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

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/imageserver/image/%2Fmethode%2Ftimes%2Fprodmigration%2Fweb%2Fbin%2Febd816d6-a2b6-3d4d-afb5-4fcbafd442a6.jpg?crop=780%2C520%2C0%2C0

I wonder whether -- if Johnson is still unwell -- that's how the Tories could get rid of him.

If he goes then their pet No Deal project comes under increased stress, so no doubt they'll shove him out there however near he is to carking out.

Are there any governments in any other country that have had many key members go down with the rona?

Don't forget Brazil! Wait for it to hit the US Senate too, almost an inevitability.

kind of amazed that it hasn't fucked up more politicians tbh

mainly disappointed

Rees-Mogg dying of C-19 through his own hubris would be the most blackly comic thing to happen this year.

i don't see a black side tbh

I know that at the heart of it it was about disenfranchising whole constituencies, but Moggy really is every shitty manager of an office based workplace where the underlings have adapted quickly to WFH but he wants them back in before it's safe so he can 'keep an eye on them'.

— REMAIN INDOORS (@Scriblit) June 4, 2020

lol we're you get the idea

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/jun/04/nhs-track-and-trace-system-not-expected-to-be-operating-fully-until-september-coronavirus

now more than ever

NEW Britain needs a new £100million Royal Yacht Britannia to provide 'morale boost' during coronavirus pandemic, former Trade minister Digby Jones tells this week's edition of Chopper's Politics podcast. https://t.co/iH7B2otJSF @ChoppersPodcast

— Christopher Hope📝 (@christopherhope) June 4, 2020

Sharma has tested negative apparently :(

phew good thing his having symptoms didn’t expose the complete lack of interest the tories will have in following their own rules when another mp actually does have the ‘rona

xp someone's been playing a hacked version of Civ again.

So that there Dominic Cummings seems to have got away with it after all. What a rogue!

Will we get to vote on a name for the yacht?

Exclusive: Welfare should be based on "what you put in" to tackle public mistrust, says Labour’s shadow DWP secretary
https://t.co/4QNM9mXDwx

— The House Live (@TheHouseLive) June 5, 2020

Cheers lads, I wasn't going to vote for you again anyway but thanks for making it so much easier for me.

The glory days are back again, you Tory fucks

ah yes, that public mistrust which sprang fully formed into the public consciousness and was not deliberately inflamed by dishonest political rhetoric and amplified by billionaire media owners

aiui, this is basically how union-negotiated unemployment benefits work in France / Germany / Italy - you get paid a % of your previous salary if you're made unemployed. It means that overall benefit payments are higher than the UK. However, floating 'get out what you put in' as a principle without backing it up with a commitment to increasing the amount spent on social welfare (and increasing NI to offset) is moronic.

it's pure "win back the red wall" rhetoric with a slightly more cautious spin on it than would've happened under Brown or EMil

given that rhetoric is about all they can do at the moment, that's disheartening

Really loving all this pandering to gammon thumbs.

that lack of detail makes him sound sound like he's just a fraction away from riffing on "lazy benefit scroungers" which is probably the undercurrent of his message here imo.

Don’t campaign for this party, don’t vote for them, lesser evilism is a race to the bottom

— Rosewood Shoehorn (@apiarism) June 5, 2020

what this fellow says to all those dickheads that say democracy is a binary choice, fule!

not voting eh? that'll show 'em

yeah lots support a shadow Tory party that openly hates us as much as them.

that lack of detail makes him sound sound like he's just a fraction away from riffing on "lazy benefit scroungers" which is probably the undercurrent of his message here imo.

Yep, that's absolutely right.

We're obviously faced with a situation where a huge number of people have lost jobs who never thought they'd be the ones on benefits, along with the complete demolition of the idea that there are enough jobs out there for everyone, as long as you can be bothered to go ahead and look for them. There's unlikely to ever be a better time to push for an increase to basic long-term unemployment benefits and propose the introduction of the kind of salary-insurance model you have in France.

None of what he's actually proposing is bad (ending means testing / waiting for UC, etc) but it's a) extremely limited and b) couched in unhelpful rhetoric.

Why are they talking about welfare right now anyway? In the middle of a pandemic? It seems completely tin-eared.

It does feel like both the article and the tweet itself have put a heavy spin on what he said, the full interview is here:

https://www.politicshome.com/thehouse/article/jonathan-reynolds-interview

“One of the reasons that support for social security has diminished amongst parts of the country is the sense that people put into the system and they don’t get anything out of it. In a way, if you look at eligibility for Universal Credit, people are not wrong. You can make significant contributions to the system and find that actually, you’re not really eligible for any major support if you need it, even in a crisis like this one. I think you’ve got to recognise that that’s a big problem for working people in the UK.”

And also:

“At the minute, I see absolutely nothing from the Government that even responds to the fact that we’re heading towards five million children being in poverty,” he says. “And if you incorporate that into the [welfare] system, you have to have a more generous system.”

