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

Good thing we left the eu or we’d have got a real showing up there

"scones were served at 1940's themed tea parties"

I'm pouring one out for the Red Army tonight, fuck Britain

That Matthew D'Ancona tweet reminded me of this, which I'm sure wasn't the intention.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-f_DPrSEOEo

Is the disdain for gaudy VE Day celebrations more antisemitic than... Winston Churchill?

Yep Tooze and Egerton have been a good antidote to the widespread manure getting sprayed everywhere today

Tooze is the grandson of soviet spy Arthur Wynn after all!

street party going on in our very middle class road, they've blocked it off with cars and there are kids playing football, social distancing be damned.

real england update: someone on the street whatsapp group was 'shocked and horrified at the disregard for social distancing, it's like living on a sink estate', and an ambulance couldn't get through. someone said this was ridiculous, 'the local mp and the police said it was ok to block the road and the ambulance driver said it was ok', someone else said 'the hysteria for every living person to stay at home is ridiculous'.

you'd think Starmer with his oh so w/c factory boss dad who was obv a bit of a labour party history geek might have an inkling that it traditionally wasn't a party that protected the interests of minority groups like wealthy landlords. That was the job of the other party.

Looking after the interests of all those millions of exploited worker ants might not win you plaudits from the UK media but that is supposed to be your job, cunt!

absolutely pathetic policy, protecting landlords from sustaining even the briefest hits to the income, at a time when almost every other industry is in freefall, at the expense of the rentier class, who are expect to pick up the debt or bankrupt themselves https://t.co/nAKQJEG1Ww pic.twitter.com/gaPz51rh9H

— tristandross (@tristandross) May 9, 2020

radical landlord policies are needed during a crisis like this, not as radical as I'd like but protecting their wealth like nothing is happening here and putting the financial burden of c-19 on renters is a right wing tory policy.

*some* people get stopped and arrested by covid-ridden cops for sitting alone in parks or on train platforms

while *others* are celebrated as a heartening puff piece by the state broadcaster (yes) while helping to guarantee a second peak of infection

this country is wildddddd pic.twitter.com/CjVmDcGM2Q

— michael (@Sisyphusa) May 9, 2020

god damn it that pic makes me want to commit a mass shooting

what

the

fuck

exterminate all the brutes

meanwhile

All travellers coming to Britain will be quarantined for a fortnight in an effort to avoid a second peak of the coronavirus pandemic, Boris Johnson will announce tomorrow.

The prime minister will say in an address to the nation that passengers arriving at airports and ports, including Britons returning from abroad, will have to self-isolate for 14 days.
Under the measures, which are likely to come into force in early June, travellers will have to provide the address at which they will self-isolate on arrival.

The authorities will conduct spot checks and those found to be breaking the rules face fines of up to £1,000 or even being deported. However, the aviation and holiday industry has warned that the move could be catastrophic for business. It is likely to end any lingering hopes that Britons could take their summer holidays abroad this year.

yes timing-wise this seems like a weird flex

maybe a bit of misdirection while he lets flash mobs of union jack draped cunts run amok round carphone warehouse

give an address and be ready for a "spot check", ie "oh please don't go out"

Amazed UK hadn't already done this, and even so it's weak piss. In Sydney where I am, travellers are taken to hotels in the city centre and unable to leave for 14 days

yeah but they did that before the rona

TBH I'm amazed there's anyone other than repatriated Brits entering the country at all right now. Then again I saw two planes going over within about ten minutes of one another yesterday and that felt like the most in weeks.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/08/lockdown-boris-johnson?CMP

Meanwhile I concur with the Tory MP who thinks we're completely fucked. Although maybe not for the reason he does.

of course Katy Balls gets a Graun column, why wouldn't you?

Travel quarantine is two months too late, the community spread was well out of hand by then. They going to do anything about care homes or...?

TBH I do think it's useful to have a columnist who Tory MPs will talk to in a less guarded way. The Graun is absolutely awash with political hacks whose contacts books are 10-15 years out of date.

Re starting to quarantine being announced as part of the “exit roadmap” or whatever, I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of ppl were assuming we were already doing this so it could be quite a bombshell - & the govt’s line appears to be “nothing we did could possibly have made any difference”. Really feels like if they only received any kind of pushback at all, ever...

How weird is it that VE Day celebrations in the middle of a global pandemic have brought out the worst Brit fucknuts imaginable? Not weird at all, is the answer.

TBH I'm amazed there's anyone other than repatriated Brits entering the country at all right now. Then again I saw two planes going over within about ten minutes of one another yesterday and that felt like the most in weeks.

