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

Finally, Keir and Angela release a joint statement :-/

Joint statement: “We have seen a copy of an apparently internal report about the work of the Labour Party’s Governance and Legal Unit in relation to antisemitism. The content and the release of the report into the public domain raise a number of matters of serious concern.

— Sienna Rodgers (@siennamarla) April 13, 2020

“We have seen a copy” - presumably they saw a copy quite some time ago?

Oh good, they're going to track down the whistle-blower. That's the important thing.

Serious concerns have been raised, guys

We are very concerned about the reports of the theft of the crown jewels being stolen, and will urgently hold an investigation into

1. Why the report was made and who made it
2. The details of what "stolen" means, if anything
3. Who leaked the report and what action can be taken to stop them embarrassing us again

cunts

"Our investigation into Watergate will focus on 3 equally important things:
1) How & why those journalists came to be investigating Nixon in the 1st place
2) What Nixon said
3) Whether the journalists were justified in making what Nixon said public & what should be done abt them" https://t.co/J4CtkBQ8r1

— Alex Niven (@Alex_Niven) April 13, 2020

better effort than mine! Guess I'll stick to making mixes of old music.

questions will be asked

lol they’re going to be left with no fucking members, seriously fucked it

Lot of people saying this is a GDPR breach, but isn’t something like this, especially over something like party members allegedly trying to throw an election, a matter of public interest? Agree that names of complainants should have been redacted.

I think part of the reason this is slipping under the radar is that it's all very dense: lots of characters who aren't household names and difficult to follow who has done what exactly, especially when there's censored names etc.

Wait, the complainants are named? That's massively fucked up. xpost

The unredacted version is circulating.

Are there any MPs in the party worth supporting, I hear you ask
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EVfxJi_WoAA0NT1?format=png&name=900x900

imagine being a chief shadow minister and not being able to sign that letter :(

idk what jezza's excuse is tho ;)

the unredacted version was posted in this thread (dropbox link)

Oh no we'll have Steer on our backs

bastadi is saying the NEC should have been informed about an investigation into the leak and due process isn't being followed ..shambolic not forensic.

Strong and stable and electable

even the Maybot was a comparatively decisive, competent + capable party leader next to Starmer, he's started weaker than gnat's piss and just got weaker!

you'd think at least a basic level of competence would take you to the top of the DPP. or maybe you just need a 50's style hairstyle and be a complete establishment feeb.

can someone... explain Labour to me? as an institution?

like... why was someone who looks fresh out of undergrad literally in charge of compliance?? how do these people already have lifelong grudges at the age of (i presume) 23? pic.twitter.com/AxshBdmUfW

— Sophie Hill (@sophie_e_hill) April 13, 2020

did a GiS of that young guy in the pic and the latest Guy Ritchie movie came up

The Labour A/S report has raised a lot of crucial questions for the Jewish left - In particular, is Max Lansman single? pic.twitter.com/3QdXK4dlGF

— jewdⒶs // ייִדהודה (@jewdas) April 12, 2020

too left wing ... too Jewish but also the most qualified candidate for the job ....hmm.

Interesting polling from the Telegraph, and The Times finding very few people think lockdown is too severe, and people in the UK are less willing to risk lives to protect the economy than other countries pic.twitter.com/Js21b0WP7L

— Dawn Foster (@DawnHFoster) April 13, 2020

interesting disparity between mixed messaging from the UK govt and polling in tory right wing rags that suggests people are much happier to lock down than some of their messaging suggests and don't want risk more death for the fucking economy.

Hearing that @Keir_Starmer had the #LabourLeak report for a WEEK and did nothing

— Harriet Williamson (@harriepw) April 13, 2020

The message I’m getting from someone whose opinion I respect is that the outrageous bullshit behind the scenes is not news to the pundits and that they don’t think it’s particularly interesting or relevant. Which is in itself quite interesting and relevant to me, if not to them. pic.twitter.com/4o2y9S3c87

— Flying_Rodent (@flying_rodent) April 13, 2020

Nobody in the press is going to care either but from what I have seen this is the most the left have been angered since the election and it's how we organise in the party to get some of these people out that us the question.

A whistleblower has told @Channel4News they fear Coronavirus is sometimes entirely left off death certificates in care homes and in the community, meaning the true number who die from the virus may never be properly recorded. https://t.co/l2JOEqhCww

— Ciaran Jenkins (@C4Ciaran) April 13, 2020

xxp much to the disgust of the owners of said rags

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/13/uk-missed-three-chances-to-join-eu-scheme-to-bulk-buy-ppe?CMP

Fucks sake.

open labour response to the leaks perhaps an indication of the way the wind will blow https://openlabour.org/break-the-cycle-open-labour-response-to-the-leaked-internal-investigation-on-anti-semitism/

hard to believe that a plan for one small medical device company and a bunch of fucking car mechanics to make thousands of desperately-needed ventilators has failed but here we are

A plan to buy thousands of medical ventilators from a group including the Renault and Red Bull Formula One teams has been cancelled amid signs that symptoms specific to Covid-19 could make building new devices more difficult than hoped.

