Free as a Dodo: UK Politics Welcomes 2021

Fucking horrendous. This poor family.

Mother fears son could die as Brexit stops medical cannabis supply https://t.co/ir11auXbfV

— The Guardian (@guardian) January 5, 2021

One more.

Matt Hancock has just told MPs that nurseries are being kept open because they are private and “would otherwise go bust”.

The Health Secretary should not be making public health decisions based on private profit.

— Nadia Whittome MP (@NadiaWhittomeMP) January 5, 2021

i haven't been keeping up itt, but on the same note, sunak's per property business grant is effectively a pure siphoning of cash to landlords, and doesn't take into account the business as a business as a going concern with staff and perishable inventory etc. put in the column marked rentier capitalism for Brett Christophers (though I disagree with some of his definition). although incompetence clearly has a large part to play in much of the fiasco, it would be useful to have two columns, one marked 'incompetence' and the other 'decisions driven by rentier capitalist interests' and i'm not at all sure that most in the first column couldn't be assigned to motivations and incentives of the second.

That would still be better than this if done competently because as actual capitalists keep pointing out the best result for them isn’t a collapsed NHS either. Independence Day cartoon dot jpeg

Sunak is there for the taking - he's a lightweight in every sense of the word apart from his blown up rep. The only thing that makes him powerful is the right-wing UK media and elements within CCHQ who paint the simpering boy wonder as the next PM elect and I've not seen anyone from Labour meaningfully ripping him a new arsehole since Rebecca Long Bailey silenced him in at the televised debate in 2019. but alas what we have now is Starmer Labour, which will often do it's best to make him look even better than them.

Sir Keir Starmer calls for "round the clock" vaccinations

The Midnight Jabber!

you snooze you zoos

:p

Ha

A shot in the dark

capacity in terms of space isn't the issue. having enough people trained to do it is. no-one is going to be working 24 in a shift to do this. you might have two teams working 12 hour shifts. no reason they both can't function during the day though. this plan is fucking stupid. also can you really see the most vulnerable people getting up at three in the fucking morning to travel to some godforsaken carpark and then filling out a bunch of forms in the middle of the night? what planet is this fucking idiot on?

I can see healthcare workers who are already on shift getting jabbed at 3am, yeah. I would, too.
I would imagine physical space plays some part - there's already been talk of schools using community buildings to enable more kids to actually be in school (pre-lockdown). But yes like every other problem we are facing, having enough trained people available is going to be a bottleneck.

Sir Keir Starmer calls for "round the clock" vaccinations

See You Later, Vaccinator

well obviously vaccinating healthcare workers during their work hours makes perfect sense and i assume that managers would already plan that. if that's what starmer is calling for, it's hardly worth him raising the issue xp

It's hardly worth him raising his head off the pillow in the morning tbf.

he's probably just calling for something the tories already started last week, that's how this knighted melt rolls.

Isn’t 24/7 vaccination what Israel is doing? Not that he’s not still hopeless, but I can’t see how having 24hr availability is a bad thing in itself.

Working 24hrs isn't going to make any more trained staff available or any more vaccine available. If it's just needing a physical space to do it, there are thousands of empty buildings right across the country right now. Not sure what Israel is up to though

it wouldn't be a bad thing if the NHS was adequately funded beyond the kind of meaningless lip service that Starmer Labour does, but the current message is: Labour spent too much in the past

i haven't been keeping up itt, but on the same note, sunak's per property business grant is effectively a pure siphoning of cash to landlords, and doesn't take into account the business as a business as a going concern with staff and perishable inventory etc. put in the column marked rentier capitalism for Brett Christophers (though I disagree with some of his definition). although incompetence clearly has a large part to play in much of the fiasco, it would be useful to have two columns, one marked 'incompetence' and the other 'decisions driven by rentier capitalist interests' and i'm not at all sure that most in the first column couldn't be assigned to motivations and incentives of the second.

― Fizzles, Tuesday, 5 January 2021 21:58 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I was trying to do an hmrc calculator to see what I would be entitled to (Towr Hamlets as a council usually take a couple weeks to be assigned the money and what to do with it) and am in the bracket where my shop pays between £15000-£51000 in rates a year. We pay £16000. That seemingly entitles us to £2k a month. Our rent is £2500 a month. I’m emailing the landlord, who we have 5 months left with, in the morning to essentially say “lol” if they want the extra £500, and kinda assume their nick it from our initial deposit. Fuck knows how much rent arrears people who pay £49000 a year in rates will be in.

I presume they've made a calculated decision that businesses accruing huge rent arrears or going into liquidation is the lesser evil than disrupting the rent income of their precious rentier friends. Or maybe they just don't know what they are doing and are haphazardly making this up as they go along.