At the same time linking benefits paid out to contributions paid in is fundamentally regressive, the more you have paid in in tax the less likely you are to need a larger welfare payment out. But there's also a wider sense that people who are receiving benefits have never paid into the system via tax, which is complete nonsense but it does reflect another aspect of the way that the link between contributions and benefits has broken down in the public mind.

it's always those melts with the least at stake that believe in gradualism and have the audacity to tell people from the lower orders it'a a binary choice fule! No it isn't, not supporting a rotten party is a actually a vote, fule.

thanks SV i meant to make that point but i got distracted. moronic time to do moronic politics because they only have one way of doing politics.

not voting may not help, stet, but voting got us Blair and that's all it got us. when you vote for the least worst option you really do create a race for ever worse options.

And what creates the pressure for the better options? Because not-voting just guarantees you the worst option, who go on to accelerate the decline.

mass non-voting in a party puts pressure on that party to move towards the direction the non-voters are in

"children in poverty" is a perennial Nu Lab rhetorical move and i think it's to do with a mealy-mouthed justification for welfare benefits because they lack the conviction to make the strong case. it also got us a byzantine, intentionally alienating tax credit system and oh, lest we forget, the sheer poverty-ending magic of SureStart.

middle managers gonna middle manage, technocrats get the fuck away from my techno.

seriously stet i think the burden of proof is on your argument here, voting for Nu Lab in droves didn't force Blair leftwards, quite the opposite.

i don't think anybody's even talking about not voting as a tactic, just that there is nobody of worth to vote for

It’s very garbled and when I combine it with Starmer doing a show with Nick fucking Ferrari...

Starmzy Puts You On Notice

honestly that pig will make a great James O'Brien mark II

ok, sorry for splitting the tolerant Left, i'm gonna walk this bile off

Lord Mandellson's arch criminal boss boast of "they've got nowhere else to go" was actually followed by millions of people dropping off the electoral register, so was completely wrong, they went somehere!

The way forward is to learn from the right, influence the (at least theoretically) mainstream party by putting it under serious electoral pressure. Labour has to fear losing large numbers of votes to the left otherwise it will be almost entirely focused on winning votes from the right with all the policy positions that implies. Otherwise they'll calculate they can afford to lose a few socialists in metropolitan areas if it means bringing in larger numbers of votes from elsewhere.

Otherwise they'll calculate they can afford to lose a few socialists in metropolitan areas if it means bringing in larger numbers of votes from elsewhere.

Seems like it's time for voters in London to be taken for granted.

I’m not saying it did — but it did give us a lot of things we’d not have had if we’d just let the Tories in.

It’s interesting to compare the Tory route. The current admin is far more right-wing radical than Corbyn was left-wing. But they got control of the country by first taking power, then taking the party.

There is an argument that none of that would have happened without UKIP. So yes, minority party voices matter - and will matter more if Labour are the largest party because without Scotland they’re still not getting a majority. It’s not a binary choice. Except on the left rn, where there are no compelling alternatives afaict.

So if you are on the left and want to say “don’t vote Labour” it is hard to see anything other than you’re saying “I’m OK with the hardest right option possible keeping control”.

xp - I think I agree. But not voting doesn’t bring pressure from the left, it just weakens what remains. If there was a genuine alternative this would be a different conversation but there isn’t and I don’t see a route to creating one in the time available.

(Though if ever there was a time the upcoming economic depression is surely it)

One of Corbyn’s calculations was to return people who stopped voting back to Labour. His argument that Labour lost millions of voters tacking to the centre was correct, and loads of them were poor or BAME. One thing I thought the 2019 manifesto was missing was to give the demographic that never needs benefits (or never applies, they can be a group with below-average incomes) a few good reasons to vote for them.

Just to say, because I’m making myself cross with myself here: that’s not saying “vote for whatever is in the red rosette regardless of how hateful their rhetoric is” because also fuck that.

I’m mostly fucked off with the tweet’s implicit idea that, on its own, “don’t vote for them” is any kind of answer to the problem.

glad it pissed you off tbh!

welcome to the Six, stet :D

Think I've said this before but the UK system where you're voting for your local MP also makes it far more muddled to send out a message about the party either way.

Lack of credible minority left parties also very much a problem yes, you'd think this was the USA or something.

isn't the neo-neo-cons' underlying principle to turn us into a US client state

One of the most enraging things about centrist discourse during the Corbyn years, especially around the time of the 17 election, was an over-reliance on prebuilt narratives. "Labour only achieves power when it moves to the centre ground" was one of them, another was "all the Tories need to do is move back to the centre ground with Ruth Davidson as leader and they'll comfortably beat Corbyn". These narratives was so divorced from actual political reality that they were basically meaningless.

A lot of left Twitter in particular appears to repeating that mistake, I'm seeing lots of prebuilt narratives cobbled together from bits of the Blair and Miliband eras but we still don't know what this Labour frontbench are going to propose and these narratives don't really acknowledge the completely unprecedented political situation we're in. (Centrist Labour Twitter also has these prebuilt narratives, in which Starmer leads them seamlessly to victory apparently without considering what's going to happen with Scotland, for example).