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

When I got a CAHMs nurse a couple of years back one of the best things she did was hook us up with a local prescription delivery service who are very good and when there has been any fuck ups it hasn't been from their end.

Dunt - nominative rhyming slang determinism

“Equally I’m going to disagree with him that it is far too early to make international comparisons. If they are to be done, they should be on a per capita basis. We are already seeing there are different ways that deaths are measured not just in the UK, but across Europe and across the world.

what did they start/stop counting care home deaths to their tally in Italy, Spain and France as well and then after a couple of weeks say ah.. add 'em on, we've fucked it anyway! It sounds like Starmer was a bit more forensic today he used "truly dreadful" as a criticism of the govt response to c-19.

misquoting Starmer there - he was calling the death toll truly dreadful

John Crace seems to think my MP is doing a fab job of softly softly, catchy flunky at not-PMQs. I didn’t watch because I was out for a walk and didn’t want to hear anyone’s rote baby congratulations.

"Sub Dom hankers for Daddy"

is this the fucking graun or xhamster!

A bead of sweat formed on Raab’s forehead.

enough already!

the pressure certainly won't be coming from people who plan to match their c-19 hawk tough-talk by getting on crowded buses and trains every day. no sirree, they won't be so cavalier with their own precious health and for what for what cause? for an nth of a % improvement on GDP for a month until the death toll starts spiralling out of control again.
― calzino, Wednesday, 29 April 2020 15:40 (seven hours ago)

Absolutely

hey look we have a judiciary: the supreme court has 'struck out' govt legislation from 2016 that sought to ban publicly owned bodies from conducting boycotts

The rule stated that councils must not use their pension policies “to pursue boycotts, divestment and sanctions against foreign nations and UK defense industries.”

But the Palestine Solidarity Campaign challenged the government, and in 2017 the High Court ruled in its favor.

That decision was overturned in 2018 by the Court of Appeal but has now been upheld by the Supreme Court.

love the way they sneak the arms industry in there

grim lol, does seem somewhat tacked on!

tbh John Crace has always looked like a prison guard who murders inmates for his own sexually-sadistic gratification

— Rosewood Shoehorn (@apiarism) April 29, 2020

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/apr/29/jd-wetherspoon-plans-to-reopen-pubs-in-june

The chain expected like-for-like sales to be 10% lower during the first month after reopening, and then gradually increase by 2% each month, ending up 3% higher than before lockdown.

Tim Martin must really be banking on a steady influx of parched Brits to replace the pub regulars heading onto the ventilators.

Sub Dom Raabs one out as Sir Keir felches him with forensicity pic.twitter.com/i4olmrvHQq

— TheIainDuncanSmiths (@TheIDSmiths) April 29, 2020

Sweaty Raab vs. Forensic Starmer, no contest.

I could totally picture Raab in a Nazi-themed s+m dungeon and he looks quite like Baron Ribbentrop.

what in the name of shitting christ is wrong with people?

And they say it isn't a cult of personality, all this worship of Magic Daddy.

tbf crace has always been worse than bad but now is his time to shine (even more badly)

it turns out the so called adults in the room are as politically sophisticated as a classroom of recalcitrant children who've been on the yellow smarties!

it puts their complaints about the cult of Corbynism into sharp relief

I watched a bit of it yesterday and Starmer did pretty well but not at the level you'd expect judging by all the hosannas. It is really difficult to overstate quite how terrible Raab is at PMQs, visibly shitting his pants on camera, apparently just making things up in moments of panic.

Credit where it's due Starmer is very good at one thing, which is using a follow-up question to puncture a balloon of diversionary bullshit. That will come in very useful against Johnson for whom diversionary bullshit is his primary method of communication. That's not even being forensic, it's basic interview technique and it shows up how bad most politicians are at it.

The downside is that Starmer appears to be doing this at PMQs and nowhere else. Most people don't watch PMQs obviously but in this quieter format and at this particular time you could argue it matters in a way that the old orgy of hot air and pre-rehearsed zingfest didn't.

Turning Raab into a sweaty bumbling wreck isn't the most difficult task in politics. I wonder if the fact that Raab is a lawyer and knows that he's up against a far far more successful and talented lawyer isn't somewhere at the back of his small mind?

Boris should have retained Geoffrey Cox in his cabinet, in the old PMQ game of blowing much hot air without saying anything he'd beat any former barrister!

