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

people could be able to reliably test whether they have developed immunity to the virus – and then be allowed to return to work and socialise as normal.

i don't think that's... how it works

look it’s in the daily mail it must be true

History will record it as the "August Spike"

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EWhQsdeWsAAhtCR?format=jpg&name=small

some are saying the man with the mace won't be a shadow minister for long now the labour party is sensible again.

"we need to draw a line under this type of behaviour and have a more respectful public debate"

sir kier is playing the evidence-based bingo game every day

ah yes, the old rheotorical tactic of saying someone ‘claimed’ something outrageous, like 100,000 people were killed by austerity, as a way of deflecting that the figure is actually 130,000 and it comes from ippr research rather than the fevered imagination of a corbynite maniac

Labour isn't "opposition" in any sense any more. I fucking despair. let's keep saying the govt are doing their best while pushing the same line as the C-19 hawks in a polite and respectful manner.

I thought the WHO were saying immunity isn’t guaranteed by already having covid. This isn’t the same thing as saying “you can’t get it again” but it’s enough of a caveat that you should really pause before spunking a big wad of cash on more antibody tests.

Sorry, “you can get it again”.

yeah but this way it looks like you’re doing something and not just thrashing around in a panic because your cabinet is full of some of britain’s most fanatical morons

whoever came up with Immunity Passports is clueless and should be shot

a gs suggests it was German scientists that first proposed the idea, but I didnt see their govt talking it up.

That Brockway statue is about 100m from where I am sitting right now!

i like that you can't quite tell if it's lifesize or not

tbh this is from memory, maybe it's easy to tell (if you know what size FB was in life) but the bus i usually take into e.g. soho no longer passes it

That Brockway statue is about 100m from where I am sitting right now!

I thought (hoped) you were going to say that Brockway statue is about 100m high.

he looks like he's miming changing a lamp in a light fitting.

All the better to shine a light on the injustices of imperialism.

What.

it just keeps getting worse https://t.co/CL6m2IOjLH

— 💕 (@ameliabeing) April 25, 2020

Can't read it but wonder if it's the times just having fun

It is from two years ago.

Thanks, people are still outraged by 2017 in my timeline

At least now it doesn't read like paranoia at all. Just business as usual for these cunts.

not that Sir Forensic will give a flying fuck, it was probably some of his pals who did it.

Even Tom Watson was on the right side of the political argument with the big bookies re: advertising and regulation etc. Sir Forensic is in the pocket of fucking Bet365. There isn't no justifying that .. take money from a scumbag like Coates and you are just as morally bankrupt as them and you belong in muppet voice phone-sex hell!

The Ace With The Mace is immunocompromised and either has or had coronavirus so he can be forgiven for being in some distress right now. Unfortunately he also appears to be a bit of an idiot.

One of the reasons for not saying shit like this is that Labour then wastes precious airtime defending themselves from manufactured outrage when they could be using it for something else*. It's going to happen anyway but offering your opponent golden opportunities to gleefully use your statements against you is just self defeating. There are plenty of other public figures who can be relied upon to say things like that, you don't actually need Shadow Ministers to do it even if it makes supporters feel better for two minutes.

Firing him would be excessive but he'll be frogmarched up to make some kind of apology and it gives Starmer the opportunity to indulge in some public halo polishing.

*Not that the leadership is exactly using its airtime well as it stands, but still..

i must've missed the lie

Ace with mace is still correct and might be an idiot political operator but he's still worth ten Starmer's. Whose approval rating seems to be slowly going downhill although I don't think his pmq tour de force has kicked in yet.

If I was LRM I'd go into Starmer's office, head held high, you need to resign Sir Kier your position has become untenable.

It doesn't really matter that he's correct, sadly. In any case I suspect that Tory MPs love to see Labour MPs banging on about how evil they are, if nothing else it seems to be pretty ineffectual as an attack line. They'd rather be thought of as masters of hard choices than incompetents any day.

Leaf from their book: keep repeating the message. By all means take the personalities out of it, but I see no reason not to calmly repeat "austerity kills people" whenever asked.

