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

I'm not really saying she's done bad there, just that the impetus from above from the rosy cheeked knight of the realm to not point fingers at that piece of shit when it is handed to you on a plate is so weak and they wouldn't spurn such an opportunity to attack if the tables were turned. I know some of you lot have your theories about the correct way to win over the electorate, but that's all just meaningless anyway when you have such a pathetic cunt leading the Labour party.

They wouldn't spurn the opportunity to attack but they have the full force of the media behind them which would gleefully clap along rather than clutching its pearls and feigning outrage. Its just different for Labour.

Dodds was in John McDonnell's team for several years so I'm inclined to cut her a bit of slack. She's done OK there but you can just see Osborne grinning away to himself next to her. Being charitable you probably want them to be pinning it on the current administration in the public imagination rather than some guy who hasn't been in power for four years - regardless of the truth of it.

The article she wrote for the Guardian the other day was very weak and gave the distinct impression that it had been watered down so much that it was difficult to detect a message in it at all.

I did cut Dodds slack and said she's following orders from this fucking arsehole.

We asked Keir Starmer about Liverpool Mayor Joe Anderson saying that council funding levels 'could cost lives' - the Labour leader said he would raise the issue with Government @GranadaReports:https://t.co/jn4cf4Jn9h pic.twitter.com/lhWB9KE7hG

— Hannah Miller (@hannahITV) April 30, 2020

resign you dismal melt, people dying because of cuts to LA funding "is a very important issue...but what the public want to hear..rah rah rah evidence ..data ..." so sick of this fucking clown.

I don't think there's any point micro-analysing everything that happens between now and another election. They're probably melt cunts calz but it means nothing without a manifesto and the remote possibility of enacting it

'Are you saying it's George's fault?' had the distinct impression of a deliberate attempt to trip up because it means the camera can go right back to Osborne who can put all the blame for austerity onto Labour again.

xp

The tone Starmer is setting now is a pretty good marker of what the manifesto will be like, I don't know about "micro-analysing" I'm just commenting on what is making my blood boil at a particular moment!

Sun Tzu's The Art of War, Machiavelli's The Prince, and Jamie Vardy's From Nowhere, My Story should be required reading before these Labour cats are allowed on television again

all Starmer will need is the Centrists book of the most useless mealy mouthed politician speak of the early 21st century. chapter one: Difficult decisions..

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/openeconomy/dont-buy-the-lockdown-lie-this-is-a-government-of-business-as-usual/

This is very good.

Starmer is often trying to minimise austerity, minimise racism everything about thus far suggests a return to the awful fucking 2015 state of the party. But yeah I should wait until the manifesto comes out until I slag him off, that would be a much better forensic + evidence based approach to posting!

like i said, i think you're right. but they're gonna chat a lot of shit over the next few years and most of it will amount to nothing.

well la-di-da!

non-essential call centre staff are key workers? that is a fucking travesty

The Opposition appear to have dropped the demand by then shadow employment minister Rachael Maskell on 31st March for “strict and enforceable closure” of non-essential workplaces, but continue to call for the current guidance around safety at work to be “strictly implemented and enforced” with the help of trade unions.

her majesty's opposition is back

brilliant piece by Caroline Molloy.

Calling bullshit on the idea that you can't operate a call centre remotely. What this is really about is a group of workers who don't have/can't afford laptops and a group of employers who can't be arsed paying for them.

Given how much activity takes place in Portakabins I'm not convinced it's even possible to run a properly socially distanced construction site. And even outside there are practical reasons why you would need two or more individuals working physically closely together.

Good piece. You would only some of this from bits and pieces on twitter.

"And there’s more to come. Whilst firms have applied to furlough 3.2 million people according to figures released last week, some employers seem to be interpreting the 3 week minimum as a maximum, and are now demanding workers return"

Control of workers for the sake of it. And people are going to die.

I'll be interested to see how the UK "half-lockdown" compares with what France, Spain, Germany and Italy have been doing. I'd guess some of them will be treating the working poor like cattle as well. There is a suggestion they could face a lot of legal cases over this *after* all this, if the UK death toll continues surging ahead of the rest of the EU countries then the UK govt's position will become increasingly untenable. i heard the other day someone saying the Boris approval rating is starting to dip slightly.

Just on a purely commercial level it's incredibly short-sighted. You lose more from having your whole workforce off with the rona at once than you do from letting people work from home. Not to mention the possibility of your workplace itself becoming uninhabitable.

"Calling bullshit on the idea that you can't operate a call centre remotely"

That sounds like investment in a workforce that is mostly paid minimum wage. Far easier to exploit them when worker rights have been cut to the bone.

Phone sex workers in 90s films are always just chilling in their homes doing it, it’s def possible

Faced with the prospect of going back to work, involving 30 mins on the bus each way and dealing with the members of the public who go shopping who are too thoughtless to follow social distancing, I doubt I'll be only one developing a solid cough that my doctor definitely recommends me to stay home because of.

Residents in deprived areas have experienced double the death rates of those in affluent areas, new figures from the Office for National Statistics reveal.

the human cost of the business as usual/lockdown social divide is there for all to see.

