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

I know, nothing of what the very conservative and cautious leader of the opposition nor any of their MP's says publicly has any significance, I just keep forgetting. Any ideas of offering anything radically different to what we currently have to the electorate is an exercise in futility..

it's a quite a pertinent question because she publicly dismissed the free broadband policy of Corbyn's during an election campaign, but is now saying it is a good policy.

but here is me feigning outrage that a hypocritical melt tosser like her doesn't seem to have any kind of moral consistency or ideological beliefs underpinning her "politics".

it's easy media money to just get the new shadow cabinet to distance from the previous one by saying their ideas are bad and they should feel bad

she didn't make it into the current shadow cabinet through recently having a child I think, but she would have been odds on in there otherwise. probably a stalking horse for RLB's education brief going by the way she has been undermined by Reeves recently.

It is factional bullshit to some extent - it nearly always is - but offering free broadband on pre-existing networks to deprived parents with school age children during a school-closing pandemic is not the same policy as building a national broadband network and offering it to everyone in the country for free.

Why she couldn't just say that instead of spinning out multiple rhetorical contortions is beyond me.

because she's a melt is the simple answer. Oh right the universalism of nationalised broadband was bad then was it? lol!

sorry if I'm being rude Matt, but she's Tory slime to the core imo

that was a brilliant policy idea and making out you could oppose it previously because there wasn't a global pandemic is just nonsense.

broadband inequality existed long before the Rona, she's a fucking wanker and I can't take anything she says in good faith, like about 90% of Labour MP's.

𝗧𝗘𝗔𝗠 𝗡𝗘𝗪𝗦

Also on the #peston team tonight is Labour MP and Shadow Minister for Domestic Violence @jessphillips, a left-winger who can also cut inside and play a more central role if needed#Peston | 📺 @itv | 💻 @itvpeston | 𝗟𝗜𝗩𝗘 𝗔𝗧 𝟭𝟬𝟰𝟱𝗣𝗠 pic.twitter.com/TmneuNivVI

— Peston (@itvpeston) June 17, 2020

I'm not watching Peston rn, but now apparently now Jess Phillips can talk freely over RLB's education brief. She will be gone by autumn.

“I want the children to go back to school now.”
@JessPhillips tells @Peston the government should have been planning for schools to reopen from the moment they closed. #Peston pic.twitter.com/giPYoF6olh

— Peston (@itvpeston) June 17, 2020

jess phillips being a moron on pesto retweeted by Labour Press just to diminish RLB a little bit more.

we are still on around 200 deaths a day and this mumsnet karen is partly blaming the schools without being very specific on the govt's failures, and she is deemed better to speak on this than RLB. Fuck this party.

“Taking the knee” began in 2016 with American athletes refusing to stand for US national anthem. They were protesting police brutality and racism. But @DominicRaab thinks it comes from Game of Thrones!!! https://t.co/9spuAqWSQV

— Diane Abbott MP (@HackneyAbbott) June 18, 2020

we always knew this tory cabinet is made up of the absolute dregs of their party, but they can still occasionally take you by surprise by plumbing new depths of stupidity.

wow

That's not even the most stupid - it's entry level now.

That's genuinely bizarre about Raab.

I agree that Creasy has turned out bad. I think I actually voted for her in the 2015 Deputy Leadership contest or something.

Apart from anything else it's dire that Phillips is billed as 'a left-winger who can cut inside'.

I agree about the awfulness of these people and their disdain for RLB, a person with vastly more value and integrity.

I watched a Novara Media debate between two factions of Momentum. It became somewhat bitter.

Two factions of an organization that has little influence on Labour, which has little influence on the UK.

I suppose it was Borges on the Falklands all over again.

Was Jess Phillips invited on to talk about schools or was she just invited on to be Jess Phillips and ended up talking about schools? She's not really a message discipline kind of person.

she's starts going into a beef she has with her local school on television, that is certainly not message discipline. She needs to ditch politics and get her own C5 Speak To the Manager show or something because she is terrible at this game.