When the leadership is so fucking weak I'll take a bit of good old fashioned murdering tory scumbags, it's better than Starmer's calculated, careful not to offend opposition that isn't even in the game.

I prefer physical violence to respectful public debate but 'plot to murder citizens' talk is counter-productive and comes across as histrionic. Agree with the above comment about not wanting to be seen as incompetents. Everyone knows they are cunts, the mistake is in thinking that has any relevance. The person that fixes my roof is a cunt too, and probably ripping me off, but at least he knows how to do it. The lad from the college seems well meaning and has nice notebook but I'm not letting him anywhere near my roof

The public are totally fine with murdering citizens why wouldn't they be? What a silly line of attack

'Austerity kills people' is a message worth repeating, certainly but that's different to 'conspiring to murder'. Let other people say the other bit out loud. But if you want to be in a position to actually end austerity any time in the next decade then you need more than just righteous anger for all the reasons in Anvil's post.

Given that this is now as much about when the lockdown is ended as anything else, it also gifts Boris an open goal, by not ending the lockdown, which has massive public support, it enables him to say proudly that he's saving lives. Which he'll almost certainly do, given that ending the lockdown any time soon would be both impractical and self-defeating.

The trick is to not let him off the hook about the people who did die because he was fucking about two months ago.

I actually think Starmer will be outflanking the Tories from the right on austerity just going by how he has attacked them so far.

Which is probably why Gideon had a wet patch from Starmer's bravura PMQ jizz fest.

The Moral line of attack has, what, a 95-100% failure rate? It never works, you're implicitly tarring target voters with the same brush as the people they were considering voting for, how's that supposed to work?

And you have to convince people of two things, not one. You have to convince them that eg Boris is not just bad at stuff but has bad intentions too. Why not just say these guys are just not up to it I'm sure they tried their best but we're not a charity here we haven't got all day

Especially when Labour's achilles heel since the dawn of time has been competency and resolve. They don't know what they're doing and even if they did they lack the balls to do it. wah wah the bad boy punched me miss.

With Corbz and McD you knew they were uncategorically hostile to austerity/UC/the evil PIP reforms. Wouldn't trust this slippery melt (whose campaign was funded by some of the worst people living in tax havens outside this country) to commit to half the stuff in the previous manifesto.

much as I get fed up w/ moralism it does sometimes work, especially over the long term. the short term argument and long term argument are completely different games

I'm not convinced a Labour victory would even make much of a difference right now under this leadership and the direction they most likely to go in. That might be a personal pov and not a balanced *evidence based* one and maybe even a bit selfish but fuck them imo!

if i believed Starmer was playing some long game to bring in a government with transformative ambitions to make people's lives better I'd get behind any strategy he adopts and take some of these awkward bumps in the road with a bit more patience. but I don't believe he is to any degree at all.

You have to convince them that eg Boris is not just bad at stuff but has bad intentions too. Why not just say these guys are just not up to it I'm sure they tried their best but we're not a charity here we haven't got all day

I made the mistake of talking about how this govt have fucked up this crisis and made it much worse to a Morrisons delivery guy (2 metres away ftr) and he said just think how much worse it would have been if Corbyn was PM!

Sir Kier Commode, he's definitely from the same tribe as that prick!

I can imagine a scenario where a Corbyn coalition government is ripped to shreds by the press over this and loses power for a decade as a result, not sure if this is better or worse than things as they stand tbh

oh they'd get slaughtered if they'd kept the death count to 3006 at this point.

he said just think how much worse it would have been if Corbyn was PM!

Which comes right back to issues of perceptions of competence and resolve, which Labour have suffered from for decades and are unlikely to be able to anytime soon (on some level I can understand the desire for this 'forensic' figure centrists have imagined into existence, regardless of the fact it bears no resemblance to reality)

Boris would be saying he'd have locked down much faster. PPE/testing failure would probably be still as bad under Corbz but the difference is he would have to own it!

Probably with Corbyn PM we'd have more resistance to restrictions in turn causing more deaths but offset by swifter action in the first place that would've saved just as many. But knowing 'our luck', in that position, he would also have got it himself and died by now.