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

somebody start the "Starmzy's rock-hard penis" thread please

actually nobody start that thread please

This year's going to end with leadership contests being settled by who can successfully wrestle Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow.

Politics's Hardest Men

i really feel that leaving the phrase "rock-hard penis" out of the title was a failure of nerve and for that i make no apologies, come on you bastards, outside, i'll have yez all

There's going to be a lot of this Real Men's Man stuff over the next four years so get used to it. If anything it'll be ramped up given how much lower the Labour vote was among older men in particular, Boris has just had a baby with a woman 25 years his junior so has a clear lead in the midlife crisis vote right now.

best league in the world

By the end of this year he'll be turning up at Westminster in a new Jag with The Blueprint blasting out.

Starmzy’s gonna try and contract the rona

More than anything I'm looking forward to his first Prime Ministerial meeting with Putin.

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer tells #BBCBreakfast it’s "a shame" the sentiment behind the Black Lives Matter movement is getting “tangled up with these organisational issues" and it’s "nonsense" to call to ‘Defund the Police’. pic.twitter.com/7ydITWGZWN

— BBC Breakfast (@BBCBreakfast) June 29, 2020

Again, obviously he's not going to say anything bad about the police but the framing is O_o.

BLM is a 'moment' in which we should all focus on what happened in the US a few weeks ago and it's a "shame it is getting tangled up with these organisational issues, with the organisation Black Lives Matter, but i wouldn't have any truck with what the organisation is saying about defunding the police or anything else, that's just nonsense".

look i think we can all agree with the sentiment that black lives matter but doing anything to address the cultural and structural problems that devalue black lives is going too far

Clearly too many black people voted Labour last time.

https://i.imgur.com/QPz1OKQ.jpg

How is he this bad

Aiming for broad church left-centre-gammon umbrella with centre-gammon making the difference in marginals.

Presumably he's now he's going back to prepare for his next Zoom interview, taking care to replace everything on his bookshelf with copies of Bravo Two Zero.

"of course black lives matter that's why I spent a career helping the police put the wrong'uns away"

The irony that Theresa May was the closest we've had to a liberal police reformer in high office in like forever.

— Wail Qasim (@WailQ) June 29, 2020

Its not so much Starmer as the Labour Party's badness.

Labour -- and poster Left perfectly reasonable point (taking aside his manner of saying it) a few days ago -- is that Corbyn et al. were competing with the Tories on funding the police. Now that looks awful and weak. We saw the effect of BLM in this country through bringing down statues of colonisers. Direct action as the path to reverse police and prison funding will be the only way to force these ideas through and bring in a generation of politicians who take 'defund the police' seriously.

Citing excessive stop and search inflicted on black communities and failures in handling domestic violence cases, May said problems appeared to lie with a significant minority of officers rather than just "a few bad apples".

She pledged to break the powerful federation, announcing an end to its automatic right to enrol police officers as its members, in effect curtailing the closed shop in policing .

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As the home secretary took the stage she was greeted by polite applause, but when she left there was silence, as May warned that a string of scandals about corruption and the conduct of the federation itself risked destroying the bedrock of British policing, which is that officers exercise their powers through the consent of the public.

"If there is anybody in this hall who doubts that our model of policing is at risk, if there is anybody who underestimates the damage recent events and revelations have done to the relationship between the public and the police, if anybody here questions the need for the police to change, I am here to tell you that it's time to face up to reality," May said.

Imagine anyone doing this today.

The net result of which is the former Met chief blaming her for a rise in knife crimes xp

I mean presumably she was quite happy to have that all blamed on Sadiq Khan for her duration as PM?

the UK gov: not sending your child to school is such a detriment to them we might fine you

also the UK gov: don't sweat about vaccines tho, wouldn't want them to catch the dyslexia

Even given any number of other factors, frames, whatever -- seeing that clip of KS above on BLM really surprises me.

I'm surprised he makes such a big deal about his love of the police, rather than talking politely about the need for reform and accountability in the police so that they represent our diverse society. He could do that and be bland and inoffensive. But he doesn't bother. He just goes on, without prompting, to say how much he admires the police.