The NHS needs to increase its stock of ventilators from 10,000 to at least 18,000 and the government has been scrambling to procure enough in time for a peak of cases expected by the end of the month.

Efforts to source more have involved enlisting UK manufacturers, importing devices from overseas and even borrowing them from the set of the BBC medical drama Holby City.

The Cabinet Office confirmed that a provisional request for thousands of one model, called BlueSky, would not go ahead because clinicians feared the device was not sufficiently complex to be suitable for treating Covid-19.

I know all the statistics are basically made up so I don’t know why I decided to look at them last night but I was very struck by

ww 116,098
uk 11,329

We have 10% of the recorded cv deaths in the WORLD? It feels like there’s a disconnect: I remember a week or so before the lockdown - so, a month ago - people at work talking about Italy like “welp, they’re finished”, because that was the nature of the coverage. Can the bbc and starmzy’s air of mild concern really fit the public mood right now with lockdown set to be extended?

a lot of bbc domestic coverage has an odd denialist tone to it, while they are much less shy with quoting the brutal figures when covering other parts of the world. It's bizarre at times.

Not unexpected though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T72TopWbXJg

I can't believe bus drivers are still being put in the unsafe position of having to handle cash. How many more more need to die until its made free or at least subsidised bus passes for key workers. Fucking ridiculous.

Two local shops I've been to still have a limit on contactless. Are banks still charging small businesses to use contactless?

Lot of people saying this is a GDPR breach, but isn’t something like this, especially over something like party members allegedly trying to throw an election, a matter of public interest? Agree that names of complainants should have been redacted.

Legally the intention behind the leak doesn't make any difference. If it really was leaked with the names of complainants unredacted, as that Open Labour link suggests, then it's a huge and serious data breach. The names and perhaps other details of people who have made complaints about antisemitism or sexual harassment could quite easily end up on any MRA crank or Nazi forum. A lot of the stuff in the report clearly needed to see the light of day but not redacting it is both stupid and indefensible. I don't see how Labour could credibly exclude it from the inquiry.

The people in the WhatsApp group have almost certainly committed gross misconduct several times over as well. It looks like now an inquiry is in motion then things will proceed in a very legalistic way and maybe that's for the best. A lot of the behaviour in the report came from salaried employees and should be unacceptable in any workplace, and how can anyone take a future Labour government seriously when legislating against these things if there is evidence of its failure to get its own house in order?

Stephen Bush made the point that, if you're going to have a big and potentially embarrassing inquiry then it's probably best to do it at a time when most of the country has other things on their minds.

xp Card companies, but yeah they are - a shop with a £4 limit on Saturday was very apologetic, but said that the processor had already cut the limit.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/14/uk-care-home-providers-report-521-coronavirus-deaths

Well here you go, wonder when the official government fatality figures will start to factor non-NHS deaths in? (Answer: never)

When all this is said and done, the worldwide death toll for care homes is going to be staggering. All the stuff I’ve read about this is horrific.

BBC soft-pedalling the deaths of thousands of British people so as not to be accused of partisanship is vmic.

Stephen Bush’s part about the timing of the inquiry was the only one I agreed with in his piece.

I've hit the NS paywall limit and didn't actually read the piece itself, just what he was saying on Twitter.

The current top story on the BBC site has the headline "Elderly being 'airbrushed' out of virus figures" and, well, people are going to get the message. But it buries several paragraphs down the point that the death toll is 11% higher than claimed.

quite a bleak way to solve the social care crisis I guess

We have 10% of the recorded cv deaths in the WORLD? It feels like there’s a disconnect: I remember a week or so before the lockdown - so, a month ago - people at work talking about Italy like “welp, they’re finished”, because that was the nature of the coverage. Can the bbc and starmzy’s air of mild concern really fit the public mood right now with lockdown set to be extended?

On the phone with my mother, who lives in the poorest region of Portugal, and it keeps hitting home how surreal it is that she is in every way better protected than I am (good thing in this case obv).

ONS statistics for England and Wales are released 11 days after the fact, so the numbers for w/e Apr 3 (= week 14) are now available.

5-year average deaths for week 14: 10.3k
Deaths for week 14 of 2020: 16.3k
Number of deaths where Covid-19 was cited: 3.4k

So, yes, seems likely that Covid-19 is directly or indirectly responsible for an extra 6k deaths in that week in England and Wales, not the documented figure of 3.4k. Next week's stats may reinforce this.

I don't think this is unique to the UK by any means; this under-reporting of CV-19-adjacent fatalities will be almost everywhere.

Was speaking to my mother, who was initially negative about Ireland’s handling of the crisis until I pointed out they are forecast to have 400 deaths by the end of August now? That’s due to a big effort nationally and consistent messaging by the government as much as intrinsic differences in population between the two countries. There was no need for things in the UK to get as bad as they have.

Underreporting is apparent in every country, not just care home figures, but also where the dead aren’t being tested posthumously or where the symptoms are pretty much clearly covid and the person was being treated as such, but there was never a formal diagnosis.