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

I read "doesn't play" as "we will do everything in our power to make sure it doesn't play"

Farage used to make a point of praising Corbyn as well, it was a favoured shit stirring tactic of his.

Lab: we will be fiscally responsible.

Tories:

Sloping down if anything... blue = chosen, green = civil service recommendation pic.twitter.com/jD0jbJxNBY

— Chris Hanretty is staying home (@chrishanretty) September 24, 2020

Wonder about the possibility of a rent strike in Glasgow (and perhaps other) unis as a response to an appalling state of affairs.

You pay upfront - which is why some people have been shouting at the Unis on the suspicion that they wouldn't do anything until the money came in - when in fact they won't do anything at all.

Also this question-contains-the-answer from the BBC article.

"She's signed an agreement and paid a lot of money to stay there and what for? Now she is essentially imprisoned?"

it really is shameful, good job shame doesn't exist now

"You pay upfront - which is why some people have been shouting at the Unis on the suspicion that they wouldn't do anything until the money came in - when in fact they won't do anything at all."

Is this for the term or the year? Also I don't know if you can cancel the tenancy agreement or anything like that? Just a horrendous situation.

traditionally students pay a term at a time up front but i don't think the contract is easy to evade once you're in anyway

batten down the hatches lads it's gonna be a rough *checks notes* rest of our lives

#BlueLivesMatter pic.twitter.com/gwgxzDRIBd

— Cllr, Rev'd Gary Gray (@CllrGaryGray) September 25, 2020

Labour councillors being total dogshit, what a surprise.

Screaming at how the students at Parker House are dealing with the entire building having to go into lockdown and self-isolate after a covid outbreak pic.twitter.com/yPszI8xqvG

— Jordan (@livie_jordan) September 24, 2020

Boring Dystopia at its best

I watched the Scottish brief today. From the tone of the questions it seems the whole country should be more upset about students being asked to stay away from the pub for a couple of nights than the elderly and vulnerable being told to stay home and avoid family contact for over 3 months.

Most new daily cases ever in Scotland today. UK overall over 6600 new cases - only surpassed once in April.

October is going to bring brutal death numbers.

The real caseload was much higher in March/April though wasn’t it? They were doing barely any testing back then. (Not saying next few months won’t be grim but)

It's estimated that there were something like 100,000 cases a day at the peak, and as casual as people have been for the past few weeks they haven't been piling onto trains or going to gigs or sporting events.

I wonder how long it'll take before we get to the point where the progress made during the original lockdown has been wiped out (which of course means that the massive economic disruption during the spring has been, effectively, for nothing).

fuck that's a lot of coppers, maybe we do need some kind of blue lives matter movement!

Croydon shooting: More than 1,600 officers have been killed in line of duty https://t.co/d1i6wlkkv9

— BBC London (@BBCLondonNews) September 25, 2020

oh wait that's over the last ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY EIGHT YEARS ffs

lol there’s a stat about half the number being RIC members during the war of independence, a century ago

pouring one out for that Bow Street runner that got run over by a hansom cab chasing Jack the Ripper.

apparently it's since 1680?

fuck me,they'll be counting murdered medieval bailiffs as pigs next

The very bad tweet has now disappeared.

erm that’s 20 you mugs https://t.co/XJICn4azmk

— Rondelle Hobbs (@RondelleHobbs) September 25, 2020

(500 from the RIC, 1919-1921)

If only they had some other kind of motif to represent the number 10

right on cue https://www.ft.com/content/470cf7f4-59e6-47c1-9efa-ce634b7980d7

A majority of people want the Labour Party to prioritise its own pandemic policies over scrutinising the government’s response, new polling for the New Statesman has found. https://t.co/0bFGstiXIV

— New Statesman (@NewStatesman) September 25, 2020

Andrew Neil has officially quit the BBC and is starting his own news channel

As for the future, I’m delighted to announce I have accepted the post of Chairman of GB News, a new news channel to be launched early in the New Year bringing new perspectives to the news. I will also be presenting a new nightly prime-time show on GB News. Watch this space.

— Andrew Neil (@afneil) September 25, 2020

Keir Starmer is currently being destroyed by everyone on gogglebox for agreeing with the government on literally everything and then complaining about what they've done after the fact, they're all dumbfounded at why he won't say what he would do instead

— Lewis (@lewisandstuff) September 25, 2020

I avoid gogglebox like the plague, but it sounds like everyone on there tonight doing more astute political punditry than the so-called professional commentariat class!

Gogglebox people mostly nice to Jeremy Corbyn or at least not repeating absolute right-wing garbage IIRC.

the LibDems have voted to campaign for UBI. Bold move, but I wonder if the UK electorate have long enough memories to remember what happened last time they had an attractive flagship policy that was way to the left of a floundering gutless Tory-lite version of Labour.

