love* in the time of plague (and by love* i mean brexit* and other dreary matters of uk politics)

There is paywalled piece in today's Times where some Cambridge think tank academics are saying if the death rate spirals out of control this could end up breaking up the UK. Starmer might be treading on egg shells but I bet Sturgeon won't be scared of "politicising" the UK government's clown shoes bungling of this pandemic from the start.

DO YOU WANT TO KNOW MORE LESS

Sturgeon is in a different position to Starmer in that she's actually in power rather than in opposition and can make decisions that have a concrete effect. I don't know the extent to which Scottish policy has diverged up to now but if the situation deteriorates north of the border then her name is on it as well.

she did hang the chief medical officer so at least she's tough on lockdowns

she also took the bold step of refusing to suck the fingers of an entire ward of coronavirus patients, unlike boris

going back a bit, no answers for this?

Also, while we are here, and without naming names, why do melts consider Jeremy Corbyn ‘arrogant’? IDGI.

― santa clause four (suzy), Saturday, April 11, 2020 2:41 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

i answered

had the unconscionable temerity to be correct for 40 years

it's as simple as "comfortably bourgeois people don't like to be accused of being beastly, don't want to have any money taken off them"

whether Corbs was a bit of an old prig/bore who i'd happily argue with from the left and from intersectional perspectives is a different question, but i'm pretty sure that wasn't the E4 Celebrity Massive's issue with him

sorry yeah i didn’t mean to dismiss your answer. i think you’re right, i think also his not paying sufficient obeisance to the forms of british politics is part of it. there’s an old clip on YouTube of him being interviewed on the topic ‘why are labour politicians from non-elite backgrounds so scruffily dressed?’ which speaks to the question, i mean to say, answers the question

Announcing that you aren't going to hold the UK govt to account takes some arrogance. It's like saying fuck you I wont do what you tell me to do to the membership that elected him.

there’s a marina hyde piece having a go at him about antisemitism which i think kind of elucidated the psychology of people disliking him for me. but i don’t want to go and look for it because it will depress and anger me tbh

It's based on the idea that Corbyn knew deep down that the project was doomed to failure and chose to stay in position anyway knowing that the end result would be a big Tory majority with all the damage that would do.

That reading of things generally didn't survive the 2017 election and has only really been resurrected (gleefully) since December. Its also arrogant to believe that the two big leadership majorities he won were somehow irrelevant in all this but these people rarely display that level of self-examination.

he’s not saying he won’t do it! he says that challenging questions will need to be asked in the future!

*distant sound of a can being kicked over the horizon*

(xp to calz obv)

Also if it hadn't been him then it would have been Andy Burnham who no absolutely no one bothers to talk about in wistful "the Labour PM we could have had" tones.

nah i didn't think you'd dismissed it thom it was just easy to miss :)

like i said, i don't think it's complicated, and personally i think it's easy to spot when somebody is "he rubs me up the wrong way" versus "even the prospect of very tame parliamentary socialism gives me the vapors" and it's invariably been the latter. there were very very very few good faith arguments against Corbyn as leader that acknowledged the underlying acceptance of our current economic settlement. that's why so many of the "critiques" were ad hom, and ad hom extended to treating every one of us happy to see the party shift leftwards as brainwashed personality cultists.

i even wondered on occasion whether physiognomy had something to do with it, but maybe this is no more than thomp's 'scruffily dressed' point.

i have enough dour relentlessly rulebound lefty friends to know how grinding that can be to engage with, but i can honestly say i've never thought about voting Tory just to spite them.

well maybe v occasionally

It's also a way for the Labour Right to deflect their share of the blame. They already react with ostentatious fury to the idea that they may have contributed to this disaster, because their self-image is based on the idea that they were the only ones with the welfare of the party in mind all along.

It's not that different to the FBPE ultras refusal to accept that Brexit intransigence eventually led to a much harder Brexit than we needed to have. Basically it was all the fault of the people you opposed and not your lot.

good point, the fact that those two groups broadly share a very similar demographic is entirely coincidental i'm sure

can't help coming back to the feeling that career pols are just all bad people tho

a gross oversimplification that conserves precious energy and time

Blaming everyone else except your own team isn't really confined to any one ideological standpoint tbh.

by "career pols" i really mean all MPs, not an ideological thing. to reach that status you have to have put the hard yards in tunnelling thru godawful hierarchical party apparatuses for way too long to stay sane

❤️ you all.

The same people charged JC with being defensive or peevish when interviewed and apart from the odd ‘let me finish?’ that doesn’t really stack up either.