I'm surprised that he can call BLM a 'moment' - especially when the movement (I think that's the right word) is literally 7 years old. That's a long 'moment'. He seems to mean that it's a 'moment' of a month or so in which people like Harry Kane and himself 'take a knee', and then things move on.

Above all, I'm surprised that he can dismiss the BLM organization - not gently distancing himself from it, but briskly and totally. I very much imagine that the people who run this organization are ... black people, campaigning for the rights of black people. That is - the kind of people that KS and everyone else was falling over themselves trying to respect, about a fortnight ago.

You can't say all that stuff about respect and change and going down on one knee, then dismiss the words and beliefs of actual black activists who run the central organization (as far as I can see) in this movement in the UK. That doesn't make any sense. The second thing is very offensive within the terms set down by the first thing.

Maybe I should no longer surprised by anything KS says or does. The mask has certainly come off.

BLM are being targeted (and misquoted) by ToriesCampaign Against Non-Tory Antisemitism on Twitter (tho not only the anti-left as the Sobel tweet upthread highlights). Starmer probably aware of that in his distancing from BLM.

Tbh I think I prefer Theresa May to Starmer, just on a personal level . She only took a decent position on Stop and Search because it conveniently sat with her slashing the fuck out of budgets all over the shop and her record as H S was pure evil, but still as awful as she is at least there was no chance of any dadflop bluster and wanking competitions.

was more in favour of recruiting civilians to enact racist harrassment on behalf of the state, whole lot cheaper than getting the police to do it

theresa may is bad

"Tbh I think I prefer Theresa May to Starmer, just on a personal level"

I hope I get to live long enough to hate as purely as calzino does Sir Haircut

I hate KS now.

I didn't use to.

But Calzino was right.

Tories are meant to be bad, and now the UK electorate gets two for the price of one. That is worse than bad.

Definitely feels like the gammon signalling has gone into overdrive this morning and I wonder if it's a burst of overconfidence at overtaking Johnson in the 'preference for PM' polls. The press ups thing was dumb but basically harmless but the BLM interview is just a disaster - he didn't need to say anything at all.

Pretty sure they're dutifully ticking off different voter groups and there are a lot of awful authoritarian shitheels in this country so it probably tells you more about the badness of Britain specifically.

You love to see it

Byron to go into administration in bid to sell parts of burger chain https://t.co/5Cl08mQutK

— The Guardian (@guardian) June 29, 2020

All those clueless melts that called Corbyn a populist maybe think populism is good now?

"Tbh I think I prefer Theresa May to Starmer, just on a personal level"

I hope I get to live long enough to hate as purely as calzino does Sir Haircut

needs a comma

User, imago is right here

been annoying me for ages but i finally figured out who starmer reminds me of

https://i.ibb.co/PhxngZb/starmergrout.jpg

looks like keith brown
https://i.imgur.com/qOAxHi4.png

User imago is right here
― scampos mentis (gyac), Monday, 29 June 2020 bookmarkflaglink

I only call him thrash twice a week at most. I know this is a failure on my part, must improve.

Meanwhile, NHS England appears to have reported single figure hospital deaths for the past two days? I know it's the weekend and the data will change but I don't think that's happened before even on a Monday. Not since early March at least.

Hopefully only the first branch of the Home Office to be abolished. https://t.co/nTSxgvMycH

— Elvis Buñuelo (@Mr_Considerate) June 29, 2020

defund the brioche

looks like keith brown
🖼

Paranoid hallucinations plague many coronavirus patients in I.C.U.s, an experience that can slow recovery and increase risk of depression and cognitive issues. https://t.co/ugMkL5qkWK

— Taylor Lorenz (@TaylorLorenz) June 29, 2020

pretty upset to see Genial Harry Grout getting libelled on this thread

As a public prosecutor, Sir Kier Starmer was a cop in an expensive suit. While black people are now incarcerated at the same rate as African Americans, the prison population in Britain has almost doubled since the 1980s. This has affected all working class people in Britain.

— #BlackLivesMatterUK (@ukblm) June 29, 2020

it is as much the Labour Party's problem as Starmzy's, and to a wider extent a public problem altho i'd argue it's a political party's job to lead not follow on stuff like this. i doubt there's any need for Starmz to triangulate on this issue, he's speaking his sincere beliefs.