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

competent you say?

cabinet ministers trying to shift blame onto the scientific advisers today, you love to see it from the safety of quarantine

Wonder if the clash with teacher's unions will form the basis for anti-union legislation..

They'll be milking it for all its worth, for sure.

Yes, and I noticed the A Scientist Did It And Ran Away message this morning.

let's hope they haven't been stockpiling teachers

I'm not sure that Tory MPs are exactly united behind that vision either, there are still substantial numbers of fiscal conservatives on the benches to whom that would be anathema.

Tory incompetence is a good opportunity for the Labour movement.

If they are competent.

Someone, somewhere, be competent please!

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EQj1PzTUwAAz7iV.jpg

I think SV has accurately described what Cummings is going for, and perhaps Johnson as well with this "low-tax, One Nation conservatism" thing. It feeds into what I was saying last week about an emerging tendency on the right, distinct from the Osbourne approach. On the other hand I'd be sceptical that, say, the Treasury-as-institution is especially onboard with the idea of almost limitless capacity to borrow and that's a whole other battle.

I'm not sure that the Tories are really going to build lots of public housing. They might even fuck up infrastructure.

This is probably a decent guide to what is planned. This Liam Booth-Smith guy was the CEO of a think-tank that has coined the (horrible) term 'neo-localism' and this appears to involve a load of Tory MPs. It may not be social housing in the way that we have typically understood it but they are absolutely going to try and split the Labour vote on lower-cost housing, particularly outside big cities.

Covid-19 has probably derailed this now but the new Tory 'project' has for some time looked like an exercise in utopia-building that is highly exclusionary to certain groups of people - specifically those born outside the UK but probably other groups as well - and with workers' rights shredded.

love 2 live in an ethnogulag

Another way of looking at is it that New Labour used architecture, development and 'public' (in reality mostly privatised-public) space as a way of convincing people that inner cities were visibly improving and voters could see what a great job they were doing - but it was focused on commercial/retail space and other areas like arts funding. Housing, or at least public housing, was largely ignored.

I suspect the intention here is similar but for TOWNS and with much greater attention paid to housing priorities. But that's going to set up areas of confrontation with more straightforward Thatcherites, of which there are still many.

Thanks, Matt - I can't read the FT link but the second one gives me an idea of what is in the plans.

just google search "Cummings picks housing expert to head Downing Street joint unit" and then you can read it!

Thanks!

The think tank page is probably more enlightening really but there's also a large amount of vague waffle in there.

shelter have a good graph on new home building over the years (under section 2)
https://england.shelter.org.uk/support_us/campaigns/a_vision_for_social_housing

back to the 70s is it

Cherry picking the worst elements of an authoratarian low wage low workers rights city state for a population of 64 million always sounded so sinister, like when when May used to allude to it I used to think you aren't meant to say this stuff aloud until you've made it sound a bit more palatable!

death toll 545 today. these are people who got symptoms about six-ish weeks ago, right? on average. so in the height of the lockdown mentality. i’d guess we could continue seeing a slight drift downward over the next few weeks. and then in about a month an edging up again. unless there’s something i’m missing?

Six weeks is a long time, it could be 3-4 weeks from the point of infection. It does depend on how widespread the virus is right now compared to the height of the lockdown, as well as just before it. I would be surprised if it was more prevalent but that doesn't mean idiots won't start spreading it again - I went out for a walk for the first time in maybe a fortnight and there were massive groups of people hanging out and not observing distancing at all. (I also really hope the group I saw huffing nitrous balloons had filled them themselves).

I'd be interested to know how many of those 545 people were physically going out to work during the lockdown. People were required to pour onto the few trains and tubes remaining even in late March and early April.

the local garage opened its doors again this week. I'm not even sure if the owner furloughed his workers or just took the decision to shut the doors for a month at the peak because mechanics are in the key worker category I think. For selfish reasons I'm glad it is open again because the building has a period charm to it and it is so well organised with a neat row of bays all signposted like: "prep bay" "spray shop" etc.. when walk past it every morning it gives me a happy feeling and Suzy would be impressed the owner has a beautiful pet whippet that is sometimes sat on the forecourt. I have seen mixed groups in the park again, children getting coached at the tennis club every night. This govt puts out muddled messaging people just start carrying on as per. there is definitely going to be a big second spike - probably not as bad as from the herd immunity period but probably worse than anywhere else in Europe at this rate.

yeah matt you're right. at least according to this the average time to death is 18.5 days. add in the reporting lag and it's about 3-4 weeks i guess.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/03/12/coronavirus-kills-average-185-days/

Honestly as long as you don't get too close to another person the chances of catching it in the park seem to be pretty low? Certainly less than you would at work/on your commute/in the pub/on the way to a massive sporting event in another part of the country. Most of what is happening now isn't even going to come close to those petri dish weeks in March.

