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

that Vera Lynn tweet yesterday, was the worst thing I've seen from a Labour leader since Russell Brand went into Miliband's kitchen.

a cringe sandwich made with the blandest insincerity bread

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

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

There's a clarification that those are net figures - it lost more Remain than Leave, but also gained a lot of other Remain.

I've a definite sense of unreality when reading "no offer of a big change from Labour" - particularly considering what we've got in charge now.

Level 3 dudes, Level 3!

― Matt DC, Friday, June 19, 2020 10:46 AM (two hours ago)

So we are out of "transmission is high or rising exponentially", but still in "epidemic is in general circulation" - alien archaeologists of the future will probably conclude that this direction of travel was seen as a problem by the government.

I think we're just moving the alert level closer to the easing of lockdown which it's supposed to match.

tail/dog

either way there's a killer virus still out there, so I'm not.

Boris back in full give-the-rona-a-clip-round-the-ear-and-send-it-packing mode:

Boris Johnson later said to “watch this space” when asked whether distancing restrictions could be cut... The prime minister said: “We have to start thinking of a world in which we are less apprehensive about this disease … I hope, as we go forward into the autumn, people will be much, much more confident.”

Bit rich coming from a man who was breathing through a hoover bag a couple of months ago. The threat to you and your vulnerable loved ones, it's just all in the mind don't you see?

look there's barely a thousand people a week dying of it now

almost down to one hillsborough disaster per day levels

173 deaths yesterday. hillsborough + valley parade + heysel, people should be much more confident in 80s football stadium safety measures

We've just settled down now into a mundane sense of 1000-2000 deaths per week, possibly waxing and waning with the reintroduction and subsequent curtailment of mass events, and the govt cheerleading their incredible success at "beating" the pandemic while the public at large do their best to stay home. This will carry on indefinitely now I suppose, and the culmination of the Brexit project early next year will tip the UK economy into a terminal depression. Happy days!

Strange how most conservative voters vote that way because they want everything to stay as it's "always" been, and Johnson & co are revolutionary radicals who are forging a new, very un-British new economic order onto the country. They don't even bang on about law and order any more! What are the oldsters seeing in them?

Re: Labour having to win Rees-Mogg's seat, that constituency had a Labour MP up until 2010 (or at least a big chunk of it did, the boundaries were redrawn).

Working very closely with Apple and Google by not communicating with them or requesting meetings for weeks. https://t.co/ysfXEnPTDs

— Michael Veale (@mikarv) June 19, 2020

So it turns out that we had over 1000 people dying of covid a day for 22 consecutive days. Fuck.

think of it as a full to capacity mid-sized football stadium amount of people dying in a few weeks and it makes it seem even worse.

https://t.co/ObyH8Ul5Hg pic.twitter.com/JnFMvuvNEL

— Notts Momentum (@NottsMomentum) June 19, 2020

yes, but no...but yes actually!

A quick look suggests the most commonly read paper of those who didn't vote Labour in 2019 (having done so in 2017) is The Guardian (~10%) then The Daily Mail (~8%) and The Sun (~7). Just over half read no paper at all. But among those who 'stuck' with Labour 19% were Guardian.

— Paula Surridge (@p_surridge) June 19, 2020

Baroness Hyde trending, partly because -ho ho ho - she's done it again and also is trashtalking the left again. One loves to be lectured by the landed gentry but maybe stfu!

oh Hugh Laurie thinks government ministers shouldn't be allowed to even draw a salary until they have read the latest Marina Hyde column, great endorsement there - talking truth to power sister!

Marina Hyde as a safety valve for people's cynicism performs a really unhealthy function doesn't she? The better she does it, the worse it is. FBPE types are obsessed with being *right* (in a mixture between moral and 'well actually'/legal rightness), and would rather be cynically tickled on the tummy about their 'rightness' than think about how change that benefits people's material circumstances might be effected.

OpenDemocracy have put the first chapter of Anthony Barnett's Iron Britannia, Why Parliament Waged its Falklands War online, and it's well worth reading, especially cross-referenced with David Edgerton's analysis of 20thC politics (annoying on twitter tho innee).

• establishing belligerent consensus on small scale and peripheral items of nationalism
• category difference between Churchill and Churchillism (a 'chronic deformation' of which WW2 parliamentary consensus barnett suggests we live in now)
• empire as motive force of early 20th century conservatism (this is where I need to go back to Edgerton and his careful treatment of Liberal, Tory and Labour approaches to empire, nation and trade)

By continuing to exclude the restless Churchill from office, Chamberlain perhaps ensured that he would see the opposite and indeed, Churchill gave priority to military belligerency. Thus Churchill, who had initially welcomed Mussolini as an ally in the class war, became the most outspoken opponent of Nazism, because it was a threat to British power. There was no contradiction in this, but rather the consistency of a Toryism that in the last instance placed the Empire before the immediate interests of trade and industry

the fact we have a media class and commentariat incapable and not at all desiring of deepening an understanding of why, say, Churchill's statue is currently boxed in, rather trying to ensure you understand less after reading them than before really is bought home by a very small amount of reading outside our papers.

(forward to the new edition is also online)

"The better she does it, the worse it is"

there is probably some Pythagorean triangle or some anchor/hook type visualisation to prove this!

"David Edgerton's analysis of 20thC politics (annoying on twitter tho innee)"

yep, but don't forget he also described Ken Livingstone as "one of the more interesting and intelligent people from the UK left of the 70's/80's" in Rise and Fall, which would be a sick burn if that was the intention but I don't think it was!

right xpost. the thing that occurred to me is that she's like a return to the tonic in classical music, providing a sense of closure after the the main event turbulence (cummings, brexit, 1000 deaths a day) from the norm, resolving the disruptive social anxieties with her wit back to happy sense of adjusted normality.

lol this needs a 'in this TED talk I will..'/'i will not be taking questions today' somewhere.

lol xpost. about the most generous you can get with that livingstone assessment is that it means 'interesting and intelligent in the sense of being central to the framework of my analysis and providing an unwitting critique and support of it'.

