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

Genuinely gasped that Raab's response to having the worst death toll in Europe was to claim we're world class at counting bodies.

Grant Shapps said more or less the same thing on Sunday. Not that anyone cared.

it really feels like 50,000 people just died and nobody gives a shit.

they just use counting squads wandering about hospitals armed with mechanical click counters in Germany, that's why their figures are so low.

they should make every arsehole who wrote so much risible bollox about Rishi after the feb budget eat a few kilograms of wood pulp for every word of wildly wrong bullshit they wrote about him.

I suppose cutting the furlough money from them and dragging over a million(?) previously salaried workers into the loving bosom of Universal Credit and sanctions, zero hour contracts etc is sort of socialism in a way!

There's definitely a belief in the Treasury that some businesses are taking the money that just don't need it. But a lot of those businesses aren't going to do anything (bar make redundancies) while the virus is still ongoing.

This feels like a gigantic gamble from the government that the virus will have substantially receded by July - and if it hasn't it will likely be their fault. If it hasn't I don't think they'll be able to get away with it either economically or politically - like ending lockdown too soon it undermines the point of having done it in the first place.

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/health-coronavirus-britain-elderly/

another good reuters piece on the UK govt's outright negligence in the huge number of care home deaths. it's heartbreaking reading about the care assistant who had bought her own PPE from amazon and by the time it arrived she was already dying of c-19 in hospital:(

I hate to say it but even Jeremy Cunt was showing more forethought and competence than the UK govt on care homes, ffs!

Jeremy Hunt, a former Conservative Party health secretary and now chairman of the House of Commons health select committee, advocated banning visits to care homes by friends and family from early March, advice that wasn’t followed.

Three days into the lockdown, on 26 March, the nation was urged to stand at their doorstep or window on a Thursday evening and applaud the NHS. Boris Johnson, by now already infected himself, led the cheering on the first occasion.

For some workers in Enfield, the chants left them uneasy. Working 12 hours shifts for barely £9 per hour, below the non-statutory London Living Wage of £10.75, they wondered if those cheers for caregivers were also meant for them.

What the far right have been doing is spreading and reacting to news stories from before lockdown that when shared read like mosques have been open since lockdown. And last week Nigel Fascist-Partridge, exploiting 'key worker' status, tweeted a video of himself on the beach speculating about how people enter the country by boat and are taken off in vans, some to jobs they've lined up, and others 'bringing the virus', putting words into the mouths of some locals and that they don't believe the official figures.

Status he doesn't have, of course

METRO: Boffin quits over affair in lockdown #TomorrowsPapersToday pic.twitter.com/qx8fCZaI5Q

— Neil Henderson (@hendopolis) May 5, 2020

didn't realise the scientist was a bonking love rat. h/t hendo

Into the sea
You and me

Good Farage headline. He looks even worse than he ever did before.

he looks very haggard + sunken eyed and his hair makes me feel sad, hope he isn't dying!

he looks a lot like david icke with his lockdown hair

Allegedly, someone just triggered the fire suppression system in one of the hangers at Heathrow, after BA announced they were sacking 900 staff. pic.twitter.com/yMmhYrTAS0

— Lenny Etheridge ⭕ (@lennythepen) May 5, 2020

u loves to see it

Rory S is dropping out of the London Mayoral race.

his decision to campaign solely in dari was, in retrospect, ill-advised at best

wonder how many strangers' floors he ended up sleeping on in the end

mayor of London starting to look a little too much like hard work.

I've sent him a white feather in the post.

Neighbourhood stasis in the Stokey group throwing a fit over Hackney having the third highest infection rate in the country, blaming sunbathers as per usual.

Turns out no it doesn't, it has the third highest MORTALITY rate, meaning the problem isn't ppl going to the park it's understaffed/underfunded hospitals.

But holding the government to account not as much fun as grassing on your neighbours.

The London Mayoral election is delayed for a year, isn't it? So Khan gets an extra year that he hadn't earned, though it may not be a very welcome one?

Labour used to ask me to campaign for Khan but I'm not sure I'll even vote for him.

