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

Starmzy's hair increasingly becoming Sounds of the 80s touring musician

My autistic son watches some odd stuff on YouTube: domino rallys, bird table footage, aquarium cleaning tips on the dustin's fishtanks channel, japanese candy, screwed & chopped horror versions of cbeebies programs... but today he is mostly watching a boris johnson press conference from last week!

― calzino, Monday, 11 May 2020 14:29 (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

omg POLL! i have watched like...most of these too

"The Blob" was trending a couple of days ago, expect a lot more of that bullshit in the coming weeks.

"i hope we will achieve a virus"

...

"er, er, er, i mean a vaccine"

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/11/britain-economy-coronavirus-deaths?CMP

This is a savaging but one that bursts the balloon on the idea that the economy can just be restarted.

The Telegraph says it's a clever message shift.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/05/11/stay-alert-not-communications-blunder-clever-message-shift/

"In many ways, it’s rather clever. It echoes the “Stay alert, stay alive!” slogan hammered into US service personnel during the Vietnam War"

and how did that go?

That's a great piece Matt.

"It was a mistake that probably cost most of the 50,000 or so excess deaths we have seen so far as a result of the pandemic."

Just astounding as to why the opposition aren't hammering the fuck out of the government on this.

Hardly appropriate for someone that would like to be continued being called forensic for a while and not have the tabloids put his head on a hot air balloon above the headline of "Sir Gasbag, Britain's Windiest Balloon"

12m people privately rent, paying £63.6bn per year.

Buying up all 5.5m properties and transferring to social landlords would cost £7bn per year. £1,270 per home per year.

This would save £50bn a year in rents, and £9bn in housing benefit.

Astonishing.https://t.co/9qzJJE3vwa

— Paul Sweeney (@PaulJSweeney) May 11, 2020

https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/11/bereaved-families-seek-justice-for-uk-victims-of-coronavirus?CMP

This is going to snowball I think.

that will be a group of people who it will be very difficult for the Tory media to paint as wrong 'uns, but who knows what's possible nowadays?

Sir Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief scientific adviser, justified the policy on 13 March by saying that if 60% of the population contracted the virus, most would only contract a mild illness and “herd immunity” would be achieved, which Vallance said was among “the key things we need to do.”

just for context, here's a graph showing the timescale for reaching just 55% 'immunity' under a series of periodic tightenings and easings of social restrictions:

https://i.imgur.com/j9YNVvl.png

(from https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/08/health/coronavirus-pandemic-curve-scenarios.html)

The failure to consider the obvious alternative of a TTI regime and instead to go for managed herd immunity was not just a failure of the scientific advice: I still find it incredulous that a prime minister can be told of a strategy that will see tens of thousands die and not demand that alternatives are investigated.

One reason for this being that the endless parade of gammon the UK seems to consist of would never accept a strategy originating in one o' them foreign countries - esp. once the right-wing press started hammering it home.

Matt Hancock appears to have a Damien Hirst spin painting of the Queen behind him on the news right now.

This whole thing has been like the world's longest episode of Through The Keyhole

Part of the government art collection. He does not own it.

Someone has to disperse that crap britart about to keep up appearances , I mean who would actually buy any Damien Hirst these days? Well apart from Dave Stewart.

Jesus, a member of station staff at Victoria has died after being spat at by someone who said they had COVID. No PPE, no consideration given to removing people with underlying health conditions from frontline service, no government compensation for the family.

christ almighty

https://www.itv.com/news/london/2020-05-12/station-ticket-office-worker-dies-with-covid-19-after-being-spat-at/

I feel the scumbag who spat at her should be charged with murder, but would imagine it will prove impossible to prove he transmitted it to her. But at least attempted murder.

FWIW I listened to Starmer on the radio and thought his message was quite 'good politics'.

In other words I didn't personally agree with all of it or think it went far enough, but I thought it was probably quite good at 'positioning Labour for future success'.

I have a sense, possibly projected or exaggerated, that lots of people (including eg: 'centrist people') are now very keen to appreciate everything that KS does and create a 'narrative' in which he's like Blair was in say 1996 - the competent and principled leader we need and are waiting to get the chance to vote for. Beside which the Con government can, once you agree to follow this narrative, look like an incompetent and unworthy shower - which they are.

I suppose my sense is that all this is relatively politically good, because it increases the small chance of the disgusting and awful Con government getting into trouble and possibly losing some or all of its power in 5 years or less. Even though KS doesn't much convince me, I think that goal is very desirable.

that will be a group of people who it will be very difficult for the Tory media to paint as wrong 'uns, but who knows what's possible nowadays?

Not impossible for those scumbags.

I feel the scumbag who spat at her should be charged with murder, but would imagine it will prove impossible to prove he transmitted it to her. But at least attempted murder.

22nd March was before the lockdown so there are all manner of ways in which she could have contracted it working at one of the busiest stations in London. There's also CCTV everywhere so if they can identify who did it that's a start, at the very least it's probably a hate crime, but this is without legal precedent.