Toby Young and Ian Dunt on Newsnight look like a pair of disgruntled testicles: pic.twitter.com/hERS7zGYlx

— Paul O'Connell (@pmpoc) January 5, 2021

Unfair to bollocks imo

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Eq9NsbmWMAEIlAG?format=jpg&name=900x900

perhaps not a serious and intelligent enough person to be given a platform on national television at the time of a new lockdown or have they got van the man and ian brown on next week

Clapping for the NHS is apparently making a comeback as Clap for Heroes so all's well.

I only clap for cowards

Extended to clap for all heroes ftr. I've been told that I'm learning to be a real hero a lot in this Yakuza game I'm playing...

Oh are you playing Like a Dragon too? I am about halfway through but haven’t picked it up for a few weeks cos work/Christmas.

as a hero, appreciate the gesture tbf

Maitlis did read out that column to him (though I agree there's no fucking reason for Toby Young to be seen by anyone anywhere)

On a related note, i'm intrigued to see where the Starmer idea of suppressing anti-vaxx campaigns goes.

It could be as limited as stopping the protesters parked outside of hospitals but i'd imagine that a lot of their behaviour could be covered by existing public order legislation, rather than requiring something else.

Tories be murderin'

Exclusive: Homeless people in England will not be accommodated in emergency housing during the third national lockdown.

The Government will not restart the Everyone In scheme that helped to house rough sleepers during the first pandemichttps://t.co/HVwqh5oNSo

— Jasmine Andersson (@the__chez) January 6, 2021

yeah gyac, just finished chapter 9. Felt stupidly proud at beating Nanba and Ishioda finally.

xposts game also more humane towards the homeless than the UK govt

so many empty/closed hotels xpost.

absolutely medieval way of treating the less fortunate - shame on them, shame on us all

The homeless can always keep themselves warm by clapping for heroes.

it's just the endless grinding "oh we have a choice? let's make the evil one then" that's doing me in. They'll obviously never front up about it so with every new announcement you have to ask "what evil are they quietly up to here?" and a day or two later out it comes.

GB News is real and significant. It’s backers have deep pockets. It is not hyperbole to expect that it will have an impact on the UK broadcast news landscape, because it has money and a mission. Read the attached. @afneil @prcmarshall @LegatumInst @unherd pic.twitter.com/yifwKmMUUb

— Robert Peston (@Peston) January 6, 2021

I didn't realise the Legatum Institute was involved in GB News. Extremely bad.

They don’t even mention digital/online in the release, because this is squarely aimed at Freeview (and in passing the other linear services that carry Freeview). Which means they only care about a 55+ segment, and one that weights C2DE as well.

In other words, Fox-style right-wing brain-worms for boomers, precisely as predicted.

"The channel's third major investor is British businessman and philanthropist Sir Paul Marshall..." - net worth £630 million, father of the banjo player in Mumford & Sons (!)

my prediction which will obviously be proven hopelessly wrong by the end of the year or whatever is that GB News is on a hiding to nothing. Sky News has never made money, I don't think. LBC covers the brain worms space, and there isn't really advertising revenue to support a news show in the UK. There's no commercial space for it basically.

Surely making money isn’t the point of any of these ventures, they’re just loss leaders for the policies they will be pushing?

Sir Paul Marshall has cash to burn:

"Hedge fund bosses Sir Paul Marshall and Ian Wace have made more than £50million from the collapse of leisure stocks as the coronavirus outbreak grips London markets."
https://www.winston-fox.co.uk/marshall-wace-makes-50m-on-coronavirus-crash/

Big donor to the leave campaign too

Yeah, the channel's not going to make money, but the growth of the right-wing lunacy industry will make lots of people involved richer in other ways

UK records 1,041 more Covid deaths and 62,322 more cases

i think at some point not making money is a problem in tv, especially if it points to a lack of audience, which would also indicate a key failure of engagement. it is of course possible to make studio based opinion stuff very cheaply, but i don’t see this becoming a fox news vector. tbh that audience is well served already.

discovery certainly won’t want a loss making channel on their books imo.

as a field experiment and also as an act of self-mortification I listened to Times Radio for a few days a couple of months back. They made the BBC look like pros by their constant fluffed links, periods of silence and at one point they broadcasted the ambient noise of a backroom occasionally interrupted by two producers talking to each other for a few minutes, although this was a high point of the entire experience tbf. When they do this shit cheap it really does show.

UK records 1,041 more Covid deaths and 62,322 more cases

676 deaths on the 7-day moving average on Worldometers, up from 500 a week ago.