ForenSix Opposition - Politics in the Soon To Be Former UK in Autumn 2020

Looks like we're not going up to Newcastle this weekend, then.

🧅🧅🧅🧅🧅

Former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott has phone number and passport details hacked after posting boarding pass on Instagram https://t.co/w099pNzmaQ

— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) September 17, 2020

definitely feel like i'm seeing fewer masks around the place, almost like people think Spike 2 is inevitable so why try to prevent it

That story is like when Alan Partridge showed his credit card on THIS TIME (2019).

People now seem to think that following the rules is basically optional. Absolutely no idea what could possibly have happened to give them that idea.

Just hearing all these entitled dorks repeating "common sense" which apparently means "whatever's convenient for me"

Can't imagine where they got this from

If you call 111 to discuss a problem eg. spider bite blowing up your arm, they already make an appointment for you at urgent care, A&E’s cooler younger sibling. In my case I was given an 8pm appointment, arrived to Royal Free urgent care at 7.55pm, saw the duty doctor bang on 8pm and was out the door with a penicillin course and on the 168 home by 8.15 (which meant £1.50 round trip because of Hopper fares). My antibiotics were free, too, because the doctor had them in stock and the hospital pharmacy was closed.

That is very much dependent on where and when tbh, I remember getting seen at Moorfields relatively quickly when my GP sent me there & being really impressed with the whole thing. My father in law, though, who lives near us, had to sit in a chair in a&e for about 19 hours in hard chairs while they tested him because they didn’t have any space. They treated him as well as they could but he is in his 80s, I think, it is a lot to ask of someone that age who’s not well.

Ugh, that sucks for your poor FIL.

"People now seem to think that following the rules is basically optional."

Something like this.

This isn't how I'm living my life but I can get that the confusion and inconsistencies make it really difficult to get on board with the things we're being asked to do/not do. Like the "we'll celebrate Christmas" narrative after fucking over people hoping to see their families for Eid ... just makes things really messy.

👀
Ireland’s health service boss @paulreiddublin told briefing today
- “v senior officials in NHS” contacted him to see if Ireland “could help” UK with COVID lab tests

- & said UK’s test & trace system in “almost collapse”, “shutting down swabbing centres” via @colmomongain pic.twitter.com/XwtE5z2Fjb

— Faisal Islam (@faisalislam) September 17, 2020

FT talking about a national lockdown over half term

That’s what they’re planning in Ireland as well supposedly

half term is five and a half weeks away, things could have already gone very wrong between now and h/t.

it's also not the same week everywhere in the UK?

EXCL: Channel 4 News has seen a leaked document which calls on care homes in England to accept patients who are COVID-positive from hospitals.

Again.👇

(Thank you to all who helped us make this report.)https://t.co/t1fBSQbrfs

— Lucia Walker (@luciajwalker) September 17, 2020

Could this more obviously be made a continuation thread for the other one?

We’ve hit all the main notes so far I think. Just need some last.fm reporting from the new Gambling ambassador and a leak about Labour deliberately undermining Corbyn

Ugh he was listening to Japan today ugh ugh ugh

https://www.last.fm/user/baggymp/

and "Nowhere To Run"

Enjoy this collage of former Labour MP Michael Dugher visiting a range of betting shops pic.twitter.com/vHQylHbYC2

— black lives matter (@jrc1921) September 18, 2020

was just thinking didn't Tom Watson succeed this fucker as CEO of UK Music? So that would mean now Watson has his old gig and the bookie one at the same time, lol!

Highly amused at The Sun's take on this btw

"the trademark of left-wing regimes" pic.twitter.com/OuHMIhnB4u

— 'Client Journalism' Expert (@ClientJournoExp) September 18, 2020

"middle-class cocaine use" 🤔🤔🤔

The Sun doesn't want to be a narc now???

just imagining some furious coked-up Sun hacks panicking that they're going to be drug tested, ha!

there would be a lot of nervous hacks with bottles of piss in their pockets!

When you've eaten a full sack of wet eggs. pic.twitter.com/kO0UfxDPFo

— Llew (@llewcid) September 17, 2020

lol! at last the perfect caption for that pic

Your compatibility with baggymp is Super.

You both listen to The Specials, The Jesus and Mary Chain and The Cure

Super my arse! He's not played one fucking song from Pornography.

