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

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.

Tbh it's for BLM and orgs like it to twist the arm of politicians at local levels right up to national politics. And if Starmer/Labour will never argue for defund, then eventually people will enter politics that will. They may not have a Lab badge tho'.

I see the DWP are bringing back benefits sanctions, banks/building societies ending their no-charge to £500 overdrafts. That'll be nice for people in localised lockdowns who won't be afforded the luxury of staying in.

is that good pic.twitter.com/PqNlUCVBQN

— worm from home (@SzMarsupial) June 29, 2020

Clowned by 2020 vintage Farage oh dear.

got that neo-fash endorsement sewn up now, if he isn't 20 pts ahead next week questions will have to be asked!

Eventually Labour will elect Tommy Robinson leader and still be just slightly behind in the pills

Fuck.

Farage has form for this sort of thing, I remember he was taking pains to praise Corbyn in 2017 for being a good Eurosceptic.

Hasn't he got a plane to crash?

This is from a short piece I have co-authored with @carlheneghan & @oke_jason on apparent positive signs regarding hospitalised patients & patients in intensive care in England, Wales and NI (data for Scotland was not available in our sources). @AUHE_Leeds https://t.co/GWUtTPxoy2 https://t.co/AWTluW0Hdk

— Daniel Howdon (@danielhowdon) June 29, 2020

I've been wondering about this - what are they doing differently now, aside from the drug discovered the other week?

Be interesting to know how the patient profile has changed over time. I'd guess a lot of the oldest or most vulnerable people caught it earlier on and those that didn't have shielded since.

it's hard to find the patient profile data – there's been a similar result in the US, though and speculation there is that it's younger people catching it (mainly because they're service workers rather than partiers) and correspondingly have better outcomes

The big stat in that report is the big decline in the use of ventilators for ICU patients. From around 90% in March to 30%~ now! The survival rate has risen from around 50% to 70% and I don’t know that’s unrelated. If the thing that really fucks you is the inflammation, and they can treat that more effectively with steroids, then less need to move people onto ventilators which in themselves are a very high risk treatment?

And, unrelated:

I can’t believe we were led to believe a man who struggled with a floppy disc was competent https://t.co/pWSAONW7NA

— Your Mum says Black Lives Matter (@judeinlondon2) June 29, 2020

xp on this point, it’s not the numbers that matter, it’s the rate for the age groups and the report says:

This does not appear to be an age composition effect, as shown by data below stratifying survival by age group for each of the earliest and latest groups of just under 3,000 patients to have survival reported. These data show that while older age groups face greater in-ICU mortality risk at both time points, appreciable and statistically significant increases in survival are observed for all groups below the age of 80.

thanks gyac that's v. interesting

wtf is going on in Leicester!

No offense to the city of Leicester which I'm sure is doing its best with the £4.60 and half a pack of mints that the government gave it to work with, but the shitness of our track and trace here seems stone-aged compared to Kerala.https://t.co/fhA0Wd6gIDhttps://t.co/fhA0Wd6gID

— Phil McDuff (@Mc_Heckin_Duff) June 29, 2020

xps
Christ, it isn't even a case of what went wrong, Starmer was clearly an arrogant incompetent boss-level wanker when he was young as well.

Helen Steel and Dave Morris ran their McLibel office from a studio in the Gray’s Inn Buildings, a big short-life block of flats where I lived at the time (I don’t think they were sitting in that particular office in the clip). When I was doing the ‘serious’ features for Edgy Style Mag, I had to interview them for one such - I really liked Helen (and was appalled when it came out that she’d been seduced by an undercover cop) but Dave was one of those droning over-explainers you get in every single social justice setting. We’re talking about having to transcribe THREE FUCKING HOURS of Dave tapes.

1) The weird body-twist Starmer does when he mentions as exculpatory evidence the many actions he's done with the police, as if his thank-you scrolls are sitting on a table behind him just out of shot.

2) The noted pivot (live and on air!) from BLM as movement to a moment reflecting on that one thing that happened is in tune with the great spirit in British Politics which I will never stop thinking of as "Is there anything to be said for another moment of silence?"

3) ... which leads me to the disquieting realisation (because I'm watching the clip on silent) that his true voice is Dermot Morgan.

In conclusion, fuck this clown.

He has the voice of a muppet and I don't know if he can beat Boris record of 1 pushup either.

He seems so animated talking about the police as well!

assume leicester is only the first of these second hyper-local lockdowns :/

Exc: Labour's BAME staff groups demand meeting with Keir Starmer over "discomfort and disappointment" caused by his Black Lives Matter interview

BLM not a "moment" but a "movement" that has given voice to black people globally

Fears of "hierarchy of racism" under his leadership pic.twitter.com/v5XPV9hEV4

— Gabriel Pogrund (@Gabriel_Pogrund) June 30, 2020

There are questions on which local area will be next If Leicester does have to lockdown for longer as Covid-19 cases are rising in 36 cities and counties across England.

lovely stuff

I'm impressed by that action from the BAME staff.

someone pointed out even Sunak's BLM statement was better than Starmer's. Seeing as you get treble the scrutiny as Labour leader it is very unfortunate his instincts are so right wing and conservative and he is so unskillful at speaking live that he will have to be managed in future, unless the PLP are quite happy about him alienating everyone except some reanimated neanderthals from Workington and make it the party of provincial angry statue worshippers.

Also agree with Andrew Farrell above: very odd how animated and physical KS is about police.

