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

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.

yeah I could imagine some big US style anti-lockdown protests if Corbz was PM.

the powers-that-be wd happily be leveraging this to topple corbs however many suffered as a consequence: if getting to power was an uphill struggle maintaining it to axhieve anything wz always going to be an even steeper climb (always an under-discussed issue on these threadz sorry if this offends)

first rule of utopian dreamer club is you can only deal with one goal at a time.

see lenin's jumpers for goalposts isnt it wasnt it

trotskyite-zinovievite fc aren't going to win the premiership

if Labour are going to help the tories cover up the reality of the human cost of austerity I don't really think there's much of a justification for voting Labour even for 'harm reduction' since it seems Labour is once again completely wedded to the same ideology

— Rosewood Shoehorn (@apiarism) April 26, 2020

what I was trying to say this aft but put a bit more succinctly.

Oh look, it’s the UN rapporteur who shredded the Tories & their brutal austerity, which meant the UK press almost completely ignored his report. He’s back explaining how said policies have exacerbated the covid response & he’ll be completely ignored again https://t.co/VFFCi9cDPx

— Mr Demos of Pnyx (@gem_ste) April 26, 2020

that radical the UN rapporteur saying what Starmer should be saying if the useless fucking cunt actually was a LOTO in the meaningful sense of the title.

absolutely stonking interview on moneybox tonight about umbrella companies who have been getting away for years with paying their employees (temps essentially i.e. supply teachers, health professionals) technically minimum wage - with each job topped up with a "discretionary bonus" - on which tax is paid. now guess which amount the government's 80% job retention payment applies to. yes, minimum wage.

lots of creepy crawlies under lots of rocks that coronavirus has tipped over.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000hmy3

yep the moneybox program is much more probing than Sir Forensic and it is often quite a dark heart of middle England part of R4!

You know like when Corbyn's twitter would wish RIP to someone recently departed or have the temerity to comment on anything other than Stopping Brexit and he'd get blanket bombed with 18 megatons of shitty useless FBPE whataboutery, well I haven't got the energy to do that to Starmer but FP me away if I'm too repetitive about what a useless tory cunt he is on here, but I'll continue posting till the death!

Boris Johnson just said ‘many people will be looking at our apparent success’ in relation to Britain & Coronavirus.

apologies for quoting piers moran here but when he can get away with saying that without being met with spontaneous gales of laughter .. i just fucking don't know what!

https://t.co/ho6nYduulv pic.twitter.com/lvhV53TKix

— gentle stunts (@raaleh) April 27, 2020

Woah. As a former photo director this is some fucked up propaganda level misinformation. The cranes were there last year and are no longer there. This photo is not from during lock down. They need to address and I for one will be making a formal complaint to IPSO https://t.co/A8oC8KpS0D

— Jamie Klingler (@jamieklingler) April 27, 2020

Christ.

Government seem to want to encourage the public to become keener to exit the lockdown than public currently are.

Compare this description of today's Opinium poll, in news report on govt thinking, to the actual Opinium poll findings.

Tel reporthttps://t.co/HFZd9KgE9q pic.twitter.com/zvEhRyPhWj

— Sunder Katwala (@sundersays) April 26, 2020

yep I saw someone who lives in the area saying that is definitely an old photo and lockdown rules are being maintained as good as anywhere else in the UK.

Boris - "I know you're all desperate to get back to the pub, but please do be patient"
Public - "No thanks mate, we'll just settle for not dying for a bit"

Even the dumbest Sun readers don't want to get the Rona. No amount of propaganda will change that for now.

i'll get me coat

RLB and Andy McDonald are making the right noises as in: risk assessments before easing lockdown, no return to normal, ensure vital workers are paid properly. It's almost like there is an opposition after all.

Lammy was about to get ratioed this morning when he deleted his tweet that was only expressing concern for prison officers and other staff having PPE and not the sub-human prisoners who are involved in a scheme where they are sowing urgently needed masks together for a wage of £12.50 a week!

Starmer has retreated from Corbyn's suspension of rent payments to now supporting only a deferral of rent payments https://t.co/j09hZK2rKs

— Nick Srnicek (@n_srnck) April 26, 2020

Such a disaster