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

Oh my god ... they are ... *rubs eyes* they really are guarding the statue of George Eliot in Nuneaton. pic.twitter.com/i7yiSEjZ46

— Helen Macdonald (@HelenJMacdonald) June 16, 2020

marcus sitting therese coffey on her arse

I’m concerned this is the only tweet of mine you acknowledged. Please, put rivalries aside for a second, and make a difference #maketheuturn

— Marcus Rashford (@MarcusRashford) June 16, 2020

Thank you for your opposition at this difficult times Marcus:

1. When you wake up this morning and run your shower, take a second to think about parents who have had their water turned off during lockdown #maketheuturn

— Marcus Rashford (@MarcusRashford) June 16, 2020

feel bad for mata but marcus has my heart now

maybe those white middle-aged men are just all fans of Middlemarch?

the war memorials thing bothers me. have they (the protectors) really confused statues of slavers with war memorials? or are they doing it deliberately to cast, without basis, the BLM people as anti-"our-finest-hour"?

fwiw:

https://labour.org.uk/press/labour-calls-on-the-government-to-fund-free-school-meals-over-the-summer-holidays-rebecca-long-bailey/

xp bit of 1 but mostly 2

tho churchill statues are kind of a grey area

http://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/glee/images/9/96/Porque-no-las-dos-o.gif/revision/latest?cb=20140406155354

It's absolutely a deliberate strategy from Johnson down.

Also bunch of booze and testosterone fuelled lads who are lockdown stir crazy and looking for a ruckus.

It is incredible how a lot of the people who were saying we absolutely must get children back to school as quickly as possible so they can eat properly are the same people apparently unwilling to feed them in any other capacity.

Wouldn't be surprised if the government u-turned on this one - you can ignore Labour comfortably but ignoring England's Marcus Rashford is more difficult - and Rashford is potentially exposing himself to a hate campaign that would dwarf anything faced by Raheem Sterling in its virulence.

Someone I went to school with was doing the whole "disgraceful, these people died for our freedoms" thing on Facebook over a picture of a defaced monument of some Confederate general with minimal impact on modern Britain but he was getting such a virtual shitkicking from several of the black people who went to our school that I just sat there and watched and then quietly defriended him. A lot of people will just kneejerk into these kinds of arguments and they can be prompted to do so with extreme ease, as the government has realised.

Someone on Twitter described the mobilisation of nationalist thugs in the service of a controversy entirely generated by the government as 'weapon testing', which has a grim ring of truth about it.

Be interesting to see the reception rashford gets from the crowd at spurs oh wait

Rashford is the right colour for a hate campaign, true

It certainly doesn't help when you get grandstanding Labour idiots like Sheerman fuelling the braindead culture war by angrily responding in the local rag to a tweet by a nobody with 7 likes saying hey lets take the H Wilson statue down!

my former childminder sharing a post on Facebook by some army cunt doxxing a woman for "supporting graffiti on the churchill statue" - I try to report it for harassment and it asks me "who is this post harassing?" with the two options being "me" and "a friend" - tried the second and it gave me a dropdown list of my Facebook friends. so apparently doxxing is fine on Facebook.

maybe those white middle-aged men are just all fans of Middlemarch?

Wait till they discover George identifies as a woman.

The horrifying thing is right now we have a group of people who are absolutely convinced that they are an oppressed minority under siege, a government very happy to encourage that idea, and an economic situation that is about to lead to rapidly spiraling unemployment.

With people like Andrew Marr throwing phrases like 'culture war' around.

Yeah it’s grim as fuck.

there was a good piece by Charlotte Higgins the other day that pointed out that if Boris was even half as polished a classicist as he pretends to be, he'd know that the Romans were absolute buggers for cancellation culture, taking down statues and monuments, altering them to erase people who weren't cutting it in the political milieu of their era any more.