The problem with 'defund the police' is that it requires too much explanation and additional context to people who might initially be freaked out or are otherwise not inclined to look further into it, and it is almost perfectly designed to be weaponised by malicious actors looking to make sure as many people misinterpet it as possible, and it would be used against Labour on an almost daily basis from now until the next election. Even Corbyn would not be enthusiastically joining in with calls to defund the police in the UK, as other people have mentioned.

But the problem with Starmer's response - and it's a big one - is that he just doesn't just bat the question away or defuse it, he enthusiastically leans into it, rubbishing and dismissing BLM as an organisation in the process, and the timing of it is indefensible. That will be heard by every black person in the UK and it's a pretty big 'fuck off, we know you're going to vote for us anyway' signal. The Telegraph is already gleefully reporting that Starmer is trying to "wriggle out" of his support for BLM and we've talked about the Farage thing already.

I wonder if there's any triangulated response to this that could possibly work, say, higher funding for the police (as well as community projects, mental health etc) in exchange for root-and-branch reform and much stronger sanctions and accountability. But it's all very well saying you're going to weed out institutional racism and quite another to actually deliver on that, they've been failing to do so since Stephen Lawrence. The problem, as ever, is with the kind of person attracted to joining the police.

How widely has this interview been condemned by other black community organisations? It can't be allowed to be dismissed as an objection from disgruntled backbenchers and marginalised white leftists.

very widely, and it still will bc the press & party leadership don’t gaf

When black ppl are dying with *impunity* at the hands of police, our corpses used as props in their selfies, I really don't get how you can dismiss defunding the police as "ridiculous". At least engage with the discussion.

— p-dinheiro™ (@p_dinheiro) June 30, 2020

there's probably no adequate way that the Labour Party can deal with BLM as a movement; if this is an indicator of the inadequacy of the Party (and of electoral politics in general) then that's fine by me, at least Starmz's position is clear and unambiguous.

that's not quite the same as "the Labour Party is useless", but i think it's a good thing if people start to recognise the limits of its tactical use, and in a secondary way a good thing if this incites people to continue struggling to change it, tho personally too much of that feels like a waste of energies better directed elsewhere.

of course the structural realities of police funding and control are v different in the UK and the US, but if the choice of rallying cries is "defund the police" vs "reform the police, preferably after a good old-fashioned cockney enquiry" then i think people shd stick with the former. alienating a particular section of the electorate is the point of it, and that alienation isn't the problem of anybody bar career politicians.

Thankfully that isn't the only choice that exists.

But yeah it's a difference between campaign slogan and something that politicians could realistically do, and even then there's no guarantee they'd be interested in doing so. Bears reiterating that Labour is a fundamentally authoritarian party, always has been and probably always will be.

But the problem with Starmer's response - and it's a big one - is that he just doesn't just bat the question away or defuse it, he enthusiastically leans into it, rubbishing and dismissing BLM as an organisation in the process, and the timing of it is indefensible

That's the key. I'm not even sure if 'defund the police' has much traction within the UK BLM movement - it's nothing like as central as it is in the UK. Dismissing the organisation's objectives as 'nonsense' dismisses demands around the reduction of stop and search, proper investigations into deaths in custody, continued work on institutional racism, the massively disproportionate number of BAME people in jail, etc. You could simply say 'Labour has no interest in discussions around defunding or abolishing the police but we recognise the ongoing work that needs to be done to ensure that policing reflects the values of...., etc, etc'.

I'm not sure if he'd have been so reflexively kneejerk about it if they hadn't criticised him for sacking RLB.

'central as it is in the US'

Bears reiterating that Labour is a fundamentally authoritarian party, always has been and probably always will be.

yeah, i take comfort when that gets exposed. a slogan isn't a programme was my point really. even if the electoral maths was different i wouldn't expect much change to structural inequalities to come out of a political party currently riddled with them. also it's just nice to see the right kind of people shaken up.

'Labour has no interest in discussions around defunding or abolishing the police but we recognise the ongoing work that needs to be done to ensure that policing reflects the values of...., etc, etc'.

This would have been so easy that you have to wonder if yesterday's interview as given was the point, rather than a reflexive kneejerk. And yeah I haven't really heard 'defund the police' used much over here at all.

it was the point and the point was “fuck you”

He could also - though he didn't - have pointed to a report from his own Shadow Justice Secretary, who is black.

Just heard Jonathan Ashworth say the reason UK was late to lockdown was because we thought this epidemic was going to be like swine flu. This statement is patently ridiculous. The genome of SARS-CoV-2 was published in January and we knew then it was a coronavirus, not swine flu.

— richard horton (@richardhorton1) June 30, 2020

jesus wept

A positive of Starmer rubbishing BLM like this is that it pushes 'defund' more and more to the conversation as a thing.

Surely Ashworth meant it like it would have the same impact in the UK as swine flu did. He's still a chump.

I'd want to hear it in context as it's not a reason for why the UK was later than other countries. That was a political call.

he's fucking awful and when mostly the rest of Europe were locking down it was pretty clear this mofo was no H1N1

tbh it's been tempting to flip 'defund the police' back at Tories given their policy over the last ten years was to do exactly that

there is line between treading carefully because "the GBP don't like to see pols making cheap political capital from the Rona" and just being a complete fucking useless idiot.

"We also clap for those who make our NHS possible: our innovators, our wealth creators, our capitalists and financiers." https://t.co/hve0sI2ea4

— alex hern (@alexhern) June 30, 2020

omg clap for Branson!