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

They're essentially asking staff to be security as well and people policing the security of shops get shouted at and shouting may = infection and possibly illness or even death. I'm amazed by the employees in supermarkets' insouciance.

They really are risking their lives.

This is unconscionable. The Govt delayed the release of the Public Health England report on disproportionate BAME deaths from COVID-19 because they were worried about BLM protests and backlash.
How little they value the lives that the report is meant to help save. https://t.co/hIJQgh7Qpe

— Kishani Widyaratna (@KishWidyaratna) June 1, 2020

Times Radio, the new Murdoch-backed ad-free talk station that may or may not be a rival to Radio 4, has a confirmed launch date of 29 June. Here’s the full schedule. pic.twitter.com/mHgo9cyHFG

— Jim Waterson (@jimwaterson) June 2, 2020

if you ever longed for more portillo or 3 hours of matt chorley on the radio 4 days a week and other unique content such as the amber and flora podcast then brace yourself for this

Gotta reach the boomers and keep them Tory when newspapers collapse.

http://www.stuc.org.uk/media-centre/news/1448/stuc-re-asserts-its-five-red-lines-for-relaxing-lock-down-as-government-releases-workplace-guidance-on-manufacturing-retail-and-transport

Scotland: Official return-to-work guidance advises the use of Union Roving Health and Safety Reps who will now be on call for workers and employers in non-unionised workplaces.

Mariella Frostrup does loads of voiceovers and very little else, yet she seems to get by.

this was so grimly inevitable. the guidance a family member has received is virtually nonexistent. seeing this sort of mass manslaughter of those with disabilities get explained away by various establishment figures as people who "would have died anyway" has been beyond grotesque https://t.co/uWr9bQmsTj

— Stan The Golden Boy (@tristandross) June 2, 2020

underneath the din of air-horns and clapping and all the cummings outrage there has been a *mysterious* 134% increase in deaths of people with a learning disability it seems.

She’s married to a rich dude and has loads of property thanks to buying in Notting Hill in the early ‘80s.

Times Radio, the new Murdoch-backed ad-free talk station that may or may not be a rival to Radio 4

This seems to be a bunch of talk-radio jocks, much more a rival to LBC etc than Radio 4

They've sprinkled some BBC/Channel 4 journalists in there.

How long before Brendan O'Peasant and his crew get their own slot though?

🐦[Times Radio, the new Murdoch-backed ad-free talk station that may or may not be a rival to Radio 4, has a confirmed launch date of 29 June. Here’s the full schedule. pic.twitter.com/mHgo9cyHFG🕸
— Jim Waterson (@jimwaterson) June 2, 2020🕸]🐦

if you ever longed for more portillo or 3 hours of matt chorley on the radio 4 days a week and other unique content such as the amber and flora podcast then brace yourself for this

I'm sure that pompous arsewipe Pienaar got a payrise out of Murdoch but it still seems like a demotion from deputy political editor for BBC News, even as rotten as the BBC is.

as good a place as any to mention the quiz show i heard a bit of on Radio 4 yesterday afternoon, the least Radio 4-sounding thing i've ever heard, with some witless local radio Sunday morning host doing his local radio pop triv patter. i thought the radio must be broken so i checked the programme guide and it was Stuart Maconie.

lol jesus wept!

I probably haven't listened to the radio in about ten years. I had a housemate that listened to radio 4 in the kitchen and it used to drive me insane

i guess lockdown means they'll let anybody have a go, time to pitch my Ken Burns-style 12 hour documentary on the history of Toilet Duck

Wait, it's ad-free? Unless they're planning on doing mad sponsorship deals - and they'll need a big listenership for them - then it's just Murdoch pouring money down the drain and how long is he planning on doing that for?

Till he dies? (Hopefully a cheap prospect for him)

yeah i was thinking of the line from Citizen Kane

I was wondering what the middle class equivalent would be of those white van man ads on Talk Radio for widgets and wrenches and ballcocks.

Shepherd’s huts and posh sheds.

Thinking about yesterday's economic talk, the last few months have been a major blow to the idea that economic growth in all circumstances is ultimately a good thing. A recession, or at least a major suppression of economic activity, in this case is a good thing if it enables you to get to grips with the virus. If you haven't got to grips with the virus and it starts to spread uncontrollably again then you've essentially invited a deep recession and spent billions in public money for no reason.

One more month and the virus would probably have been at a low enough level to allow them to open things up in a more sensible way. You cannot run a socially distanced restaurant profitably without a massive reduction in rent. Same goes for a shop probably and I don't think clothes retail is going to come back any time soon. The economy in general isn't going to come back until people feel safe enough to go out and spend, maybe the public will just go out and do it anyway but if that causes another flare-up of the virus then they'll start to voluntarily lock down again pretty quickly.

