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

yeah they've been cutting dwp staff and closing job centres for years now, they probably wouldn't be able to maintain the evil pre-Rona sanctions for missing an interview because you had a brain stroke regime.

I don't if he was reading from his memoir "what a wanker" but I heard Postman Alan on R4extra one night talking about his rapid rise up from ambitious union rep to PLP contender. What a vacuous self-important arsewipe, and he's sort of like a mix of Weller and Wiggins with the swagger of Gapes. He thinks he's a character in norman jewison's F.I.S.T. movie sort of deluded cunt.

Really it should be a no brainer for the Tories, you can either allow an era of basically free money to carry on doing its thing or you can commit an action that, at a stroke, is going to really fuck off millions of people who has previously been holding you in reasonably high esteem.

Also there's no sign that Johnson and Cummings are particularly arsed about deficits at all.

Also Gyac you forgot Masked Singer Alan "I'm just off to buy a primer in economics" Johnson.

yeah i thought he was home secretory

did you see what I did there!

just read, for the sake of a certain type of rockist that doesn't exist on here thankfully: Mick Jones of The Clash is Grant Shapps' first cousin and Shapps' brother Andre was a member of Big Audio Dynamite!

Yep, a good friend of mine from high school (also the cousin of a famous musician) went to a Jewish teen leadership summer camp with Grant and they wrote to one another for years afterwards, but when she moved to London and contacted him in a spirit of ‘hey, moved to the UK, fancy a catch-up?’ he basically responded with ‘new phone who dis?’ Putz.

André is a good guy, though. He’s definitely not a Tory.

Absolutely convinced I have heard Mark S drop that Big Audio Dynamite bomb before but I have no recollection of when or where.

"bombshell"

I thought everyone knew about Shappsy and Jonesy?

I probably already knew it and forgot it faster than I knew it

Why has the Guardian got Owen Jones’ piece about Wiley’s #Antisemitism - using a picture of Kano?

Can’t they tell the difference? 🤭 pic.twitter.com/92s5G7Ktcw

— Wasiq² (@WasiqUK) July 29, 2020

kano, sue the fuck out of the graun pls!

Didn't they do the same with Denise Johnson the other day?

it's a tough game when you are running a garbage clickbait farm from your shed, but is it really that hard for the high and mighty last bastion of independent investigative journalism to tell two different black pop celebs apart?

I meant to post it to the graun thread

The only thing my gf and I use the guardian site for is the weekend quiz, a few weeks ago the accompanying photo referred to a question about Eazy E, and it was... not Eazy E.

Carrying on yesterday's discussion. The first big-ish fuck up from Sunak could be that bonus scheme (people focused on tenner off at Nandos).

When there's no take-up and unemployment goes up to 10%, what then?

Extending the furlough scheme until the middle of next year could pay for itself

+ tax receipts
+ household incomes
+ consumer confidence
- unemployment payments required
- labour market scarring
- medium term unemploymenthttps://t.co/0GessBKoSe

— Rory Macqueen (@RNMacqueen) July 29, 2020

Basically extending the scheme is the next big-call. Gyac - I like McDonnell and all but every major country has borrowed quite a lot to have some sort of furlough scheme, his pressure helped but he had to do it.

This is where Lab looking shambolic, or just quiet or not looking like opposition could (and Corbyn Lab was opposition) could mean that Tories do gamble with ending furlough earlier than they should do.

when he's proposing an online sales tax that would be another shithead move that would disproportionately hit disabled people, like these cunts haven't already fucked them over enough in the last decade.

As has been proven, most of the electorate don't care about disabled people, so no loss electorally in going after them again.

I think an online sales tax would be a PR nightmare when you're still telling elderly and vulnerable people not to leave the house if they can avoid it.

This isn't really about Labour - my guess is, given the size of the gamble, that the Tories would be worried enough regardless of who was opposing them. But serious pressure to ending furlough is likely to come from austerity hawks and shire Tories on their own back benches and - in particular - senior Treasury civil servants.

Another reason why they might want to extend it is that it might help mitigate the damage if there is no Brexit deal.

They will also be conscious of not gifting Starmer with the opportunity to cast himself as the guy defending the interest of struggling businesses.

What I'm saying is if Lab don't meaningfully pressurise the government to extend furlough the Tories might not do it. But Starmer's labour have been also giving very fiscally austere vibes rn.

So if they don't extend and unemployment goes up to 10% Labour can't present themselves as a party that would do it differently.

I agree Labour should argue for extending it. By September/October though the pressure from all sides to do so might have become so deafening it'll be an easy call for even the wussiest and most cautious of oppositions. We'll find out.

For one thing, for thousands of businesses its going to be the difference between permanently closing or not.

the shapps/BIG reveal is on this very thread lol, albeit a trillion millennia ago when it was in its early middling stages

Gotta love when they devolve into complete self-parody pic.twitter.com/5MDH0FWrjm

— Lucas the Spinozist 🏹🌺🕊🏴‍☠️ (@SpawnOfSpinoza) July 28, 2020

Settle For Starmzy... because as much as a reconstructed Tory he is you've got nowhere else to go fule!

Agreed Matt. I think it will be an easy decision by then. The danger is if it isn't.

I am just putting this here, cases are going up again. All very low I think but it's more to keep track than anything.