Your compatibility with baggymp is Medium.

You both listen to Ann Peebles, Curtis Mayfield and Buzzcocks

This picture is going to keep me warm through lockdown II

Wow. Picture of the year. pic.twitter.com/3emgdDK7oR

— Mike Holden (@MikeHolden42) September 18, 2020

Why? I don't think I get what is special about the picture.

I don't get it either. Just looks like a bunch of blokes making decisions that negatively affect the lives of the public to me

Is that Phil Mitchell?

It’s hard being PM.

As a backbench MP, with his Daily Telegraph column netting him £275,000 and lucrative speaking engagements, he was earning well in excess of £350,000 a year. His prime ministerial salary of about £150,000 might seem perfectly sufficient — but that is not what he actually receives. His use of the flat that he shares with his fiancée, Carrie Symonds, above Number 11 is taxed as a benefit in kind. Any food sent up from the Downing Street kitchen has to be paid for and if they want to have friends to stay at Chequers — Covid restrictions permitting — they receive a bill from the government.
As one friend put it: “Boris, like other prime ministers, is very, very badly served. He doesn’t have a housekeeper — he has a single cleaner and they’re worried about being able to afford a nanny. He’s stuck in the flat and Downing Street is not a nice place to live. It’s not like the Élysée or the White House where you can get away from it all because they’re so big. Even if he or Carrie want to go into the rose garden they have to go through the office.”

It’s the uselessness of the shower. Hancock alone. And Cummings clearly has the smirk etched into him. Whitty is possibly the only one who doesn’t look like a spud xp

Obviously the tiny violin stuff is hilarious but they've really buried the lede with "PM can't remember what he was told yesterday".

Oh gosh I hope he's alright

preaching to the choir for ilxukpol readers obv (and w.my usual caveat at somewhat lumpish NS prose):

A Biden victory cannot bring normal back | Tom Blackburn https://t.co/fy4SnriRvX

— Guardian Opinion (@guardianopinion) September 19, 2020

= a grown-up far leftist expanding in his own careful terms what every v minor weird-twitter shitposter (me) wd frame as "fact one of the landscape we all live in now: the grown-ups are never coming back"

not often the Graun publises a Tom malaiseforever opinion piece. Someone must have pissed the bed.

a lot people seem to saying New Labour were actually quite radical and dynamic compared to the dismal inertia of Starmer Labour

initially I should have said

"Without far-reaching change, it may be that another shift to the hard right is at best delayed by a few years"

probably getting a bit too ahead there, it won't be delayed at all.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EiRjfanXgAEFXYF?format=jpg&name=medium

lol, some of these sycophantic Marina Hyde fans are quite deranged!

"preaching to the choir for ilxukpol readers obv (and w.my usual caveat at somewhat lumpish NS prose)"

One day I will finish that NS piece on Chinese Trotskyist poetry.

Been reading this piece on how covid has further weakened the union.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n18/neal-ascherson/bye-bye-britain

The Blair Shadow Cabinet was full of experienced political battler types like Robin Cook and Mo Mowlam and Claire Short, people who knew how to do Opposition properly and knew what they were doing in front of a camera. In government Blair gradually replaced them and the likes of Glenda Jackson with loyalists and technocratic wonkish types.

Fast forward to to 2010 and the Miliband Shadow Cabinet was full of people with experience at the highest level of everything *except* Opposition and as a result they were terrible at it. With one or two exceptions I'm sure the current Shadow Cabinet are basically well meaning people but they're wonks and inexperienced wonks with it, which is why you basically never see Anneliese Dodds despite her being the Shadow Chancellor. Ed Miliband is kind of a special case, so we'll leave him to once side, but it's only really Angela Rayner, Lammy and maybe Nandy who can do that kind of oppositional politics. (The other one who can is Thornberry and I'm sure she'd been told to keep herself hidden in case it annoys the Nick Ferrari crowd).

I heard a very disappointing interview with Glenda Jackson last week in which she made quite sweeping statements about the working classes and their apparently inherent socially conservative attitudes and how Starmer is a better leader than Corbyn because he understands this. It wasn't good.

the production and reproduction of yr own project (the creation, stablisation and maintenance of the conditions of the possibility of the realisation yr own ideas abt good in the world, to put it in a wanky way) (wanky yet correct but still wanky) is SO basic to politics, and the blair machine was SO bad at it