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

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

I see #grime4corbyn has found its analogue in Starmerism https://t.co/YB5e4SrvKT

— Dan Hancox (@danhancox) June 18, 2020

lool!

We will, aha, you see, all meet again - no, hear me out -

I suppose it's the sort of garbage you're expected to come out with but still *boak*

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.

― glumdalclitch, Thursday, 18 June 2020 bookmarkflaglink

A Tory's mate is always getting hold of public funds. Surely the main takeaway is the government's inability to stand up a track and trace app, therefore making a 2nd lockdown more likely if the NHS is totally run down by winter.

I don't think it's the plan, it's just a consequence of the standard operating model being to spaff the money you spend on anything to your pals and then move on. Covid's proving a real problem for this model because it's staggeringly obvious when you're fucking up, so you now also reluctantly, belatedly, have to attempt to do something which might actually work. Which you've forgotten how to do, so you also outsource that and then embarrass yourself.

It'd be interesting to see how much of this has been driven by data privacy issues. The Norwegian court just ruled their centralised system illegal this week.

Aside from the legality there's absolutely no chance of anyone downloading it if they can't assuage privacy concerns.

Palantir are actual evil, when I found out they were involved in this there was no way I was going to use it

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/18/man-rescued-by-uk-black-lives-matter-protester-is-ex-police-officer

He is described as a Millwall FC fan on the website of a local village club where he volunteers.

A fellow member of the club said Male was “a patriotic Brit, England through and through”.

Michael Gove says NI>GB border controls in Boris Johnson's deal shouldn't be implemented as they will anger unionists https://t.co/ptxTZwz04T

— Jon Stone (@joncstone) June 18, 2020

do not waste this time

some discussion of upcoming labour together postelection report, one interesting thing I saw which I don't think I've read elsewhere is they think Tories got 2m previous non-voters to vote for them in 19, ppl have commented that the tory vote didn't change much overall but may well have been lots of traffic in either direction cancelling each other out

they think Tories got 2m previous non-voters to vote for them in 19

must've been all those people under 25 door-knocking all over the country like in the videos we saw all over social media

oh wait

Thanks wreckers

The report doesn't criticise Corbyn personally but "the fact is he lost us a lot of votes"

Disunity was a huge issue, with ChUK MPs defecting denting his ratings massively

PV ultras will not like it, apparently, nor will those who want Corbyn to be held responsible

10/10

— Gabriel Pogrund (@Gabriel_Pogrund) June 18, 2020

with ChUK MPs defecting denting his ratings massively

yet they couldn't keep their own voters

when a brilliant MP like Joan Ryan walks from the Labour Party then questions have to be asked about the leader!

if the leader can't command the respect of Gapesy then you might as well give up.

report will blame Corbyn, ignore 2017 and overemphasise the scale of defeat ... yawn.

Do you agree that Boris Johnson/Keir Starmer...

Is best to negotiate with the EU:
Johnson: 39% (% who agree)
Starmer: 31%

Is able to stand up for Britain's interest abroad:
Johnson: 40%
Starmer: 34%

via @OpiniumResearch

— Britain Elects (@britainelects) June 18, 2020

even when Starmer is having public thoughts of necrophilia with Vera Lynn, the gbp still prefer a Tory to him and he's not even had a concerted campaign of hate against him yet! Fucking two-time loser in the making here.

those are questions for headbanging cultists, not mild mannered legal beagles

The 2019 defeat taken in the context of the long term decline of post Blair Labour tells a different, or at least one a bit more complex than Corbyn's fault.

Argh it's raining on my phone and my posts are getting even shitter!

If Starmer was a beagle Labour would be 20 pts ahead!

report will blame Corbyn, ignore 2017 and overemphasise the scale of defeat ... yawn.

That thread gyac linked to is worth reading in its entirety - it suggests the report does none of those things.

EXC: Here's an overview of Labour Together's inquiry into 2019 election defeat, overseen by MPs incl Ed Miliband, per source

It addresses threat posed by Boris Johnson, Labour's relationship with working class, what went wrong under Corbyn and long-term trends since Blair

1/10

— Gabriel Pogrund (@Gabriel_Pogrund) June 18, 2020

I'll check it later because of rainy phone syndrome

was listening to a bbc report giving a very bland history of De Gaulle's wartime exile in Britain and his bbc speech to Vichy France, some bollox to do with Macron's visit. It didn't include all the mutual mistrust, questions of De Gaulle's legitimacy and the absolute murderous hatred between him and the British govt. It's almost like some things never really changed!

Says biggest factors in election loss were Brexit ‘by a country mile’, Corbyn's unpopularity and too many policies.

Predictable enough. The last one is still the most infuriating in terms of audience rejection.

Labour lost 1.7m Leave voters and 1m Remain voters.

Bit surprised it wasn't the other way round here though.

Tories succeeded in turning out 2m more non-voters - mainly older white men, "leave minded", wanted to "Get Brexit Done" and/or stop Corbyn from being PM

I guess there was always the question of whether Brexit-voters could be bothered to turn up for another GE with just a little more persuasion and scare-mongering that it might not happen. I wouldn't have thought social media played any significant role here* and it all came through trad media and word of mouth in precipitous Labour seats. 2 fucking million though...

If they didn't hit the ceiling on that the big post-Brexit issue for the far right recruiters might be black people crossing into the UK by boat. Might not play so well up North but Farage is already well into this and will be PM in another ten years.

*but apparently Tory party destroyed Labour on Facebook - fair enough as Labour went after young new voters