I wonder if the fact that Raab is a lawyer and knows that he's up against a far far more successful and talented lawyer isn't somewhere at the back of his small mind?

If this is the case I fear for anyone that Raab ever represented in court.

When Raab did the daily presser last week he looked like he was going to faint. And that even before anyone had asked him any questions!

I declare Mr Raab is suffering from the vapours

Fuck this guy

NEW: Starmer met with Labour Friends of India, said: "We must not allow issues of the sub-continent to divide communities here. Any constitutional issues in India are a matter for the Indian Parliament, & Kashmir is a bilateral issue for India and Pakistan to resolve peacefully."

— Sienna Rodgers (@siennamarla) April 30, 2020

Internationalism begins at home nowhere

profiles in courage

let's not get too bogged down with "issues" like murderous ethnic cleansing, too much student politics is where Corbyn went wrong.

Besides the message being "Pogroms are good" I don't know why Starmer is doing this. It's not going to shift Hindus that vote Tory. Modi doesn't give a shit, and if anything it alienates Muslim communities that turn out for Labour, or Hindus that hate Modi.

the main way ppl seem to defend this kind of shit is to imply that to care about it is something inherently childish and unserious (see also wrt blair's dealings with countless other monsters), and that the only ppl who care about it are (presumed white) students (see also Israel/Palestine). it would be less infuriating if they would just be honest about their horrible views

Lol he hasn’t a clue

NEW: Labour leader Keir Starmer is set to have some "gritty" conversations in a bid to win the trust of the electorate in a series of public 'call Keir' Zoom meetings – catch up on the latest with @elliot_chappell's morning briefing here: https://t.co/MBmScAWSGo

— LabourList (@LabourList) April 30, 2020

“adult conversation” "his carefully maintained position of constructive opposition." “opposition for opposition’s sake”

let's fucking play melt bingo again and again and again..

lovely four-minute story on captain tom moore’s 100th birthday on the bbc lunchtime bulletin there, surprised to see it followed by an excoriating broadside from a healthcare union representative pointing out that torturing the elderly to support the nhs is not a sustainable funding model

nah sike it was a total exercise in supine bootlicking

Oh man that Zoom thing is not going to end well. Let someone else be the guinea pig for that first.

can i be arrested for showing keir starmer my arsehole on zoom y/n

It's going to be like in the early days of Twitter when the Tory Party Conference decided to do something like display everything with a hashtag on one of their big screens without thinking through the consequences.

he should conduct the Zoom meeting looking like this imo

https://i2-prod.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article21788031.ece/ALTERNATES/s1200b/5_Screen-Shot-2020-03-31-at-160109.jpg

Starmer obv never saw the live Matt Bianco phone in on Saturday Superstore

oh good now an in-depth exploration of tom moore’s ww2 experiences on the bbc news channel

we can’t get enough fucking greatest generation porn even in the middle of a catastrophic government response to a pandemic

"torturing the elderly to support the nhs is not a sustainable funding model"

come on ... I want to see a 144 year old mummified corpse of a Boer war veteran doing a 7k marathon carrying Kitchener's corpse while some Tiger Moths do a flyover next.

wait it’s not even the news channel it’s the fucking bbc1 news show, good thing there’s nothing else happening they could be covering

They'll just run the zoom call like they did the party one with no public chat just the ability to send questions through to someone else who will filter

The India thing is insanely grim

We’re going to have an opportunity to see how far right-wing smear campaigns have affected concrete foreign policy positions if the West Bank is annexed in July.

Regarding what his expert support entails, Phillips said the govt will be using his company’s 'Origins' software, which tracks people's ethnicity by their names. They'll use it to help compile Covid-19 data on disproportionate BAME deaths. https://t.co/YWb5hfwasL

— Nadine White (@Nadine_Writes) April 25, 2020

This seems weird, idk.

Mr Phillips and his colleagues believe their ethnicity tracking is unique in its method, size and ambition. Software developed by Richard Webber, a visiting professor at Newcastle University, draws on a database of 1.2bn individual records globally. It uses 2.5m family names and 800,000 first names to build algorithms that he says can link names to an individual’s ethnic or cultural origin from around the world with more than 95 per cent accuracy. The results are cross-checked against publicly available sources such as LinkedIn profiles and companies' annual reports.

“[The algorithm] can even show what might be called social integration — the likelihood of [people of ethnic-minority heritage] using Anglo-Saxon first names,” says Mr Phillips.