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

yeah i don't know what you guys are hearing on the street but i don't think there's much he could do to fuck up at the moment

changing the Covid mortality count? no problem, it was definitely too high that's why we looked worse than the other countries

loads of people dying of rona? we're more densely populated than those other countries. not the far east countries, but they're all dictatorships/you can't trust them/who cares?

he's doing the best he can and it's impossible to imagine anybody making a better job of this or even what a better job would look like

What exactly do people think failing to "get away with it" would involve when they say things like this? Resigning in shame? Ousted by his own MPs? Labour 20 points ahead in the polls (lol).

Fact is he gets away with it until he doesn't. The government's rating for its handling of the pandemic is already one of the worst in the world, if not the worst and that's a direct result of the Cummings situation. That doesn't scream immortality to me even if the key players are still in place.

Probably the worst case scenario here for Boris is that the report outrages significant numbers of their more Queen and Country backbenchers and puts them in an even more rebellious and treacherous mood. That may cause him problems later down the line but surely no one thinks any of these incidents are enough to prove terminal to his Premiership in themselves given what Prime Ministers have survived in the past (Blair lol).

If I engage with another well-meaning but naive Matt post about how there will eventually be consequences for the Tories I might well have an aneurysm, so I won’t.

Instead, this seems bad.

Exc: Trouble on Starmer's leadership campaign WhatsApp group. Overlooked staffer accuses new LOTO of worst culture they have witnessed in Labour

Says she was "brutally" treated, "discarded", left on UC during pandemic

Prompts others to request calls with Starmer chief of staff pic.twitter.com/NiSZDxWxjp

— Gabriel Pogrund (@Gabriel_Pogrund) July 19, 2020

i think it means if you're brazen enough, a la Trump, you can brush off all that stuff until it's election time, and once it's election time you ignore it by doubling down on the outrageous shit that your base believes. the question really is how addled the UK's "democratic" "systems" have become in the last 3 years and how bad they'll continue to be. at the moment i'd say it looks like "really quite addled".

not sure whether to feel sorry for saps who didn't think Starmzy's campaign would end up run by/enabling the worst macho reactionaries in the party tbh

Boris himself doesn’t matter. They’ll get rid of him in a second if they need to. The tories are the problem.

That'll almost certainly happen, depends if those tactics work as well for when you're the incumbent as they do for when you're the insurgent. I'm not so sure about that but the point is this is uncharted territory and we just don't know.

Obviously the whole media complex will swing into action to defend them when it comes to it but they may have replaced Johnson with a different Tory by then anyway.

None of this is any comfort to the families of the thousands of people dying obviously.

Xposts

i think Boris and his coterie matters to the extent that they've proved themselves a lot savvier at the mechanics of politics/winning elections in the 21st century than the Bufton Tufton wing, not sure the Tory party could pull another leader out of its arse with the same appeal to the right cross-section of idiots in the electorate

If I engage with another well-meaning but naive Matt post about how there will eventually be consequences for the Tories I might well have an aneurysm, so I won’t

Though I agree its difficult to see consequences any time soon the way things seem to work is cumulative, and when things turn they can turn quick (Trump becoming uncompetitive in the last 12 weeks or so, Conservatives in 90s/00s). But material changes are the trigger. That doesn't really affect current Tory voters (particularly on economy as they're generally retired), but it affects their appeal to the newer voters they'll need to replace them with over time

This doesn't necessarily mean its going to hit any time soon, but it will eventually become a problem for them, regardless of how much the opposition leader loves their country

not sure the Tory party could pull another leader out of its arse with the same appeal to the right cross-section of idiots in the electorate

They'll prob want to fight 2024 with someone else as leader but time is very much on their side with that

christ, that latest bairn of his looks like one ugly big-headed child of the damned, back in medieval times the nurse would have recommended drowning it.

i think it's quite possible they'll have ditched BoJo by then, but it'll be more to do with internal Tory turf wars than whether they've got a smart eye for electoral advantage

True, but one creates the condition for the other.

Also my post wasn't about the Tories, I was talking about Johnson and his team specifically, that much should be obvious. And even then I don't think there's anyone thinking "ah! He's toast now!" British politics hasn't worked like that for a long time, if it ever did. That's an unrealistically high bar for 'consequences' with the Parliamentary situation as it is.

The electoral system is pretty much designed to protect governments with big majorities in situations like this and it's doing what it's supposed to. And they're shameless enough to keep barging through regardless.

Johnson himself survives until the precise point at which Tory MPs decide he's more of a liability than an asset and that's the point I was talking about. It's how the Tories keep power - and in any case the electoral maths means they'll almost certainly win the next election anyway regardless of how bad things get in the interim. It might be on a reduced majority but that's it.

I suppose there are some Dominic Grieve acolytes trotting out the line about how previous Prime Ministers would have had sufficient shame to resign by now and that really is naive when you consider how long Blair lasted after Iraq and David Kelly.

Also get a load of this shite:

This is somehow real. I’m going to lie down in the dark for a while pic.twitter.com/NXn40r1Qq3

— Josh Seymour (@josh_sey) July 18, 2020

not sure the Tory party could pull another leader out of its arse with the same appeal to the right cross-section of idiots in the electorate

this

Supposedly that Vernon piece is feminist irony.