One export that we can rely on:

New Zealand ends Covid-free run with two cases from UK https://t.co/jxiFnmnf3P

— The Guardian (@guardian) June 16, 2020

Tory backbenchers are coming out against the government in support of the school meals thing now by the way. If that rebellion grows, and if the policy is playing well in former Red Wall seats, then the government might fold. Labour strategy appears to be trying to split Westminster Tories off from the government on specific issues and it does seem to be effective in terms of forcing individual policy changes.

On the Mirza appointment:

i think maybe bc i have to deal with them more i’ve seen more contempt for longer, including what doesn’t hit press. eg a home office official asking me post-windrush whether it was simply my organisation’s view that the human rights act applies to migrants.

— gracie mae bradley (@graciemaybe) June 16, 2020

Re: declining trust in the UK print and broadcast media after GE2019, these are from a long piece I'm currently writing. pic.twitter.com/o6PldYUtLN

— Juliet. (@zinovievletter) June 16, 2020

Good news:

Not so. The government is not opposing this Lab motion. We will be unveiling significant extra support for kids today. Well done @MarcusRashford . We support you in speaking up for vulnerable children https://t.co/eQN2fTWA0m

— Gary Streeter MP (@garystreeterSWD) June 16, 2020

BREAKING: @BorisJohnson has U-turned on summer free school meals for England.
🚨An extra £120m to be spent on extending vouchers through summer holidays.
🚨Huge victory for @MarcusRashford + other campaigners

— Paul Waugh (@paulwaugh) June 16, 2020

Erect a statue of Marcus Rashford in every town in Britain as far as I'm concerned.

lol get fucked boris

that Juliet Jacques piece is depressing af but should be read by every daft bastard who thinks the left can win thru the media

£120 million is such a tiny amount that the real story is that the cunt had to have his arm twisted in the first place

otm

This is good although yes it makes Rashford more of a target for abuse - might've been even better if e.g. a group of players across different clubs could've got together on it to help mitigate that and ultimately it's still fucked up that a famous individual might be able to prompt police change in ways organised collectives can't. NHS workers from overseas are apparently still paying extra for healthcare.

The problem for the government was that as a policy it was just too popular, same as scrapping the NHS surcharge for foreign care workers (even if that hasn't actually happened yet). Tory backbenchers appear to be very susceptible to this kind of pressure right now and can be flaked off from the government especially as something snowballs and particulary when there are highly regarded celebrities involved. Boris has u-turned or conceded something virtually every week since returning from the rona ward.

as i say, the economic cost of this u-turn is effectively nil and it's easily spun as Boris listening to his people and choosing to do the right thing. there's no victory in this except hopefully slightly less malnutrition.

bought Carrie her own laptop even xp

Slightly less malnutrition is the bit that really matters.

The campaign should continue really, the government is evidently reluctant to concede even a fraction of the argument that it might be its responsibility to prevent its own citizens from starving.

it's easily spun as Boris listening to his people and choosing to do the right thing

Even Laura K doesn't seem to think so.

Question many Tories asking is why on earth Govt tried to fight this anyway - one says it was ‘mental’, another that it’s a ‘shambles’ and they’ll now get no credit for it

— Laura Kuenssberg (@bbclaurak) June 16, 2020

hey it's all good, anything is better than nothing.

i expect Laura will be back on her meds by teatime.

a savvy opposition should be extending this argument to "people in the UK are starving and what are you gonna do?", you're right about that

I'm not sure the list of people who care about Boris' u-turns is ever going to include Boris, though.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-53061281

What the fuck is going on this lunchtime? This isn't even the top story.

yeah I just heard about that on R4 and was thinking this must be quite a big deal really.

Lads.

We did it! Thank you to everyone who campaigned for #HolidaysWithoutHunger 🙌 https://t.co/pXgTzSKJXC

— The Labour Party (@UKLabour) June 16, 2020

canny political instincts there

It woz starmzy that won it!

oh my

Not to take anything away from Rashford but it is kind of odd that so many people who until recently strongly identified as Rebecca Long-Bailey supporters appear to be totally unaware of what she's been doing.

— Dan Davies (@dsquareddigest) June 16, 2020