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

quicker than a standard mortgage term i’m guessing

interesting thinking about the effect it would have on the market for mortgage-backed securities if the most flippable properties were essentially removed from circulation

Some interesting points here:

https://nearlylegal.co.uk/2020/05/a-five-point-plan/

Highlights that you’d need to scrap the right to buy if you nationalised the rental sector and has some background on why rent cancellation would be subject to legal challenge. Also suggests the weak-sauce policies put forward are going to need to be subject to review or revision if this goes on much longer.

I did not know the CoA is issuing a judgment on the legality of the three-month eviction ban on Monday.

No need to purchase the entire sector even, you could allow private rentals for properties above some ridiculous level

if only they could pull their finger out and fast-track some landlord bills through parliament as rapidly as they sneak bills through increasing police powers. solutions can be found if there is a political will to crack some eggs and make a nice fuck-off-and-die landlord souffle for the sake of almost a third of the population.

Just lounging around like cattle. If you're going to spread disease at least do it celebrating age old British cultural traditions. I bet none of these smug hipster tossers had a celebratory VE Day Hokey Cokey dressed in a Spitfire costume. https://t.co/wzdnMjsmdj

— Simon Hedges (@Orwell_Fan) May 9, 2020

if that pic is genuine it's all on the govt and the UK media throwing out a cacophony of conflicting messages

that nearly legal blog is interesting. right to buy has been a total fkn disaster in so many ways and should be universally regarded as such. is there an obvious reason no one is discussing an enforced reduction in rent as opposed to outright cancellation?

iirc it would need new legislation. I think the time to have done it might have been the introduction of government-backed of furlough, it’s not needed by people currently on 100% of their salary and not much help to those on 0%. I could see it tied in to an expansion of housing benefit, though - ‘the government twill pay market rate minus 20%’ for x months’ or w/e rather than having a fixed cap.

Good

After writing to @Keir_Starmer asking for clarification of the Labour Party's position on Kashmir, he responded, confirming the Labour position has not changed, supporting previous UN resolutions, & confirming the primacy of human rights. We will continue to engage on this topic. pic.twitter.com/1jeV79NzbJ

— MCB (@MuslimCouncil) May 9, 2020

ffs. well that’s good i guess.

he’s been getting a lot of grief from clps on this

This seems both accurate and also practically the worst thing you could say about Starmer
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/keir-starmer-labours-iain-duncan-smith/

I could personally say much worse things about him than Tories that have the political integrity to join the Conservative party

“However, the longer we leave the lifting of lockdown then it is inevitable that this second wave will occur later and later in the year. And we need to make sure we don’t let that happen in winter on top of the flu, norovirus and other outbreaks.

“That means there is pressure for the government to think about lifting lockdown soon.”

i'm unclear how this is supposed to work. we allow deaths/infections to rise now, so that they don't rise later? why wouldn't they just rise later anyway, regardless of what we do now?

is the idea really that the public won't or can't 'tolerate' uninterrupted lockdown, so we need to let more people die now because of these impatient people? and then we can batten down the hatches again in october, once people are 'ready' for it again, having got some non-lockdown time out of their system? (and then restaurants and gyms etc presumably close again??)

(i use the word 'lockdown' euphemistically, obviously; this weekend looked like a normal weekend in my neighbourhood apart from the lack of organised football and the inability to actually enter cafes)

Back to forensic’s much-maligned calls for an actual exit strategy here I think.

Staying Alert might be useful advice when you are crossing the road but it won't stop you contracting the Rona. Might as well bring back the green cross code man and droid.

They went to schools where bullying and abuse was “character building”. They took part in violent, exclusive drinking societies at university. They carry that mentality to the highest levels of government, abetted by supine client journalists. pic.twitter.com/krQr21jKE1

— Mic Wright (@brokenbottleboy) May 10, 2020

bunch of children running the show

You all realise that IF a vaccine is ever developed, this bunch of halfwits will almost certainly fuck up the purchase and distribution of it? A disaster which will then be recast as Britain's Greatest Victory or whatever in the press.

i'm unclear how this is supposed to work. we allow deaths/infections to rise now, so that they don't rise later? why wouldn't they just rise later anyway, regardless of what we do now?

is the idea really that the public won't or can't 'tolerate' uninterrupted lockdown, so we need to let more people die now because of these impatient people?

I don't know but is this what flattening the curve is supposed to be? A vaccine is at least a year away and potentially much longer and no guarantee of one? The messaging on this has been muddled everywhere not just UK

Not sure who the cartoon accompanying the article is but it's not Matt Hancock.

Catapult "To use on people who dare exercise outside"

Seems we're stuck with Jonathan Ashworth, who is really not very good.

a repulsive creep who did his best to wreck Corbyn's chances in the last election. Can't stand the cunt.

Sturgeon is distancing herself from the new garbled Westminster govt messaging and reiterating the Stay Home messaging.

i'm unclear how this is supposed to work. we allow deaths/infections to rise now, so that they don't rise later? why wouldn't they just rise later anyway, regardless of what we do now?

is the idea really that the public won't or can't 'tolerate' uninterrupted lockdown, so we need to let more people die now because of these impatient people?

The idea is that you removed all restrictions now you would end up with a very precipitous spike but they wouldn't keep rising later because everyone would be either dead or recovered. That line of argument appears to be an attempt to sneak the herd immunity strategy in through the back door - there would be a hell of a lot of people dead because the NHS would be overwhelmed.

At the same time there's a need to prevent the second spike from coinciding with the flu epidemic in the winter, that's crucial but creating a gigantic spike now isn't the way.