Was thinking about this only yesterday, a whole body of smug online reasonable people steadily oscillating between "look how stupid this government is" and "I am shocked that the government has done this wicked thing" while the government calmly gets on with its political programme and sniggers at the idiots who think they can debate it

the way their majority enables contempt, laziness and indifference due to them being effectively unopposable as long as they manage the news cycle, i can only imagine that's a thing that's going to get worse.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ea8ZhSfWAAE7YmV?format=jpg&name=large

saying "fuck the political dept of the bbc and a million deaths on them" is not quite the same as suggesting some independent, strong healthy left-wing media would pop up in its place if it was privatised, which would be a ridiculous idea. Not that I've seen anyone who gets taken seriously suggesting that it would be a likely outcome. But I suppose such weak as piss strawmanning will do for Hugh Laurie and co!

I thought about checking out that Marina Hyde column and then I realised I just didn't care, its another bit of noise among thousands.

Meanwhile something that might turn out to be actually important is happening, which is that some Tory MPs appear to be reaching the conclusion that Boris Johnson is too weak and sick to run the country properly and might need to go. More to the point they are actually saying it - off the record at least.

https://members.tortoisemedia.com/2020/06/19/sick-man-boris-johnson-transcript/content.html

Also I haven't read all this yet but it's Matthew D'Ancona putting together first hand accounts of what it was like in Downing Street when the PM and others started getting ill and the sense of "what do we do now daddy's dead?" amateurishness is even worse than I imagined.

lol i spent ten mins writing up a bad post abt how corrupted regency and pre-transformation politics feels at the moment, with the corbs-project as the cato street conspiracy (multi-racial, too small, poorly conceived, always doomed), the acceptable resistance-opposition restricted to a bunch of half-measure gentry (the godwins, henry hunt in his fkn white hat), starmer as fox willingly entering the "ministry of all the talents" and bojo as er pitt the younger dying in office -- before the post was eaten up and demolished by me clicking on the wrong x

there are few ways the analogy works precisely (or at all lol) but i maintain that the feel is similar; we are in the dying phase of "the thing" but that dying is going to take its time

next up neo-peterloo

literally posting incomprehensible garbage now u love too see it

Who is mad King George in all this or is that all of us?

some figures currently unassigned, comments are closed

Marina Hyde as a safety valve for people's cynicism performs a really unhealthy function doesn't she? The better she does it, the worse it is. FBPE types are obsessed with being *right* (in a mixture between moral and 'well actually'/legal rightness), and would rather be cynically tickled on the tummy about their 'rightness' than think about how change that benefits people's material circumstances might be effected.

"we are in the dying phase of "the thing" but that dying is going to take its time"

I was thinking how a time spanning implant which allows you to skip a few years in a walking deep sleep might be helpful, but then you might be in your 90's by the time "the thing" has died and the wake up alarm goes off!

lol i spent ten mins writing up a bad post abt how corrupted regency and pre-transformation politics feels at the moment, with the corbs-project as the cato street conspiracy (multi-racial, too small, poorly conceived, always doomed), the acceptable resistance-opposition restricted to a bunch of half-measure gentry (the godwins, henry hunt in his fkn white hat), starmer as fox willingly entering the "ministry of all the talents" and bojo as er pitt the younger dying in office -- before the post was eaten up and demolished by me clicking on the wrong x

idly considered this meaning that age came to an end when a big mark s thumb accidently pressed the wrong button and it got crumpled up and thrown in the pemanent trash bin of The Void.

history as a scrambled, badly formatted ilx post that you decide to/accidentally delete before posting.

Everyone is obsessed with being right, the political internet and Twitter in particular is absolutely stacked with preening twats convinced that they alone see things that everyone else is too stupid and blinded by groupthink to understand.

Lots of these people will start behaving like foot stamping FPBErs the moment their ball is taken away as well (exhibit a = Aaron Bastani).

Wow, this can’t have been easy to admit. Well done @Nigel_Farage pic.twitter.com/Ig85qxeaAQ

— Tom Neenan (@TNeenan) June 18, 2020

(To be honest it's probably less about childishness and more that otherwise healthy things like self doubt, and ever having to admit that you were wrong, put a lot of these people at a career disadvantage).

Moratorium on writing columns about An Argument You Had On The Internet. pic.twitter.com/Yd3ySAepXA

— Elvis Buñuelo (@Mr_Considerate) June 20, 2020

her readership is the probably the same one Starmer thinks he can't win an election without oh so subtly signalling what a nice Tory he is to on a daily basis.

if the argument's the same one I witnessed it wasn't about having cleaners, it was about exposing cleaners to the dangers of covid because your shitty husband won't help around the house

It's about signalling first and foremost that you won't be shouted down by a self-righteous mob. There's a lot of that going on right now. The question of whether or not they might have been full of shit in the first place is of secondary importance to these people.

There's a lot of signalling!

Tbh given that whole fight happened like two months ago it might also just be a completely half-assed and phoned-in column.

It's about signalling first and foremost that you won't be shouted down by a self-righteous mob.

I say we go down to her house and force her to drive to Durham.

she gets paid a paltry quarter of a mill p.a. to write the column, at least I think that is what Suzy said a couple of years back.

lol, I just heard Piers Corbyn mentioned amongst the names of people facing lockdown breaking charges to attend protests.

I used to know her when she lived like a pig/with Taylor Parkes in a flat around the corner from me, I pity her cleaner tbh (and her lovely husband shouldn’t have to clean up after her).