous rage wouldn't even begin to describe it.

What Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe must be going through is unimaginable. And I don't think there is any change that Johnson and Gove would be treating this all in such a cavalier manner if she had been a white British citizen. They'd be trumpeting the colossal diplomatic effort at every opportunity.

that last point has felt like the blaring subtext here right from the start

Well yeah the front pages of the Sun/Express/Mail would have been screaming for it for a year now. As it stands it has relatively little publicity until Boris waded in.

Has anything decent and authoritative been written on what Iran is looking to gain from this?