The updates today on the government’s coronavirus data dashboard also show that the number of coronavirus cases continues to rise.

On 1 July the seven-day rolling average for cases was 711.1, but then it fell and stayed below 700, falling as low as 546.1 on 5 July. But today for the first time since 1 July the seven-day average on the website has gone over 700 again. It was 725.7 on 26 July, the most recent figure for which a seven-day average has been published. And the number of cases for today is 763.

5 July was a Sunday which may have something to do with that. The weekly average can't have been that low.

Obviously the pubs opening has made a difference but increased mask wearing may be offsetting that to some degree. Looks like it's ticked up very slightly but has been bumping along at roughly the same level for most of July? Certainly appears to be down on late June from what I can see?

No reason to get complacent mind.

I keep hearing WHO blaming for the reluctance of the UK govt to have a coherent mask policy until recently. it doesn't cut the mustard when so many other countries who have coped better with it didn't need any WHO guidance to do the right thing.

what industrious poster will be first to register settleforstarmer.com

Such a sad thing.

I really hope that someone or some organisation in Cardiff, can help this woman whose letter we are publishing in the paper tomorrow, because it is heartbreaking pic.twitter.com/1Ca46AqCpa

— Rhiannon L Cosslett (@rhiannonlucyc) July 29, 2020

Awful and I can say with certainty not unique

that could be me one day if I wasn't such a fucked up pisshead who won't get to 70! But not trivialising it, it is heartbreaking to the point I'm almost tearing up tbh. That "vulnerable list" that didn't include seemingly thousands and thousands of chronically ill people was more Tory fuckery that has probably cost lives.

the most sickening thing is commentariat arseholes that comment like austerity had some endpoint and when some tory cunt says: no we are not going back to austerity they guilelessly go along with this narrative. Because either they don't know what austerity is or they are thick UI's or they are just Tory cunts.

Kate Green appearing to suggest that unions are wrong to say teachers should be allowed to wear masks.

Shadow Education Secretary Kate Green says the Labour party does not believe face masks are necessary in schools.#KayBurley

Read today's top stories: https://t.co/4ozTbgvoxl pic.twitter.com/7SUusCsBrQ

— SkyNews (@SkyNews) July 30, 2020

ffs!

Possibly one of the sadder consequences of Labour's apparent determination to embarrass everyone to the left of Barry Gardiner into leaving the party is that it means more spare subs for any grifter with an ego matched only by their persecution complex. pic.twitter.com/jwHqRwnw2S

— SW Carver (@invisibleste) July 30, 2020

another one to add to the stubborn diseases that never go away list

Sometimes people take the view that this - *gestures widely at thread* is unhelpful and just a load of us whinging, but it’s difficult to find solutions when the political class have pretty clearly said they’ve had quite enough of public involvement and get back in your box, pleb. The rage I feel at that masks in schools thing is indescribable and I’d like to know, seriously, how anything constructive can be done with a party that’s stopped listening to the unions and the evidence because they don’t want to scare the 4% of 5g conspiracy theorists that were never going to vote for them anyway.

"Sometimes people take the view that this - *gestures widely at thread* is unhelpful and just a load of us whinging"

Is that so?

Re: Kate Green. Let's see what the union says, they should not go along with it.

And this might explain why the Tories still maintain a lead too.

I don't understand who this statement is 'for' at all. It's clearly not for the Toby Youngs of the world. Masks make it more likely, not less, that the country will be able to get kids back to school properly and safely in September.

Masks in schools is likely to have overwhelming support among parents, who will be used to their kids masking up in public places now. And it's going to provoke awkward conversations when some children start asking why they need to wear a mask in a shop when they don't wear them in schools, and parents will have no clear answer. And I doubt the majority of parents want to see their school become a vector for rona spread or their teachers forced to take weeks or even months off school when children are already behind. And it might be a precondition of getting the support of teachers unions in any case.

I can only assume one of two things a) Green has gone off message here or b) it's specifically intended to provoke a confrontation with teachers unions on the basis that they will have pissed the public off by September, and I just can't see that happening for reasons I've outlined before. I just don't believe that people view teachers unions in the same way they view, say, transport unions for one thing.

There's also the possibility that the government might make masks compulsory anyway, leaving Labour in an awkward position. If there's scientific evidence that it's going to be safe and then publish it, but that doesn't appear to be the case yet, probably because it doesn't exist.

The government is almost inevitably going to perform a confusing u-turn on this that Labour can denounce as shambolic so just let them get on with it.

Also, lives are at stake so don't do anything that encourages the government to endanger them more than they are already.

It might be possible that Green sincerely believes that masks do more harm than good with children but it seems inexcusable, when teachers are fighting for the right to wear them if they want to, not to explicitly back that.

When the market for Frozen/Paw Patrol/cute Pikachu masks goes overdrive then kids will be demanding they can take them to school.

🙄

Today’s verdict is one that brings profound sorrow. It ends my 25 year marriage to the only man I have ever loved.

I would ask for some personal space and time to come to terms with the shocking events of the last 3 years.

I will not be commenting further.

— Natalie Elphicke MP (@NatalieElphicke) July 30, 2020

that makes it sound like if he had got away scot free after committing multiple sexual assaults, she wouldn't have divorced him!

At least she spared a thought for the victims