Looks like schools won't be reopening after all after a mutiny by councils.

BREAKING: Courts to open once more to hear eviction hearings on 29th June, solicitors are told. https://t.co/Z0D80a6mIR

— LandlordZONE (@LandlordZONE) May 19, 2020

I got a letter from my school today which basically said, we're being asked to prepare for this, but we won't be ready by 1 June; when we are ready it will be super weird; your kid won't be with his usual classmates; he'll be in a 'bubble group' of 10 children; will you be sending your child in whenever we do open the gates? A bit thumb-on-the-scale there - they clearly don't want it. I still haven't answered because frankly I don't mind - he's already had it so he's safe. But I feel like saying "no" just to stand with the teachers.

It seems to be moving towards a position of the local councils deciding whether to reopen or not. I’d imagine some still will but idk how many will want to take responsibility on behalf of the government.

TH that’s what we told ours - we are OK with sending him so long as the staff are happy with the situation because we’re concerned for their safety.

with my son it's a case if he goes back the danger goes both ways. Social distancing is impossible in a whole autism school, even with smaller classrooms. And it isn't just the teacher's that need shielding, if you are non-verbal and autistic in a hospital with covid 19 symptoms, your odds of getting sectioned or put to the back of the queue if you need emergency ICU and basically ending up dead are much much higher than if you are a neurotypical patient.

I'm not convinced the government has given any thought at all to how it would work logistically.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/19/extra-uk-bank-holiday-could-help-remedy-37bn-coronavirus-loss-to-tourism-mps-told

October? Should happen just in time for the third spike of infections! Not to mention the pissy rain season coming in.

John Major mooted a holiday in October, but he wanted to replace May Day bank holiday, the socialist one, with some kind of patriotic thing, Trafalgar Day.

We should make Thatcher’s birthday (Oct 13th) a permanent national holiday.

The fact that it’s also my birthday is just a coincidence.

For your birthday, we should all remember Margaret Thatcher?

As long as I don’t have to go to work, knock yourselves out.

It wouldn't be the 13th though, it'd be the closest Monday.

looks like what passes as a nationwide scorcher today in England, the rona will be raring to go!

🤦

Another remarkable fact about this mismanaged epidemic. Your personal doctor, your GP, is not able to order a test or home test for you. You have to go yourself through 111 or a website.

— Anthony Costello (@globalhlthtwit) May 19, 2020

And this is how training for contact tracing is going:

https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/20/no-one-had-any-idea-contact-tracers-lack-knowledge-about-covid-19-job?

oh lads

https://images.sk-static.com/images/media/img/col6/20200511-162850-406680.jpg

Facebook has been showing me ads for that a lot

me too, looks like the algorithms still need a bit of work

seriously tho 34 quid to watch webcam chats with Jess Philips, David Aaronovitch, Steven Pinker, Nick Robinson...just take my money now

I'm sure this has been pointed out before but any test and trace app where stage one is 'enable Bluetooth' is not going to work unless they are also sending battery packs out to everyone in the country.

lol, otm.

The contact tracing stuff is going to have fun long-term ramifications for privacy. I think that Palantir's underlying technology is pretty much designed to see who suspected terrorists / criminals have been associating with so the military and police can hit their extended networks. Harriet Harman wants to bring forward legislation to explicitly stop the use of data for anything other than the NHS but the government has been resisting.

Bluetooth uses very little power tbf.

Not on my iphone it doesn't.

A point that doesn't get made enough is that the nature of capitalism profoundly changed when millions of people willingly opted in to previously unheard-of levels of surveillance in exchange for convenience and free stuff.

Given that Apple had been running explicitly privacy-centric iPhone ads for some time it looked like we were reaching a tipping point there. But I do think that, if the app works, most people will throw their privacy away without thinking too hard about it if it means being able to move around freely and live their lives again. It's what happens when the pandemic is in the past that people are going to freak out about.

The NHS does have the capability to anonymise big data sets but I don't know how the trace bit can possibly work with any real degree of anonymity. If people get a message saying they've been in contact with an infected person what's to stop them just ignoring it and going about their day?