Does Pesto ever describe his guests as 'right-wingers'? Guess I'll never know.

It is good that JP ran for Labour leader and was humiliated and rubbish.

Nashwan is correct that leftists are described as such, right-wingers are viewed as normal.

That's genuinely bizarre about Raab.

I don't think he's being stupid, he's signalling that it isn't something important enough for him to bother with. Same with Hancock yesterday although he at least has other very important things to worry about right now.

see also "who even are you?", "I hadn't heard of Marcus Rashford campaign", etc etc

I can certainly believe Hancock is stupid, Raab's 'error' seems deliberate to me.

Even if he is just being stupid, it's evidence that neither Cummings nor anyone else in their comms team been on the line saying "these are the details, make sure you get them right".

Ignorance and/or contempt probably plays better with particular groups of voters right now.

people who talk about history but don't know any history, people who think all football fans are working class white supremacists, people with billions riding on a hard Brexit, it's an exclusive crowd

He went on: “I take the knee for two people – the Queen and the Mrs when I asked her to marry me.”

He added: “By the way, she disputes that... I’m sure I did but we’d obviously had too much champagne at the time, but I’m certain I did.”

£100bn of QE lads. That suggests they'll keep furlough running past October after all.

Raab, when he talks, seems, stupid, in a certain way, to me.

It's more that he doesn't function too well among humans.

I do think he is quite stupid but he's also doing his own version of that thing people do when they mispronounce a black person's name for effect. It's a casual flexing of power that comes from stupidity. But he's also showing that he doesn't need to be as intelligent or engaged because he's the one with the power. Every black person who sees that will know exactly what it means.

he probably is the 2nd brightest of the Britannia Unchained posse, but that is not much of accolade.

Apparently Raab is a karate black belt. Doesn't that involve a bit of kneeling? Now I'm imagining him doing the noises :(

fp

I don't think he's being stupid,

Surely one thing you can always be sure about with Raab is that he's being stupid, it's an eternal truth.

To add to yesterday's scenes in Glasgow:

Mask off Bristol. It was always about celebrating slavery not learning from history.

Anyone wanna tell me again this isn't a deeply racist country?https://t.co/cdCimjFQKr

— W #BLM (@Whagwan_W) June 18, 2020

I watched a Novara Media debate between two factions of Momentum. It became somewhat bitter.

Two factions of an organization that has little influence on Labour, which has little influence on the UK.

I suppose it was Borges on the Falklands all over again.

― the pinefox, Thursday, 18 June 2020 bookmarkflaglink

Until recently it was a pressure group that a lot of the leadership paid attention to. Given what's happening there is still a need for sections of the left to keep organising in whatever way possible instead of retiring to a library, like erm...Borges(?!)

not sure if this is still the current design of the medal but...

This is the KCMG medal. The highest order given traditionally to diplomats and overseas personnel by royalty in the New Years Honours list. Zoom into the image and you’ll see how/why the UK is built on racism. Until these traditions etc are overhauled nothing will change... pic.twitter.com/iZXqpKed8f

— Wayne Reid⚡️ (@wayne_reid79) June 17, 2020

This is what it is supposed to be. Still awful.

There are versions which, while keeping the traditional light/dark motif, are more clear in what they're supposed to show: pic.twitter.com/VZY1MhuMSl

— 🛡️ James Calbraith ⚔️ (@eadingas) June 18, 2020

still showing as the first image on The Gazette:

https://www.thegazette.co.uk/all-notices/content/101453

Until recently it was a pressure group that a lot of the leadership paid attention to. Given what's happening there is still a need for sections of the left to keep organising in whatever way possible instead of retiring to a library, like erm...Borges(?!)

I think that I would support most of Momentum's goals. I am quite glad they exist. I am sure that many good people are in Momentum. I hope that they can succeed.

