love* in the time of plague (and by love* i mean brexit* and other dreary matters of uk politics)

matt hancock can fuck right off if he thinks he can make it illegal to stop me taking a walk when i have yet to come 5 metres within anyone else whilst doing so this past fortnight

Well done Keir, it's taken less than 24 hours to prove you are utterly fucking pathetic. https://t.co/pqYQw3SQRA

— Joe Kennedy (@joekennedy81) April 5, 2020

great we've got two tory parties now, Starmer is literally a fucking tory.

only way the pigs will stop me going out is by either putting me in a cell or breaking my legs!

fucking hell a pure fucking cop wanker as LOTO, who could have seen this coming? :p

There was an otherwise predictable puff piece in the Guardian yesterday that had this one line in it about him picking up two aides and going straight to the office like that was a perfectly normal and acceptable thing to be doing right now.

parks and open spaces should be considered key elements of a successful lockdown in densely populated urban areas, as long as social distancing is practised.

you'd need police to act with judgement and discretion so there's your problem

that sky video of a police bothering an old man sitting on a bench who said he was resting because of his sciatica and she said “i’d be able to see if you were in pain” and sky sticking their cameras in the face of a woman out for a walk with loads of space around her saying “HAVE YOU HEARD OF SOCIAL DISTANCING?” and she’s like yes i am out for my walk. ffs.

like i can see messaging like this can be difficult and a *perception* of people not bothering to obey *rules* can create an actuality of “why should i bother” but clearly very nearly everybody *is* obeying the rules.

lambeth saying “we’ve had to close brockwell park because of a minority of people”. yes that’s the point. it’s a minority of people. that’s good. you only change it if it’s the majority of people.

There are 48,000 acres of golf courses within London and the Metropolitan Green Belt (shown in red on map below)

Why not open them up to public for exercise, as @RosamundUrwin suggests? https://t.co/V2ioJj85yv

Easier to maintain social distancing if existing parks less crowded. pic.twitter.com/cOb1baLAXQ

— Guy Shrubsole (@guyshrubsole) April 5, 2020

We had two community warden vans and a police car up the wee country lane behind my house yesterday. Apparently someone spotted two lads with a football and a bag of beer walking past and called in the swat team.

when I was out earlier on a dirt road (where the only traffic is usually cows being herded by farmer's 10 year old kid in tractor) and the copper chopper was menacingly hovering about, probably passing on recon to the heavy "frying squad" boys who'll be smashing some BBQs later.

BRITAIN

I’m basically fine with public spaces being shut if there is a strong justification for doing so - Italy, Spain and China have all done it, but the U.K. position of avoiding an unpopular decision, prevaricating for a few weeks and then blaming the public for forcing them to make it is vmic.

I'd be a hypocrite to support anything like this because I pass through my own park a couple of times a day, but even at the height of summer you won't see more than 20 people in there at the same time. My fave part of the lockdown is no more fucking idiots rarsing quad/motorbikes about there in a reckless and quite uncaring about dogs and people fashion and cutting up all the grass. Earlier I saw this young lad flying down a main road on his mountain bike, doing it in showoff nonchalant none-handed style, no crash helmet on but he was wearing a face mask.

In a week where we've failed on tests and doubled daily fatalities and failed to produce or procure PPE and ventilators it's notable that the media focus is strongly on the public going for walks.

https://i.ibb.co/7XF9sQ0/FA6-F214-C-0034-4-D7-C-9-F42-BCEAE7-C1-A7-A8.jpg

It is a blame-the-public play like others have said. But there might be something in it all the same.

that and footballers pay. maybe one day we'll be talking about the likes of amazon paying their taxes, but don't hold your breath xp

Not a huge mystery why people are going to parks more in the countries where parks haven’t been closed, tbf.

what is the y axis stet?

Portugal's a week ahead of us in terms of social distancing and all my friends, especially those who live alone, are going totally stir-crazy and some have even started visiting friends on the sly (bad, I know). I feel like closing down parks will lead to more flaunting the rules, not less.

0 is the “baseline level” but it’s not described further. It’s using the Google Mobility data, which is what powers that thing on Google Maps that shows whether places/roads/etc are busier or quieter than usual.

Just to be clear I think closing parks is bullshit unless people are really dramatically flouting the rules inside them. London is too dense to sustain a summer lockdown without them, I think.