Bosses just having a laugh as usual:

Various universities are looking at cutting zero hours staff & not renewing fixed term contracts.

The first place they should look to save money is on salaries for high earners. VC cuts of 20% are pitiful.

At Durham salary caps at £100k-60k would save £1.5m to >£3.8m pic.twitter.com/zhdxdy2qy4

— Sol Gamsu (@SolGamsu) May 1, 2020

going back to work is inevitable. no govt and especially not this one is going to subsidise people like me (non essential retail worker) to stay at home for a year or more.

That's why it was almost certainly better to have gone for an earlier and more comprehensive lockdown. The economic hit of repeated lockdowns/a big second spike is going to be worse than for countries that pursued a more sensible policy and will be able to rebound much more quickly.

The idea that man-made economic laws can possibly trump a lethal virus that spread around the world in a matter of weeks is just fundamentally stupid on so many levels.

Quite easy to envisage a scenario where reports from Ireland or New Zealand show people going about their business more or less normally in the autumn/winter while British people have to batten down the hatches all over again. The government isn't going to get such an easy ride in that scenario.

The Dutch and UK government seem to be in step with one another (the Dutch have been as vocal as Germany in regards to Corona bonds).

Let me try to bring some clarity to my position: I don't think at this stage any government is in a position to "solve" this problem. There is simply not enough knowledge about this disease to articulate solutions. But what I do expect is for governments to protect lives

— Flavia Dzodan (@redlightvoices) May 1, 2020

Why contact tracing won't happen..

“We don’t have the health service infrastructure at regional level” that we used to have ten years ago, says former regional director of public health Dr Gabriel Scally, which would make contact tracing more difficult
#Newsnight pic.twitter.com/YCWdqYJsDd

— BBC Newsnight (@BBCNewsnight) April 30, 2020

I mean obv you want to see all countries getting a grip on this thing, but I feel like if a few of our neighbours get their lockdown easing badly wrong then it takes pressure off the UK govt to get their act together. And they would be craven and self-centred enough to use other states mistakes and the resulting death spikes to try and put shade on their own monumental fuck ups. We need some success stories and a govt that learns to copy successful strategies.

Have British journalists missed the mood of the country on coronavirus? A significant minority think they have

I dig into the narratives underlying this "critique of the critics", and ask, can the press ever reconnect with the populists? And if so, how?https://t.co/uiQLpAlvRB

— Jay Owens (@hautepop) April 30, 2020

This is interesting - a deep dive into that idiot meme that's doing the rounds and why it's so popular.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/01/cavalier-tory-leader-botched-pandemic-response-1957

A couple of gaps here as I don't know if we will ever see any significant economic growth again and the press could also be decimated in a few years. Besides this pandemic will last for longer than the '57 one seemed to. It's almost certainly killed more than 30k already and there's a long way to go.

OTOH we don't have a sharp Lab leader.

No surprises, just confirmation:

Very striking from @ONS Covid related death rates in most deprived areas are more than twice those in least deprived areas. The socio economic gap in Covid mortality appears bigger than the general mortality gap https://t.co/PnWhiCiU3x pic.twitter.com/lIzMuHlpU2

— Paul Johnson (@PJTheEconomist) May 1, 2020

What would be the outcome of this

The @BoardofDeputies strategy of dealing with #LabourAntisemitism is flawed because it keeps giving carrots to the leadership instead of using sticks sometimes. BOD should tell @Keir_Starmer if both @HackneyAbbott
& @BellRibeiroAddy not suspended by Monday, we cease contact

— Tal Ofer טל עופר تل عوفر (@TalOfer) May 1, 2020

o no

OTOH we don't have a sharp Lab leader.

And they didn't have one until 6 years after the 1957 pandemic.

Excellent passive-aggressive hashtag usage there, so glad that the advent of the Kier-era hasn't put a stop to this stuff

we cease contact

seems like a carrot tbh

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ZqXfuZ_Sk_E/hqdefault.jpg
"the advent of the Kier-era"

Carrots, in the kier-era, are too orange

tbh, don't sign up to absurd guilt-by-association 10-point pledges when you aren't going to stick to their unworkable conclusions - which goes for RLB equally.

Weren't there like 600 people on that Zoom?

Yeah they were and I’m pretty sure it was to discuss the racism of the leaked report!

so they got disciplined by Starmer for participating in a mass zoom event that happened to contain a few unsavory characters. Fucking joke.

Friendship ENDED

Dark day for Manchester, whose local politics & Labour Party is in the grip of the property lobby.

This was *thrown out* at the planning meeting in April. Approved yesterday by extraordinary committee of 3, which included the council's (unelected) Chief Exec. https://t.co/mIFpnk1c3n

— isaac rose (@_isaacrose) May 1, 2020

layla moran calling for UBI

what a hotbed of radicalism the LibDems have become since Swinson has gone. I totally forgot they don't even have a leader at the moment, how could any party manage to run a leadership election in a slower fashion than Labour.

739 new deaths, def time to consider relaxing our restrictions

that doesn't sound like past the peak to me