All forms of this Rishi fandom is excruciating nonsense, there is some bizarre projection going on that won't age well. Can't wait until people start blaming him for the crash and they want his broken corpse strung up from a lampost

Things that are happening over the next five years:

- Recession with a potential depression, depending on how the Tories manage it

- Brexit, with a potential break up of the UK and further depletion of GDP

- with an option of a climate event.

I think saying the Tories will get away with it is something understandable given the last few years, but that can also be called naive.

Not naivety, just thinking with the press actively working to hush up bad stories and hyperfocus on the opposition, any old cunt could do what they liked and get away with it, and thus far that’s been the case.

That's a perennial state of affairs and it will happen again with Starmer. The government doesn't necessarily benefit if it's sufficiently discredited in the eyes of the electorate though (and if the public doesn't give enough of a shit about the stories themselves). We're a way off that yet and there are more than enough people in the country who fundamentally want what the Tories are offering.

Alphie your post is slightly playing down the ability of the right to make hay out of a crisis though. The Tories probably see a disputed Scottish referendum as an opportunity for one thing - the very fact of holding it would be disputed in court and it gives the Tories the opportunity to look like defenders of the union while placing Labour in an incredibly difficult position.

We're not talking any old cunt here, we're talking Boris Johnson, who really does get away with stuff that no other UK politician can get away with.

I remember this. I also remember how this same Labour MP instigated a racist pile on because I dared to do some material about her at a Stand Up 4 Labour gig. Assisted by Stella Creasy and Guido Fawkes. https://t.co/eoFxxfJb8a

— No such thing as BAME 🇩🇲🇧🇧#FatAndRound (@thetwerkinggirl) July 19, 2020

Jess Phillips' and other Labour arseholes like Creasy's conscious bias towards a fellow black MP

well Stella's conscious bias towards a black comedian, but fuck all these arseholes!

Bunch of failed human beings! 🤮

I blame the parents. If we look at their backgrounds I expect we’ll see parents who’ve passed their rearing to anyone else except themselves.

I think we should ask their parents what they think of their children’s behaviour. Are they proud?

— #PeopleB4Privilege #BLM #IStandWithChrisWilliamson (@2010somerset) July 20, 2020

This country's in a really fucking weird state.

crank left got to keep cranking

personally wouldn't stand too close to that fellow, bet his farts are rank!

bobby pesto: "are you feeling quite scared over there?"

wtf

As an impression, it's actually not that bad.

But a dreadful, dreadful scene that shows what utter bastards they all are.

Not naivety, just thinking with the press actively working to hush up bad stories and hyperfocus on the opposition, any old cunt could do what they liked and get away with it, and thus far that’s been the case.

― scampos mentis (gyac), Sunday, 19 July 2020 bookmarkflaglink

Well as I said covid has been covered by low borrowing rates to shore up unemployment, and also tell me of another government that is in serious trouble because of its actions on covid? I'd struggle to find any resignations of top cabinet officials. There is a very good piece in The New Republic talking about how governors and Mayors across the states haven't even said sorry or resigned over the mountain of cases and deaths.

He will be PM pic.twitter.com/Ahjnw3Z9FE

— Cllr Shepzy (@tshep42) July 19, 2020

One for Calzino.

a parody account, surely?

the whiners will vote Lab anyway

what's his scotland strategy

Not to care because a Lab govt is probably the only route to a second IndyRef, I guess.

@centrist phone loves starmer and is the leading Labour Right crank of twitter, joke account!

Big 'hates the left far more than the right' energy from the moderate "Doctor"'s twitfeed

It's it interesting how the exact same people on Left Twitter who supported Corbyn's policy of funding 10,000 extra police, are now angry because Starmer doesn't support defunding the police.

HE GOT US HE

I voted for pigs, deal with it!

my contention that the centrist phone is an intelligence-services psyop remains otm

i hated Crombyrne, i was only in it for the extra pigs tbh

i assume Cllr Shepzy is the parody account btw

no-one with a voice like that is ever going to be pm anyway, the British constitution says: kermit voiced melt, you aren't going through the door, dickhead!

The number of cops is irrelevant if they can’t solve burglaries but are all over black teenagers as busywork.

Not naivety, just thinking with the press actively working to hush up bad stories and hyperfocus on the opposition, any old cunt could do what they liked and get away with it, and thus far that’s been the case.

― scampos mentis (gyac), Sunday, 19 July 2020 bookmarkflaglink

Well as I said covid has been covered by low borrowing rates to shore up unemployment, and also tell me of another government that is in serious trouble because of its actions on covid? I'd struggle to find any resignations of top cabinet officials. There is a very good piece in The New Republic talking about how governors and Mayors across the states haven't even said sorry or resigned over the mountain of cases and deaths.

I think Cllr Shepzy is real.

lord help us

gyac - If "It’s yet to really play out" in a country with a bad handling then I'd say the same for the UK, which has been a half-way house in its handling, as in it has borrowed a lot to keep the show on the road but it's obviously far more tailored to big business and property owners.

We've seen tens of thousands of lay-offs in the last three weeks, and protection from eviction lapses in a month.

fairly stinging assessment of the UK's performance during the crisis on A1 of the NYTimes

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/20/world/europe/coronavirus-mistakes-france-uk-italy.html