🖼

It is a blame-the-public play like others have said. But there might be something in it all the same.

an ever-increasing rigidity seems to create more problems than it solves, to me. there has to be a level of controlled flexibility that recognises that people need to get outside sometimes, and i don't think the UK gov and police have handled it at all well at the moment.

as i understand the facts of transmission people are still at far more risk from going to bullshit jobs that shouldn't be happening, travelling on public transport to get to those bullshit jobs, and visiting supermarkets which everybody is compelled to do, rather than sitting in a park several feet apart from anybody else.

I think I get the chart but I can't stop seeing "-40" in both directions.

and if you take away all the carrots that normally help people deal with the grind of their existence then you'll need more than blitz spirit to keep a lid on that.

not justifying individuals' (a)moral choices but this whole situation needs to be managed by finer minds than politicians and cops

idk if it creates more problems necessarily - but the more rigid you are in the rules, the more you need to be committed to ruthlessly policing them. A halfway house where the public and the police are both expected to use their own judgement just leads to the latter making up the law as it goes along and arbitrarily deciding who to enforce it against.

it creates problems because given the logistics of staffing it's unpoliceable? and the harder they try and whackamole people into their houses the more pushback there's likely to be

The notion that all those people miles apart from each other in the park are taking an unacceptable risk but if they were doing fucking Pilates it would be fine is an absurd one and shouldn’t be given the time of day

My idea for the day is that ice cream vans should drive round the houses selling bread and milk and stuff like that, kind of surprised they're not doing it already tbh

they used to if you lived on the right estate

... and heroin, like the good old days.

travelling on public transport to get to those bullshit jobs

You'd think the fact that five London bus drivers have just died might ring a bell or two but...

then there was the "toffee apple van" that used to go round Great Thornton Street which was a kid lying in the back of an estate car and pretty fucking blatantly selling zero toffee apples and loads of gear

That’s possibly true but it might be too early to say so definitively when a bunch of countries are whack-a-moling their people into stopping at home and seeing reductions in the number of cases. It does require a heavy police presence and for a deterrent effect to do most of the heavy lifting. Whether it’s sustainable for more than a few weeks is the question. I’m reluctant to say France and Italy have overreacted but idk what the situation there is going to look like by the end of this.

Xps.

zero toffee apples is how many i would ever want tbf

We are truly in weird times when I feel sympathy for London bus drivers, believe you me.

hope you realise i'm not radge and shouting for "let's all run wild in the streets" SV, just thinking about this stuff. do we really have an accurate picture of how many people are sneaking out for crafty sunshine in any of the other countries tho? it's not gonna be reported in our media the same way that "look at these terrible plonkers" is

the last universal social patrolling exercise the UK undertook was in WW2 i think? = (a) rationing and (b) curfew and lights out for air raids

ppl policing the latter entered the public myth-space as "little hitlers" while ppl flouting the former (= spivs selling nylons i guess) were disapproved of but everyone knew one and nearly everyone partook of their services*

of course we didn't have other european approaches to compare and and contrast

*my mum's parents were tremendously proper and correct abt this and still got dobbed in for cheating even tho they didn't (i mean maybe they did but i don't believe it, they would never)

by war's end a pragmatic modus operandi existed but i bet the first few months were curtain-twitch hell

luckily curtains with black air-raid material stitched in were heavy and hard to twitch and you got yelled at if you did

my dad told a story about my grandad doing a favour for one of the spivs he worked with and being rewarded with a ginormous wheel of cheddar in his locker one Monday morning, which he freaked out about and told the guilty party to get rid of pronto

my friend in the whatsapp who is trapped in spain with his mum says the official policing of the shutdown there has already somewhat adapted more towards pragmatism after a similar bad start in both directions

hope you realise i'm not radge and shouting for "let's all run wild in the streets" SV,

Yes, of course, and this stuff should all be critically assessed, particularly in a country where a fair proportion of voters would be in favour of fines for people outside of their houses without good reason even if there wasn’t a pandemic.

cheers i just didn't want to come across like a dick whatabouting it all lol

I've been getting the bus c.twice a week to go to (NHS) work and the fact that five London bus drivers have died so far shit me up

Also infuriating that the week on March where this really kicked into gear was when the decision to stop routemaster buses boarding at the back and middle was implemented

Like the one fucking time a routemaster could have been useful to anyone

I'd have thought the risk for drivers is more from other bus drivers if they're sharing vehicles. Otherwise they've got more protection than most shopkeepers.

Starmer: I would support ban on outside exercise over rules flouting

auspicious start

austere finish, no doubt

There are reason levels of supportave that could possibly be vindicated right now but Starmer is basically a suppository