There is probably a gigantic crash coming in commercial real estate - retail was in trouble in lots of the country even before the virus and bars, restaurants etc won't be able to survive without significantly lower rents. White collar work will probably adapt with more people working from home but there's going to be a ton of empty/unused office space out there.

Whatever happens we are probably looking at a slow drift towards more normal ways of behaving and in a couple of years I think people will be living more or less as they were - with some technological trends accelerated maybe. But the government trying to rush everything back to near normal by July is just an arbitrary deadline that could make the economic situation worse, not better. (Doesn't bode well for Brexit in December/January either and that's a whole other disaster in the making).

the arbitrariness is the real horror show: it'd be one thing if they were prioritising greed over lives but the overwhelming impression is simply that they don't know what they're doing. there's the real possibility that a decent summer might keep the R number suppressed for a while? combo of the virus not enjoying the weather and people being that bit more distant outside. if there's a spike towards the end of autumn/beginning of winter god knows how this government will deal with it, how it will be reported or what the public's attitude in general will be. i still have the idea that in the UK at least there could become a grim fatalism to a steady toll of "background" deaths mostly concentrated in sections of society that are already neglected.

in reference to the economic future i've seen no evidence that anybody in the public or parliamentary political sphere is taking advantage of this experience to advocate for changes to the way we organize economic activity as a state, never mind as a society. that's the most depressing aspect of all of this to me: something potentially world-altering is happening now and bar the kind of inevitable and marginal changes you mention Matt i don't see anybody grasping the possibilities.

(nb: this isn't specifically about the Labour leadership, but it is about the dead hand of the Labour party which wouldn't have been much different under a Corbynish direction)

never mind as a society species

"the dead hand of the Labour party"

I know I said Starmer is a f/t wanker, but I didn't mean it literally!

We've normalised 100 people dying every day. If it stays at that level you're still looking at 21,000 deaths by the end of the year. That's assuming it takes at least that long to develop a vaccine but also that we don't have another spike (we will). I can't believe that's going to end up as background noise.

also that CQC report is heartbreaking. This idea that your worth is attached to your ability to contribute to society via capitalism needs to fuck off forever

i've seen nothing in this country's politics during my lifetime that makes me think that will happen

Tbh it's not only the UK that is not taking advantage of this moment but I do see this pandemic as one in a series of events that will make growth and our way of living pretty much impossible as it is.

Although things will change, many will find perhaps frightening ways to adapt to the constant 'disruption' and barbarism to come.

unfortunately otm

Normalising hundreds or thousands of deaths is what human beings do. Think about the best day of your life - hundreds of people with worthwhile lives and grieving families died in this country alone, some of them in entirely avoidable ways. There are limits to human empathy when things start to seem normal.

It's why fixating on the death rate alone - no matter how high it is - isn't enough and why it isn't constantly on the front pages. The thing that might drive behavioral change - and almost certainly already has - is the deaths that might still happen, particularly if its your parents, grandparents, your friend who had a heart transplant etc.

you could argue the same about public attitudes to the welfare system - exposure to more friends and loved ones struggling to survive thru unemployment benefits etc - but again without being melodramatic i wouldn't bet on it

the spikes will become more and more concentrated in more vulnerable populations and it will disappear from headlines/the minds of those not affected

Just depends, it's quite an unknowable situation. I'm inclined to go with a lot of bad things happening before the good, i.e. basically money running out for enough people to drive change. In the meantime many will die, but the rate may matter if we get back to near a thousand deaths and the NHS being overrun.

xp that assumes the government could manage the spike and tracing things to a local level and I'm not sure they'll ever get that right.

I am furious that the vanity of Boris Johnson the Prime Minister will prevent me the longest serving Member of Parliament on the Opposition benches from speaking or voting today!

— Barry Sheerman MP (@BarrySheerman) June 2, 2020

lol I forgot this non-entity had beaten off Frank Field (with his dead hand) for the father of the house status since they killed big beast Kenny.

He's not quite Father of the House yet.

who is?

Peter "Wake me up when he's finished speaking" Bottomley.

lol another non-entity

The only thing I know him as is Virginia Bottomley's husband tbh

Yes, married to the woman whose name is an anagram of I'm An Evil Tory Bigot.

lol at Sheerman getting pissy about somebody else's vanity

just looking with wonder yet again at the uk's tests / deaths ratio, which today stands at 276,332 / 39,045 and thus suggests the death rate in these united kingdoms is 14.1%

clearly it's not anywhere near that, and the colossal ratio is a side-effect of the woeful approach we've taken to testing so far, but i don't think i've ever seen anyone questioned about it and it seems like a missed opportunity to me

yeah check yrself barry ffs xp

Weekend COVID press conferences have been suspended 'due to low ratings'.

If it's not as popular as Midsomer Murders, it's clearly not worth doing.

that's some trump-level reasoning there, very reassuring

maybe get Ant and Dec to do the weekends, problem solved