Free as a Dodo: UK Politics Welcomes 2021

Going by date of death, we have already had a longer run the last week or so of 950+ deaths a day compared with last April (and recent days might continue this).

I keep reading reports about how Johnson is constantly batting off the covid hawks/anti-lockdownists in his cabinet, well now we have highest per capita death rate in the world - perhaps what really happened is that they won and we are victims of an attempted gaslighting. Kudos to them for doing a better job than Bolsonaro and Trump though.

Imagine dying of Covid after you'd received the vaccination, I'll be squirreling myself away as much as possible after I finally get mine just to make sure I don't have that on my fucking tombstone.

On your tombstone and then circulated on facebook to PrOvE the vaccines don't work

Just fuck it, give the government 500 mps in the next election, i don’t care anymore
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EsHMZEZXYAAtKqX?format=png&name=900x900

Kieth just so exponentially increases the "nothing matters anymore" melancholy and despair in the UK, just by being such a political useless Tory dipshit.

The alt-right and Momentum thugs are two sides of the sane coin to libs, pt.5785885883559

They really don’t like the idea of accountability do they? A tale in three parts: pic.twitter.com/YEo9lxQ2Pm

— Liam Young (@liamyoung) January 18, 2021

ahh yes, labour is guaranteed to win a landslide victory by simply saying ‘i’m sorry, i didn’t catch that, could you repeat the question’ and then feigning unconsciousness until the next day whenever the issue of trans rights comes up

lol, the does-Siri-recognise-your-voice guide to voter targeting, make sure you copyright it and sell it to them, bg

he's very good at feigning unconsciousness for very long periods of time tbf

i'm sorry but i just don't see any way that the Labour Party can win Michigan

i can't work out whether the highest rate of death in the world is not true or not notable but i can't find the BBC covering it anywhere

Sorry, I don’t know that one.

Did you mean 200,000 more people given first dose?

saw a bit of channel 4 news earlier where they were light-heartedly covering the news of boris’ napping habit with lots of footage of churchill and thatcher

oddly flattering comparisons for a news cycle where the uk posted some truly horrific death stats but i’m sure number 10’s comms office had no role in either the timing of the news of boris’ ickle snoozes nor the decision to frame it as a feat of churchillian proportions

I thought that was a bit beneath them tbh.

I'm just imagining telling a prospective employer at a job interviewer: listen pal I have two naps a day and you will have to work around that if you want me. But tbf fuck microsleeping it's got be a half hour nap at least to get the full rejuvenating benefits.

Nah, I'd go have 5 mins, it works for me..

I used to often steal a 15 minute nap on a bed of dust sheets in the back of the van at work and it never felt quite enough.

and once I woke up and some twat had put a dead crow in a bag right next to my head.. hilarious bantz!

Aye a nap is a tricky thing, like goldilocks' porridge

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-55722168 <- the big covid news. it says 'updated 1 hr ago' but is timestamped 20:21.

there's a coronavirus section on the news website here - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/coronavirus - but it's counter-productive because of the speed of it - 20 articles on the front page, 5 pages posted today (including an earlier version of the the above news iirc) but it also has crap like "'Harry Potter' village busy as summertime" and "Covid survivor celebrates 105th birthday" and "When could lockdown end?", non-news stuff hiding the news.

it is is the top story on the main BBC News right now tbf

why is the BBC not covering this though

Nowhere on the story koogs linked does it mention the UK hitting the highest death rate in the world, and nowhere on the BBC News website can I see that story, and nowhere did I hear it mentioned on the Radio 4 news last night. Somebody got the correct links?

Yeah the linked stories are about the uk beating our personal best for most deaths in a day, not our new world-beating status in that regard? Which yes seems like something the bbc should not be ignoring. Hard to find a starker metric of how comprehensively they’ve failed

It's great that Nick 'Harold Shipman' Triggle is still the BBC's go-to person on this.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-51979654

(third highest death rate, because two people died in each of Monaco and Gibraltar)

Remember when it seemed bleakly pessimistic last spring to suggest that hundreds of deaths a day might be reduced to background noise?

imagine talking about moral leadership if you were the main hostile environment honcho and presided over an austerity govt that was directly responsible for 140 000 plus disabled deaths .. no I wouldn't mention morality.

"Here is why Tories don't give a shit about ppl dying" is the narrative but, ultimately, this is a process of people spending a lifetime paying into a system too.

UK average house prices increased by 7.6% in the year to November 2020, up from 5.9% in October 2020 https://t.co/AwDzZhrM3Q pic.twitter.com/FR6WlGAGa0

— Office for National Statistics (ONS) (@ONS) January 20, 2021

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EsHMZEZXYAAtKqX?format=png&name=900x900

I can't quite put my finger on how being fiscally and socially conservative, making vague references to family, security and community and dismissing trans rights as part of a culture war might not be the best strategy to beat a party that already does all that.

The Telegraph was forecasting a house price crash yesterday, though likely as a way to increase pressure around the reintroduction of stamp duty.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ it’s exactly the same as Macron going full mask off, the people you’re courting already have a proper version of the thing you’re hinting at and they don’t trust you to be fash enough

It's also...not really the Biden approach.

Labor in Australia responded to being beaten by the incumbent Tory/farmer coalition at the last election by deciding to attack them for not being tough enough on immigrants

nb that Australia already operates multiple offshore concentration camps for aspiring immigrants

It's also...not really the Biden approach.

Yeah, like.... huh?

maybe Kier should start claiming Irish ancestry! I like how he's paying lip service to the Dems now, he was cautiously hedging his bets during US election week - not even as principled as the anyone-but-Trump melts of the Labour Party is a shocking indictment.

The fact that the US presidential electoral system bears little resemblance to the UK parliamentary one is only the first minor quibble I'd be forcibly explaining to Kieth as I beat him about the head with a rolled up newspaper

yeah for all that the biden thread likes to dump on biden, his policy proposals so far are way more progressive than anything coming from Starmer (though tbh have there been any actual policy proposals coming from Starmer?)

"New Management"

iirc

Writing that on the day that Biden appointed Rachel Levine as Assistant Health Secretary is definitely something.

You can definitely criticise Biden for his fiscal conservatism and compromises but he understands the need to signal 'progressive values'.

He's sharing a platform with Radicals today

All that leaves is something borrowed nest pas

lol so seems Ferrari and LBC were well aware that the lady who misidentified herself to ask Starmer about ethnic cleansing was doing so? I for one am shocked.

1,820 dead today.

The only way to avoid becoming inured to these numbers is for them to keep getting bigger.

fucking hell

also this fucking guy:

This is disgusting from @TomTugendhat. pic.twitter.com/BKD50Tt0OS

— James Foster (@JamesEFoster) January 20, 2021

The EHRC report into anti-Semitism in the Labour Party is positive about the Chakrabarti Report. But evidence-free attacks on Chakrabarti - often by Labour right supporters now mean a bunch of v.right wing Tories (a party of actual racist laws) feel happy to join in smears pic.twitter.com/bShDvj37Ki

— Solomon Hughes (@SolHughesWriter) January 20, 2021

Solomon Hughes otm