Free as a Dodo: UK Politics Welcomes 2021

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.

Oh no not a right wing free marketeer media channel, this is a game changer

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

And we still got the effects of Xmas to come.

At least no schools and hopefully no unis as well.

Oh no not a right wing free marketeer media channel, this is a game changer

NEW: Gavin Williamson confirms that children without a laptop have been added to the “vulnerable” list who are entitled to go into school, as per below.

Massively expands number able to attend class. Teachers already reporting higher numbers going in than during first lockdown. pic.twitter.com/OXRAcun4tu

— Paul Brand (@PaulBrandITV) January 6, 2021

that is god tier shithousery

I, for one, cannot believe this government are, once again, fucking it

kill the poor imo.

As for this channel you have right-wing talking points on all the time across the BBC, and free-speech liberals give that shit air-time all day because they think they will rationally beat it in debate lol. Hedge fund managers spending a bit of spare change.

BREAKING
Nigel Farage and Richard Tice get the green light from the Electoral Commission to rename the Brexit Party as Reform UK.
One of Reform UK's policies is to ease Covid-19 restrictions.
The pair are planning to stand over 1,000 candidates at the local elections this year.

— Christopher Hope📝 (@christopherhope) January 6, 2021

not now lads eh

I think GB News is likely to be anticipating changes from Ofcom too, like allowing political advertising and easing some of the impartiality restrictions.

ah that’s interesting. that was one of the things i was going to call out. didn’t realise they were thinking of changes.

Depends on the new chair, I think. If it's Dacre, then whee.

NEW: Gavin Williamson confirms that children without a laptop have been added to the “vulnerable” list who are entitled to go into school, as per below.

Could conceivably mean that in some instances, half the children are at school and half are at home and teachers might need to be teaching in both realms simultaneously?

i can't see dacre doing it in a million years (another good one to come back to when he's appointed). Put Dacre in a nominally important oversight role for the ongoing telecoms changes, Huawei, OpenReach and 5g governance?

I originally thought Dacre was a spoiler/troll like Moore but by all accounts they were in fact deadly serious about Moore so fuck knows.

I thought a lot of teachers were in both class and virtual class simultaneously, in order to support the kids of key workers ?

sure, but i'm assuming the numbers of pupils in class would've been lower and would've freed up some resource for online teaching. begs the question what students with no access to computing and no right to school attendance have been doing up to now though

(sorry for my hypothesizing, i realise it's of no good use to anyone)

I originally thought Dacre was a spoiler/troll like Moore but by all accounts they were in fact deadly serious about Moore so fuck knows.

― stet, Wednesday, January 6, 2021 7:18 PM bookmarkflaglink

Yeah quite. I didn't realise that about Moore which is just O_o but of course also not.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ErFU4fxXEAAFesL?format=jpg&name=large

lol .. the great white hope of the soft left.

guess it's good we're getting our very own fox news huh

The Queen was blameless, the particular combination of jewels she wore constituted Epic Shade towards Trump, there were several of us who Couldn't Even, as I recall

Oh I'm dreading all the right-wing lunatics getting maximum airtime on a daily basis

not that it matters when we have the BBC I guess

Starmer's refusal to back the other old guy was a tacit endorsement of Trump imo

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.

Murdoch's right-wing talking-head cable channel in Australia gets a viewership of 50-70k. Their youtube posts get over 5 million views from conspiracy theorists and headbangers worldwide. The broadcast channel is just to give legitimacy to the influence-peddling.

I realise that the political left does not have the financial resource to compete with this far-right media challenge, but I nonetheless think that the best thing the left can do is to work on building its own media.