Thinking a bit more about this furlough thing - the scheme is pretty much the only thing preventing hundreds of thousands of businesses from simply running out of cash right now. On the assumption that the Treasury doesn't actually want this to happen (because, y'know, economic disaster, widespread unemployment + soaring benefits bill + gigantic hole in the tax base + slower recovery) it feels like an attempt to push more of the debt burden from the public to the private sector. Which will become unsustainable pretty fast if it isn't safe to restart things. I suppose that's what the taxpayer-backed loans are for but both Dodds and Miliband have pointed out that these are inadequate.

We're also going to get soaring consumer debt as furlough money starts being withdrawn. The people most at risk are likely to be people working in the leisure or hospitality sectors because those aren't going to be restarting for months yet and even when they do they're likely to be on reduced footfall. And business confidence more generally is going to be anaemic until we have properly got the virus under control, regardless of any "back to work!" rhetoric coming from the government.

Being even more cynical, I suspect they've picked July because it's the start of Q3. But all this is pretty much a recipe for a financial crisis or mass loan defaults, with the government picking up the bill whatever happens.

That extra year probably wrecks Khan's own plan - because he'll still be sitting in City Hall by the time Starmer loses to Johnson and therefore unable to run for Parliament and the leadership?

I can't see Khan ever running for leader, tbh.

I bet he can.

idk, he's ambitious but if Starmer fails, i'm not sure the Labour centre/right is going to go for 'Starmer but Muslim', particularly when he's already a lighting rod for every racist and Islamophobe in the country.

Depends on how ambitious he is and whether he has sufficient support from the benches (I don't see why he wouldn't). I can't really imagine what it's like being a member of his immediate family and he's also very likely to decide it just isn't worth the trauma.

Love too live in a democracy.

Truly incredible video. Watch this and gasp (again) at the BBC: pic.twitter.com/9w0TfUw5Gk

— Liam Young (@liamyoung) May 6, 2020

Khan isn’t going to run. It’ll make the campaign against Corbyn look like Tony’s 1997 cruise into no 10.

jesus christ that Radio 4 thing

If I was Khan I'd already be concerned about the very real possibility of a Mair type deranged assassin coming after me as London mayor never mind Labour party leader and might think it too dangerous a move to make in what is a right wing emboldened and quite deranged political milieu right now. But that's as far as my sympathy and empathy goes with this fucking creep!

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/feb/01/matt-hancock-mp-app-released

so the app has launched will anyone be downloading it

not even with Starmers cold dead severed hands!

If I was Khan I'd already be concerned about the very real possibility of a Mair type deranged assassin coming after me as London mayor never mind Labour party leader and might think it too dangerous a move to make in what is a right wing emboldened and quite deranged political milieu right now. But that's as far as my sympathy and empathy goes with this fucking creep!

That Novara thing has been silently deleted, huh

'ending with a smile' is as old as the hills - that's all that was.

The attached graphic about trust in the written press, published last week, has not been widely reported in Britain. This is a huge annual survey by @EurobarometerEU across 33 countries. It's the ninth year out of the past ten that the UK has been last. We have a problem. pic.twitter.com/8eYoQR7XZw

— Brian Cathcart (@BrianCathcart) May 5, 2020

going out on top, baby!

British public are good again.

Clarification: This morning we shared a clip of a paper review on the Today programme cut together with the headlines being discussed in which the Guardian's headline was replaced with story about otters.

— Novara Media (@novaramedia) May 6, 2020

Interesting: PHE ordering govt comms hubs to take down all “Stay Home” messaging by Saturday night. Looks like we are getting a new slogan from PM... told: “Please ensure that all Stay Home messaging is removed from websites, social media and any other available channels“

— Harry Cole (@MrHarryCole) May 6, 2020

“Wash your hands for the length of we’ll meet again and get to fucking work peasants” is it

Go Forth And Multiply.

boris 'regrets' the care home epidemic, apparently, which presumably means that he's neither apologetic nor responsible but he gets to say something platitudinous that cretins will give him credit for

Whatever this is I have a suspicion we're about to witness a fuckup of genuinely historical proportions.

i can't see how it leads to anything else tbh

to not even wait and see how easing lockdowns plays out in france and italy before we even start thinking about our next step seems basically genocidal

we still don't have enough PPE, capacity for adequate testing/contract tracing etc to cope with getting hit by a 2nd spike. I just can't think what could possibly go right.

but red line go down tho

still don't have enough PPE to even cope with now when we are supposedly past the peak