He should have just followed the now standard Tory approach of trashing interviews by loudly talking over interviewers.

all cops? bastards? in MY national crisis?

A hospital trust has said it was forced intervene with Cambridgeshire police after officers stopped staff on their way to work and told them NHS ID cards were insufficient evidence of essential travel.

In its newsletter, seen by the Guardian, bosses at Cambridge University hospitals foundation trust said they had received reports from staff who had been “stopped by the police on their way to work and asked to confirm if their travel was essential”. The newsletter went on:


When staff showed their NHS ID and said they were on their way into or from work, they were advised by the police officers that this was insufficient evidence of essential travel.

Following these reports the trust has been in discussions with Cambridgeshire Constabulary. It has confirmed it will remind all police officers that such an explanation together with an NHS ID badge is sufficient evidence.

how fucking thick do you need to be to look at an nhs id and consider it insufficient evidence of whatever you’ve decided ‘proper’ need to travel is

Cambs police covering themselves in glory all week. Hope the NHS workers had an intense discussion with them around the subjects of sex and travel.

If you think that by going for a picnic in a rural location no one will find you, don’t be surprised if an officer appears from the shadows! We are covering the whole county #urbanandrural #StayHomeSaveLifes #ProtectTheNHS 2813 7702 pic.twitter.com/hieQ86dM9R

— Central Community Team (@CentralBedsCPT) April 11, 2020

xp yeah I don't recall my local police franchise making much news of any kind before (main preoccupation in Cambridge is trying and failing to stop bike theft) but they're not exactly rising to the occasion here

particularly since, iirc, the slowness of processing complaints was one of the main sticks used to beat corbyn by the less hysterical commentators, and a key part of the narrative.

There's been a spate of "He's only been in the job a few days and the committee got back to me #finallyanoppositionagain" on Twitter as well.

So much exuberance! xp

Owen Jones has the report, hope whoever sent it to him finds time to leak it. Don’t think it’s a vindication of Corbyn - there were and are failures - but it’s really bad news for the Labour right who were the crew who took the narrative from “the Labour Party is institutionally antisemitic” (which implicated them) to “Jeremy Corbyn is the poison of the Labour Party”.

If you needed any more evidence that factionalism played an outsize part, consider the fact that many people who pushed the “existential threat” narrative the hardest are now engaged in playing down concerns about the government’s handling of the crisis. A crisis that, among many other damning statistics, is responsible for disproportionate deaths among British Jews.

well there it is - a cash value on how much damage Tory cuts did to national preparedness

can’t wait for starmer to hold the government accountable for this shocking state of affairs

UK government stockpiles containing protective equipment for healthcare workers in the event of a pandemic fell in value by almost 40% over the past six years, the Guardian has found.

Analysis of official financial data suggests £325m was wiped off the value of the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) emergency stockpile, reducing it from £831m in 2013 under the Conservative-led coalition government to £506m by March last year.

Nice Steely Dan homage by Central Bedfordshire police there

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51fiHb3E7kL._SX466_.jpg

you will be surprised to learn that i've already seen our favourite social media melts reading this story as "so Corbyn was a wrong 'un, can't blame the good decent people of the Labour right for trying to fit him up"

Boris out of hospital on Easter Sunday.

What were the odds...

jesus didn’t last much last easter sunday tho iirc

er, past Easter Sunday

says here he rose again in accordance with the scriptures and shall sitteth at the right hand of god the father he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the father h e will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead and his kingdom will have no end

jesus i dont know abt

Spaffed onto a wall IIRC.

hence the white thing on the wall

Boris out of hospital on Easter Sunday.

middling revive

I'm a single mum to 2 severly autistic young men along with learning difficulties etc. I am not able to leave the house with them as I would need 2 other staff with me, yet I am unable to be on the vulnerable list. And am unable to get any shopping delivery booked.

— Sharon Sapwell (@SapwellSharon) April 12, 2020

unsurprisingly this tory arsehole govt are missing lots of people off the vulnerable list. I can't bring my son to a supermarket and if I leave him in the house there is a danger he could end up hospitalising the missus again if he has a meltdown. How does a household with two disableds (one with MS) not get on the vulnerable list? Luckily so far through dogged persistence and luck I've managed to get a delivery from Morrisons tomorrow. At least I could go in the early hours to a supermarket when Alex is asleep I suppose, but even then it's a calculated risk that could go wrong. But some like her in the tweet above don't even have that option. People with autism tend have bad spatial awareness, tend to touch their faces a lot when stimming, how the fuck are you supposed to bring them to a supermarket ffs?

There's what seems to be a big extended family gathering going on right now in the place overlooking mine, should I dob them in to the rozzers y/n