My point was rather that given how marginal they have now apparently become (eg: to Labour Party policy), an internecine scrap *within* Momentum seems especially marginal and probably not very effectual in concrete terms.

The rate it's going, maybe Forward Momentum and Momentum Renewal will also both split and have hustings about which faction has the best way forward for those factions.

Literally no-one can retire to a library at the moment, like it or not.

I just happened to read Miranda Sawyer's radio review in the OBSERVER.

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2020/jun/13/radio-podcast-call-keir-lbc-review-shade-podcast-nut-jobs-great-post-office-trial-banged-up

We’ve been treated to Phone Farage and Call Clegg… now it’s Sir Keir Starmer’s turn to have a phone-in slot on LBC. Or “Ss-KEeah”, as most of the callers said his name, a little like a sneeze. On Monday morning, Starmer sat in on Nick Ferrari’s breakfast show, at the correct social distance, and answered listeners’ questions. Boris Johnson used to have a similar slot, but our prime minister doesn’t venture out of the house so much these days.

Starmer was good, I thought: calm, clear, direct. When asked for opinions he gave them. A caller brought up Barry Gardiner, the Labour politician who had attended a Black Lives Matter demonstration: “No, he shouldn’t have done it,” said Starmer. “He was wrong.” What about the new 14-day quarantine when arriving in the UK? Starmer would prefer on-the-spot testing on arrival and then a 24-hour wait for the results at an airport hotel. (The listeners weren’t fond of that solution.) Brexit? “It’s no secret that I voted Remain… but we have left the EU. The Leave/Remain divide is over, it is gone; the argument now is about what the future relationship with the EU should look like.”

Ferrari wondered if the Bristol statue of Edward Colston should have been toppled by demonstrators. It shouldn’t have been brought down “in that way”, said Starmer, but added: “That statue should have been taken down a long, long time ago… This was a man who was responsible for 100,000 people being moved from Africa to the Caribbean as slaves, including women and children who were branded on their chests with the name of the company he ran. And of the 100,000, 20,000 died en route and they were chucked in the sea.” There was no place for such a statue, he said, in 21st-century Britain. Good.

It was another of Ferrari’s own questions, the last one, which proved the most revealing. “So, your parents were quite politically minded?” he asked, after Starmer said that he was named Keir after Labour party founder, Keir Hardie, and Starmer agreed that, yes, his had been a Labour family. His dad, a toolmaker, “worked in a factory all his life” and his mum, who had been a nurse, died three weeks before her son was elected as an MP. She’d had a long-term illness, said Starmer. “What was the condition she had?” said good journo Ferrari, venturing where most polite conversations don’t. It was Still’s disease, a rare condition “where your immune system attacks itself”, Starmer said. In the last years of her life, his mother couldn’t walk or speak, and had her leg amputated. “She’s never spoken to our children,” said Starmer, using the present tense. “As a teenager I spent a lot of time in high dependency units with my mum, watching the NHS saving her life.”

You may like Starmer or you may not, but it was heartening to hear a politician who was steady and honest, who gave straightforward answers and was across the issues that mattered. Plus, he didn’t appear to be using the media for its ego-boosting jollies and rabble-rousing opportunities. Amazing how refreshing that seems now.

Not only does she highly praise KS.

Including praising his statement about the Colston statue.

She also literally calls Nick Ferrari a good journalist.

That's less a review than a synopsis really.

Take that Germany Kremlin, with your notorious lack of honesty, vagueness in answering, ignorance of vital issues and media vanity.

BBC scoop - NHS abandons centralised contact tracing app, moves to Apple/Google decentralised model

— Rory Cellan-Jones (@ruskin147) June 18, 2020

Who reckons this was the plan all along? Allow masses of public money to be spaffed up the wall siphoned to Dom's mates, and then revert at a convenient moment.

spaffed up the wall of course