MattHancock's “World-beating” “NHS” app doesn’t recognise tests carried out by the NHS or PHE - only those by private outsourced companies like Serco.

sounds perfectly reasonable if you are a demented Tory ideologue, but absolutely insane to any reasonable person.

Have to say that moving UBI into something akin to the political mainstream is important even if it is the LibDems doing it.

It's a weird one really in that a notoriously tankie publication like The Economist can be all in favour while socialist columnists are still handwringing about whether it can be really considered left-wing.

My guess is that UBI is like Modern Monetary Theory in that the pandemic will eventually force policy makers into doing it on the sly even as they're pretending they aren't.

Yeah just needs a rebrand. Obv I will never vote Lib Dem but this is a better move than Starmer's likely to make in his entire career

It's a weird one really in that a notoriously tankie publication like The Economist can be all in favour while socialist columnists are still handwringing about whether it can be really considered left-wing.

How is that weird? The Economist being onboard for something is pretty strong evidence that one should question whether it is left wing - or at least, whether there aren't ways to implement it with results that aren't in the interest of the left.

Theoretically the welfare state in Germany was created to stymie the Left but in the absence of guillotines you take what you can get

The question of whether it's sufficiently left-wing is secondary to the issue of whether or not it will benefit people. Or at least it should be.

And yeah unintended consequences and all that. The most convincing argument I've seen against UBI is that it will be used as an excuse to trim other social protections and things like the minimum wage but that's likely to happen anyway.

iirc the debate on the left is about whether the 'universal' in UBI would ever be implemented in the first place, and whether that would be turn out to be cover for dismantling welfare. So yes it's important to have that debate, and to monitor it's outcomes because the Tories and Lib Dems will look to use it for other means.

They’re on their bullshit in so many ways on so many fronts right now. New PSHE guidance excludes using material from organisations that might call for the end of capitalism, who might refuse to condemn acts of violence against property, or who might support “victim narratives”.

So the government has just released some guidance for teaching PSHE which seems - by my reading - to be written in such a way as to ban using BLM materials in the classroom.

— tetrapod (@pancake_puns) September 25, 2020

Wait I thought erasing history was bad

The question of whether it's sufficiently left-wing is secondary to the issue of whether or not it will benefit people. Or at least it should be.

These are one and the same though, the arguments are precisely that it's not left wing because, in the way say the Economist or Andrew Yang would want it implemented, it wouldn't benefit people.

One of the reasons that parts of the liberal right are in favour is the universality of it would make it much cheaper to implement than more conditional forms of welfare payment (cf the vast amounts of money that are spent on administering a fundamentally miserly system like Universal Credit).

Blairite policy wonks tend to be fundamentally opposed because they're opposed to almost anything universal, raising the spectre of, say, David Cameron getting the same payment as an unemployed single mother of three. It's the same logic that was used to justify tuition fees, they see universal benefits as a subsidy for middle class people - as opposed to something that solidifies support across socioeconomic groups. It's difficult to argue against this, look at the backlash that occurred when Cameron proposed cutting universal child benefit.

Arguably millions of people in the post-war era benefited enormously from capitalist societies needing to show they could look after their people better than Communist societies. The removal of that impetus after 1990 was the start of the slope that led to where we are now - chunks of the welfare state were significantly more generous under Thatcher than Blair despite the former's intentions. Insecurity and anxiety are fundamentally at the heart of our ongoing political shitshow and it's difficult to believe that removing that wouldn't make things better at a stroke.

Obviously there's the question of how universal 'universal' really is given the obvious hostility to, say, migrant workers or even EU citizens receiving it, but exclusionary utopia-building is at the heart of the never-gonna-happen Dominic Cumming's 'project'.

Probably the single biggest reason the LibDems are in favour is that, without Brexit, they have literally nothing else to make people take notice of them again.

As somebody in the clutches of the benefits system I'm all for anything that doesn't feel like being panopticoned 24/7 and I'm guessing I'm not the only one who feels like that

I mean the other thing that might work would be the state literally guaranteeing a job in what is otherwise likely to be a lengthy period of high structural unemployment.

Unfortunately there aren't any difficult challenges happening right now that might require the government to hire millions of people for essential work.

lol the government could literally hire people just to work on infrastructure and bread and butter stuff like that, but they won’t because they don’t want to

I honestly believed they'd have to do something to create work, I guess there's a slim possibility they might still find their hand forced, maybe the relentless pressure from the opposition will push them to it

When Sunak said “I can’t save every business or job - no chancellor could” I thought well ok, but a chancellor with a bit of imagination and the will to use it would come up with something to minimise damage to the economy and protect ppl’s livelihoods (not necessarily jobs) that was a little stronger than £10 off burgers and 22% to keep “viable” people on another 6 months

(Dodds ain’t it)

Seems the Trafalgar Square covidiot protests are now weekly? lol London really needed yet another factor helping the epidemic along.