The government’s daily briefings on #Covid_19 are "not trustworthy communication of statistics" says Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter from the University of Cambridge#Marr https://t.co/TTJMcT0lgb pic.twitter.com/BEKFRhg23H

— BBC Politics (@BBCPolitics) May 10, 2020

eminent statistician who told Boris to stop misquoting him the other day laying into the govt. This must be that apocryphal "lefty bbc bias" that some tories keep talking about!

Also the line of thinking within Whitehall appears to be less that the public are impatient and won't tolerate a long lockdown and more that the longer lockdown goes on the worse the economic crisis is going to be. But at the same time no one understands the behaviour of the key variable - the virus - and therefore no one understands the economic damage that would be wrought by relaxing the rules too soon. Moving out of lockdown too quickly and allowing the virus to spread again could negate any perceived economic benefits of doing so - and you'd end up with a spiralling health crisis and an economic crisis at the same time.

When someone says “it’s important that we don’t time our second spike to coincide with winter flu” I’m always like okay then let’s just... not do that. Doesn’t seem it should have that huge a bearing on how we handle the immediate crisis.

Like I’m sure the places who have chosen to control this properly so far have also considered this and aren’t gonna suddenly go yes let’s have all our cases at once now flu season’s started

Strikes me as an admission that they haven't controlled it properly so far and have little confidence that they can do so in the near future.

Cases are rising again in Germany which is probably the clearest indication that we should not make any significant changes right now.

surely cases are going to rise at whichever point lockdown is eased? there may never be a vaccine. staying at home for the next year or two years or forever just isn't going to happen.

I just can't understand how people can't see that nothing is different to how it was at the start of March when this became very real. The virus isn't any less infectious, the PPE is still lacking, the testing isn't happening nor is the tracing, and the borders have been open the whole time. At best we'll have two weeks of cautious behaviour from everyone except reckless idiots who'll endanger themselves. Then we will be back on lockdown again because we've ran out of beds in ICU again.

We can't stay in lockdown forever but there is so much horrific stuff happening that is entirely preventable that we could manage with another few weeks of restraint.

"there may never be a vaccine."

I can't remember the Roman name given to a particular branch of probability theory where the worst case is more frequently assumed but often wrong. But given that humanity has not yet failed to produce a vaccine for such diseases within a relatively fast timescale of years rather than decades since the mid 20th century. Then I'd suggest with a bit of added hope that the odds on fav is that a vaccine will be produced within a few years, and meanwhile let's not let actively encourage a huge die-off as much as is possible is my take.

right, but i can't see how this is sustainable for a few years. it should at least be in place long enough to ensure all hospitals and care homes have much more than enough PPE but longer than that i dunno tbh.

we could manage with another few weeks of restraint.

But don't we then arrive at the same point but just in a few weeks?

within a few years

I don't want to be fatalist and say there'll never be a vaccine, because I have no idea. But a few years is a long time. Its difficult to imagine we'll be in lockdown for extended periods of time.

I don't know how much store to put in "the virus doesn't like summer", or how much that is factoring into any decisions.

I work in public health, and the message I'm getting is that there's a strong possibility there won't be a vaccine, and if there is one it won't necessarily be terribly effective and won't be ready for years, and that the focus should be more on developing effective treatments. After all, we never got a vaccine for HIV, but we did get effective treatments.

We're going to have to live with this virus for a long time, lockdowns are a short term solution, ultimately we have to start thinking about what a feasible longer term solution looks like

The only one I can see absent a lockdown is continuous test and trace; either by app or by putting checkpoints everywhere. Then regionalise lockdowns as required.

This will accelerate the drive out of London, as just one enormous side effect.

Yeah as everyone keeps saying, getting ppe and test/trace sorted is like step 0 and we aren’t even there yet

And increasing hospital capacity in a way perhaps more meaningful & efficient than “we shoved a lot of beds into an empty stadium in only eight days and then couldn’t staff it”

"Cases are rising again in Germany"

yet with a population of 81m they've kept it to approx 7500 deaths so far. I keep the word *success* being bandied about by tories and the UK media.

This will accelerate the drive out of London, as just one enormous side effect.

Every cloud...

Presumably cases have risen everywhere that has relaxed restrictions - just a question of by how much as to whether they then apply the brake again.

stay alert, control the virus, save lives

Can't help but notice we've lost the NHS part of the old triumvirate, as cynical as it was.

Multiple xps - if we hold off a few weeks then trace and test might be up and running by then

The right arm doesn't know what the left arm is doing. I suspect hardliners like Sunak - of the "OK so some old proles will die but the economy and the Tory Party are what really matter" variety - were expecting Boris to be on their side but, in the meantime, he's shat it big time and doesn't know whether he's coming or going.

he never knew this

That line of argument appears to be an attempt to sneak the herd immunity strategy in through the back door

Did that strategy ever leave? We've got a weak as fuck lockdown which has been weakened further today. We're encouraging street parties. We've normalised 500 deaths per day. We still can't get people to wear a mask or follow a fucking arrow on a floor.

I see no evidence of this being anything other than herd immunity over 3 months instead of 3 weeks with some token messaging about control measures thrown in for plausible deniability.

Appearing on the BBC's Andrew Marr Show, Mr Jenrick said: "Stay alert will mean stay alert by staying home as much as possible, but stay alert when you do go out by maintaining social distancing, washing your hands, respecting others in the workplace and the other settings that you'll go to."

So stay alert means... stay home?

Oh, the settings that you'll go to.

shocked to find the marketing geniuses behind Brexit are in fact clodhoppers

This almost seems designed to remind the public and business owners as much as possible of the cack-handed entry into lockdown, with businesses 'guided' to stay open but customers 'guided' to stay out of them.