The fact that she was in an at-risk group and working at all is heavily negligent on behalf of the employer and there are likely to be many more in her position.

that will be a group of people who it will be very difficult for the Tory media to paint as wrong 'uns, but who knows what's possible nowadays?

"Supposed bereaved mother actually voted labour in a past election, clearly a plant!"

there are different interpretations of what the opposition should do, and more generally about what the best tack is to take with what you say in terms of getting the results you want. do you treat it purely like you're auditioning for govt, or do you think you can effect change as the opposition. ppl have attacked corbyn and the latter view vociferously (always significant), but it's not at all clear that e.g. nationalising the railways would be going ahead if we'd had 4 years of forensic opposition. the govt has very little clue what alternative possibilities there is public appetite for because all the democratic mechanisms are so blunt and rotten, but you do get an idea when you have a party offer something very different and get significant levels of support. do you dress for the job you want, or do you try to shift norms of dressing. one of the main weaknesses of moderate politics is in fact its v weak understanding of how 'the marketplace of ideas' actually functions. by meeting people halfway you can get dragged all over the place. if you want to shift the window you have to actually offer a coherent vision rather than carefully administered tweaks on the status quo.

in any case, the electorate has changed a lot since the 90s. there's way more leftwing liberal voters than there were then and there are no robust looking coalitions that might win a majority. if labour can't win the next election (and this will be determined in large part by factors outside of labour's control, such as the ability of the lib dems to poach tory votes and the SNP, as well as all the extra-parliamentary issues), then spending the next few years getting the right shoes and practicing for a doomed job interview may be a missed opportunity to try out some alternative policies.

https://i.postimg.cc/dtyqNSXg/EXz-Nz-Hy-Xg-AASXWb.jpg

I don't think Labour will recover in the polls without a combination of dull competence and bolder ideas than the Miliband-era came up with, particularly under the current circumstances, and i'd be surprised if Starmer does.

I want the bolder ideas, but if this govt continues to be as spectacularly incompetent as they're being then dull competence could well do it.

> Part of the government art collection. He does not own it.

interesting, thanks. was that a private residence though? do i get to have one if i ask nicely?

(it wasn't the greatest thing tbh, the ERII overlay looked kind of terrible, even without all the nationalistic stuff it prompts)

it was this, specifically

https://artcollection.culture.gov.uk/artwork/18640/

given that the main problem for the left is getting voters out rather than persuading floating voters i'm not sure dull competence is an election winner, it only really appeals to a fairly small class of ppl

it's true that if there's a big housing market crash or comparable shitshow then enough property-owning oldsters might be tempted by a dull and competent opposition, but that's a coalition that would have few members from or reasons to represent the interests of the post 08 crash generations or your trad working class labour constituencies

I think dull managerialism will just inspire apathy and low turnouts, lots of what'sthefuckingpoint? and tories will keep a huge majority with even less votes than '19.

i agree and there's lots of evidence for it. this is why the rent issue is such a key one, bc it's unclear if there's any way you can win an election representing renter's interests, and, if you argue for dull competence, you won't even get an opposition party

I'm sympathetic to all that but it requires an awful lot of faith in the Conservative Party being receptive to what happens in the (awful phrase) marketplace of ideas, as opposed to what their supporters and donors are pressuring them to do, or the ideas that are flowing from the right in that marketplace. The government is not renationalising the railways because the Labour opposition of the last five years redefined the art of the politically possible - renationalising the railways was in Labour's 1997 manifesto, it has been a massively popular policy for decades. The government is (effectively) renationalising the railways because a once-in-a-century pandemic has caused the revenues of privatise operators to collapse.

I'm not sure whether any generalisations we might make about the electorate over the past decade or so are going to apply moving forward, because everything has changed. The nature of opposition that is required might have changed - once of the reasons I'm ambivalent towards Starmer's approach is that it might be auditioning for a job that will no longer exist in its current form.

I wanted Corbyn to succeed both in the leadership elections and subsequent GE's. Still, the question remains as to whether or not a Corbyn-style opposition actually benefited any of the people they were supposed to represent when the end result was an 80-seat Tory majority that no longer has to give a shit about what disadvantaged voters might think, not that they ever did except when it was expedient. Righteous anger and forward-thinking ideas don't work if crucial groups of people don't believe that you are capable of doing the job better.

Everything Starmer does has to be viewed through that prism and ultimately will succeed or fail on that. He has to break the Conservative voting coalition by convincing enough people that he would be doing the job better. Convincing credulous broadsheet columnists is barely even step one. It may still be that the government does so badly at containing the outbreak and driving any economic recovery that they are hurled from office regardless of what Starmer does, there's very little point even thinking that far ahead.