RyanAir's Lisbon - Stansted route has flown every day since this all began, and for more or less unchanged prices. Lisbon - Manchester route has been out of action since mid/late March though

all these ridiculous #VEDay street parties: you people are exhausting. there is a deadly & highly infectious virus, spreading in an uncontrolled fashion throughout the population. this isn’t even close to being over. get inside, & wash your hands. 🙄🦠pic.twitter.com/qA0qclagJV

— Dr Adrian Harrop (@AdrianHarrop) May 9, 2020

look can we just take off and nuke the country from orbit?

We’ll peak again

I'm not really expecting anything beyond the tiniest relaxation of the rules on Sunday tbh - the front pages of the last few days feel like leaks intended to pressure the government by whipping up public opinion or sowing confusion.

https://www.flightradar24.com/blog/scraping-along-the-bottom-april-air-traffic-statistics/

Commerical flights down 73% year on year. Huge drop but thats still a lot of flights

My folks were repatriated from NZ 2 weeks ago. No hand gel or masks on the flight; no masks at the airport and nothing beyond 'stay inside for 2 weeks, yeah?' as messaging. Incredible.

No temperature checks either apparently

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104036/novel-coronavirus-weekly-flights-change-airlines-region/

Actually this tells slightly a more specific story, UK flights down 92% since january, China flights down 32%, Japan down 47%

We’ll peak again

― Microbes oft teem (wins), Saturday, May 9, 2020 10:46 AM (twelve minutes ago)

Wins wins.

Are there any countries that have managed to get the rent / mortgage issue right?

Don't know but this is a very good tweet on this hit policy.

One thought about Labour’s renters policy: it looks like and could easily be an Ed Balls-era policy. But it’s arguably even more timid because the context isn’t 2011’s neoliberal hegemony; its 2020, even the Tories are using the state to pay 80% of people’s wages, its wide open

— Jon Stone (@joncstone) May 9, 2020

*shit, real disaster.

It's like Labour are asking where will the renters go.

It’s a bad policy but I’m still looking for someone on the Labour left to propose a good one. I haven’t seen much about, for example, removing housing benefit caps.

Are there any countries that have managed to get the rent / mortgage issue right?

I'll quote myself from my own little red book: "when dealing with seemingly intractable problems caused by parasitic class enemies, it often better to use the blunt force of a lump hammer rather than the delicate touch of a surgeon's knife"

" I haven’t seen much about, for example, removing housing benefit caps."

there will be plenty of knowledgeable ppl on housing problems out there with good ideas, but they aren't the Labour Party leader.

This is more like it, from a group that spends most of its time fighting Labour councils.

Good summary of the evictions crisis that we face in June if the government does not commit to proper help for renters. We need:
increase housing benefit
scrap the benefit cap
scrap section 21 & ground 8
end 5 week wait for Universal Credit
council homeshttps://t.co/NH0lWxreDh

— HASL (@HousingActionSL) May 8, 2020

Yes, that’s very good.

Reckon parts of that would be lab left policy, but they don't make policy in the Labour party.

I suppose it depends on what you think a policy like this is actually for, given it has no chance of realistically being enacted. Is it purely an exercise in brand positioning? In which case they are absolutely asking where the renters will go.

Is the aim to float a policy that the Tories might conceivably adopt, allowing Labour to claim victory? This is probably at the very edge of what the government can realistically be pressured into (although who even knows now).

It's a bad policy but one that would benefit renters in the short term while screwing them in the longer term unless it's attached to some serious proposals around debt relief or rent controls. Housing benefit is a flawed system as well because it inflates private rents but it's a useful tool in this particular situation - and also one that the Tories are highly unlikely to adopt.

At it stands it's an entirely vanilla policy that no one will even remember in a few years time, difficult to see it having any positive effect on anyone, including the Labour Party itself.

Most but not all of those proposals are touched upon in the Thangam Debonnaire Twitter thread here, which isn't as bad as I feared it would be. The part I take issue with is:

"For many this will be a small arrears and they will be back in work soon. For others it will be harder - hence asking govt to consider LHA increase" - we don't actually know that it will be a small arrears for most, we don't know when jobs will return, we don't know how deep or how biting or how prolonged the recession is likely to be.

The five points are here: https://www.insidehousing.co.uk/comment/comment/the-coronavirus-crisis-demands-urgent-action-to-protect-renters-this-is-labours-plan-66374

also Kier Milburn makes the point that Landlords will more likely bank these arrears whereas tenants will help stimulate economic growth by the novelty of actually having some fucking money to spend. Such a welfare state for the rich policy from mr forensic is fucking disgraceful, whether Labour policy is largely powerless right now or not it still sucks shit and it is totally depressing.