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

The downside is that Starmer appears to be doing this at PMQs and nowhere else. Most people don't watch PMQs obviously but in this quieter format and at this particular time you could argue it matters in a way that the old orgy of hot air and pre-rehearsed zingfest didn't.

Turning Raab into a sweaty bumbling wreck isn't the most difficult task in politics. I wonder if the fact that Raab is a lawyer and knows that he's up against a far far more successful and talented lawyer isn't somewhere at the back of his small mind?

Boris should have retained Geoffrey Cox in his cabinet, in the old PMQ game of blowing much hot air without saying anything he'd beat any former barrister!

I wonder if the fact that Raab is a lawyer and knows that he's up against a far far more successful and talented lawyer isn't somewhere at the back of his small mind?

If this is the case I fear for anyone that Raab ever represented in court.

When Raab did the daily presser last week he looked like he was going to faint. And that even before anyone had asked him any questions!

I declare Mr Raab is suffering from the vapours

Fuck this guy

NEW: Starmer met with Labour Friends of India, said: "We must not allow issues of the sub-continent to divide communities here. Any constitutional issues in India are a matter for the Indian Parliament, & Kashmir is a bilateral issue for India and Pakistan to resolve peacefully."

— Sienna Rodgers (@siennamarla) April 30, 2020

Internationalism begins at home nowhere

profiles in courage

let's not get too bogged down with "issues" like murderous ethnic cleansing, too much student politics is where Corbyn went wrong.

Besides the message being "Pogroms are good" I don't know why Starmer is doing this. It's not going to shift Hindus that vote Tory. Modi doesn't give a shit, and if anything it alienates Muslim communities that turn out for Labour, or Hindus that hate Modi.

the main way ppl seem to defend this kind of shit is to imply that to care about it is something inherently childish and unserious (see also wrt blair's dealings with countless other monsters), and that the only ppl who care about it are (presumed white) students (see also Israel/Palestine). it would be less infuriating if they would just be honest about their horrible views

Lol he hasn’t a clue

NEW: Labour leader Keir Starmer is set to have some "gritty" conversations in a bid to win the trust of the electorate in a series of public 'call Keir' Zoom meetings – catch up on the latest with @elliot_chappell's morning briefing here: https://t.co/MBmScAWSGo

— LabourList (@LabourList) April 30, 2020

“adult conversation” "his carefully maintained position of constructive opposition." “opposition for opposition’s sake”

let's fucking play melt bingo again and again and again..

lovely four-minute story on captain tom moore’s 100th birthday on the bbc lunchtime bulletin there, surprised to see it followed by an excoriating broadside from a healthcare union representative pointing out that torturing the elderly to support the nhs is not a sustainable funding model

nah sike it was a total exercise in supine bootlicking

Oh man that Zoom thing is not going to end well. Let someone else be the guinea pig for that first.

can i be arrested for showing keir starmer my arsehole on zoom y/n

It's going to be like in the early days of Twitter when the Tory Party Conference decided to do something like display everything with a hashtag on one of their big screens without thinking through the consequences.

he should conduct the Zoom meeting looking like this imo

https://i2-prod.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article21788031.ece/ALTERNATES/s1200b/5_Screen-Shot-2020-03-31-at-160109.jpg

Starmer obv never saw the live Matt Bianco phone in on Saturday Superstore

oh good now an in-depth exploration of tom moore’s ww2 experiences on the bbc news channel

we can’t get enough fucking greatest generation porn even in the middle of a catastrophic government response to a pandemic

"torturing the elderly to support the nhs is not a sustainable funding model"

come on ... I want to see a 144 year old mummified corpse of a Boer war veteran doing a 7k marathon carrying Kitchener's corpse while some Tiger Moths do a flyover next.

wait it’s not even the news channel it’s the fucking bbc1 news show, good thing there’s nothing else happening they could be covering

They'll just run the zoom call like they did the party one with no public chat just the ability to send questions through to someone else who will filter

The India thing is insanely grim

We’re going to have an opportunity to see how far right-wing smear campaigns have affected concrete foreign policy positions if the West Bank is annexed in July.

Regarding what his expert support entails, Phillips said the govt will be using his company’s 'Origins' software, which tracks people's ethnicity by their names. They'll use it to help compile Covid-19 data on disproportionate BAME deaths. https://t.co/YWb5hfwasL

— Nadine White (@Nadine_Writes) April 25, 2020

This seems weird, idk.

Mr Phillips and his colleagues believe their ethnicity tracking is unique in its method, size and ambition. Software developed by Richard Webber, a visiting professor at Newcastle University, draws on a database of 1.2bn individual records globally. It uses 2.5m family names and 800,000 first names to build algorithms that he says can link names to an individual’s ethnic or cultural origin from around the world with more than 95 per cent accuracy. The results are cross-checked against publicly available sources such as LinkedIn profiles and companies' annual reports.

“[The algorithm] can even show what might be called social integration — the likelihood of [people of ethnic-minority heritage] using Anglo-Saxon first names,” says Mr Phillips.

“[The algorithm] can even show what might be called social integration — the likelihood of [people of ethnic-minority heritage] using Anglo-Saxon first names,” says Mr Phillips.

Said Trevor Phillips. Sounds like bull to me.

This app should be called Callipr

there it is

this sounds deeply fucking suss

If a hypothetical child of mine had a Muslim surname and an Irish first name would it be integrated or not? Fucking head-measurers, I swear.

This is going to be an absolute bonanza for highly technical snake-oil salespeople.

what measure of integration could exist that wouldn't leave god knows how many white natives registering as unintegrated?

I'm trying to think if any of the Afro-Caribbean people I work with have 'black' names and don't think any do.

I mean: Tony, Susan, Marie, James, Sharon, Christina, Chris etc.

Oh wait, the company that produces this software is actually Trevor Phillips's? Fuck's sake.

I mean get a load of this Powerpoint presentation and let me know if you're happy with the lives of your family being in these hands:

https://www.local.gov.uk/sites/default/files/documents/%E2%80%98Why%20Origins%20matters%E2%80%99%20-%20Trevor%20Phillips%20WEB.pdf

He's a despicable trolling cunt.

Risible.

Shamika, Kiesha, Tara, Shonda, Sabrina, Crystal, Derhonda, Lisa, Felicia, Tonisha, Shavon, Monica, Monique, Christina, Yolonda

Wight Dorke

Jesus Christ that PPT.

are we blaming rampant discrimination against ppl w “non english” names on the parents who were too unpatriotic to name their son Steve or w/e

the problem with these people is they just don't want to be integrated

By 2030 every single one of us will be a white English man called Steve having a loud work-related telephone conversation on a train travelling through Leighton Buzzard

ah, the dream

The ‘problem’ he is aiming to solve is people who either ‘incorrectly’ identify themselves as white British or who don’t feel comfortable as identifying as anything else - so software analysis of names is being positioned as a better way to track people’s ethnic origins than their own self-reporting. In theory, that might uncover bias against people who think they have integrated but...it seems bizarre, particularly for this investigation and with that astonishing PowerPoint. I can’t see it as anything other than cronyism.

Someone get big John his own twitch account

Making gaming great again https://t.co/d4Q12xvO6P from @redpeppermag

— John McDonnell MP (@johnmcdonnellMP) April 30, 2020