(many xposts)

the govt announced renationalisation of northern rail way before covid.

my main point is to argue that we can't talk about the electorate as a single mind, including the idea that they are all under the sway of one contemporary narrative. to make any sense of the electorate you'd need to divide them into at least 15+ blocs of voters with political loyalties of various strengths formed at different times that will change for different reasons. the current crisis will impact them all differently but it will often entrench these differences and will not wipe the slate clean.

then we're back onto this mctiernan argument that power is everything. the key point here is: what do you do when you're a big minority that can't win power but is opposed to both of the established power blocs. corbyn's rise was to a large extent the rise of, depending on how you want to slice it, 'left liberals'/university educated ppl/the post-crash generation. there was an alliance w/ elements of the 'old left' that had been peripheral or dormant (always worth remember how many millions of ppl are basically unrepresented and deemed 'not crucial' at any given time), but as corbyn said "i've got youth on my side". the political generation gap is much, much starker than it has been for decades. there's a huge bloc of voters who thanks to the marvels of the two party system went from being disenfranchised to wielding disproportionate influence.

dull competence is about taking certain blocs of voters for granted, offering them only a 'least bad option' rationale, and hoping they are scattered in a way which means their lack of votes won't be too harmful. the electoral strategy is almost wholly focused on appealing to the sensibilities of a section of centre and centre-right voters. dull competence is short-term electoralism, it's a big part of the erosion of political consciousness in 'former heartlands', the weakening, marginalisation and corruption of the union movement, and the move away from ideology and Politics towards managerialism. the silence of centre-left voices here isn't just bc ppl are fragile or afraid of looking lame, it's reflective of a wider lack of vision in the centre of politics.

You cannot appeal strongly to all 15+ blocs of voters at the same time, because they want contradictory things. And not to relitigate the last election, but it's unquestionable that 65+ voters were one of the things behind the drubbing, and also one of the main groups now literally fearing for their lives from this government's incompetence at execution. Competence doesn't seem a bad play for that bloc. (A lot of them are also landlords, damn their eyes)

"dull competence is about taking certain blocs of voters for granted, offering them only a 'least bad option' rationale"

I thought this was why the Labour vote was declining in every election post '97 and this decline didn't go into reverse until Corbyn became leader, until that cursed brexit election of course, which as much as a dramatic failure it was it still didn't vindicate going back to the old failed ways of New Labour imo. Some really good posts there Ogmor.

xp indeed, forming and holding together a coalition is v difficult and corbyn was aware of this and mostly did a v good job at what has been an extremely neglected aspect of leftist electoral politics and I think it has made an impression on soft and centre-left elements of the labour party, even if they haven't fully taken it on board. over 65s are more than one bloc, but a big swing in that demographic was from ukip/bxp to tory.

it's worth saying again I guess because every couple of weeks everyone forgets but the tory vote overall didn't change that much between 17 and 19, while lots of 17 labour voters either stayed at home or voted for someone else bc of brexit (at least a million votes either way)

Furlough scheme extended to November...

xp which is to say, there was no dull and competent solution to keeping the 17 coalition together than corbyn failed to pursue. a starmer-ish more remainy line might have kept enough FBPE types from voting lib dem or snp to win a few more fairly well-off suburban seats and might have lost a few more brexity #towns. if they'd gone for a more old school labour -friendly soft brexit line you'd get the inverse.

Sunak says the government believes in the dignity of work.

lying cunt

They need dignity to exist so they can take it away.

there was no dull and competent solution to keeping the 17 coalition together than corbyn failed to pursue

Yees but the 17 coalition wasn't enough, which is also one of those everyone forgets things too. Starmz can't appeal to the same blocs that Corbyn could, no. The question is whether he can cobble together enough support from the people Corbyn antagonised while keeping enough of those who turned out in 19. Jury has to be still out on that, especially with a massive realignment of the blocs themselves underway. Covid is now #1 on "your top concerns" polling and Brexit isn't even in the top 10.

24 isn't going to be like 17 or 19 again.

Fucking Sunak fanboys are back out. Entire scheme is barely costing a fraction of a scratch of the arse of the Banks bailout and already people who in theory can do sums are talking about its sustainability

Sunak decision to extend furlough till end of October is expensive but eminently sensible. It’s a lifeline business large and small to prevent Depression level unemployment. Sunak is proving Mr Steady in this crisis #COVIDー19

— Lionel Barber (@lionelbarber) May 12, 2020

yeah, but at that point it stops being a problem for the left and starts being a problem for the centre, and the left is back to 'what do you do when you're a big minority that can't win power but is opposed to both of the established power blocs'

every election is different, but just because you don't want to fight the last war it doesn't mean you discount all experience from it

Righteous anger and forward-thinking ideas don't work if crucial groups of people don't believe that you are capable of doing the job better.

there are v long term structural processes at work in society that are affected by but ultimately much more important than events (hence why the same crisis plays out so differently in different places!)

Like the issue of all these voters baying for the blood of foreigners, BAME people and whatever boogieman offered up to them by the press is why the Tories won in December, and that’s not ground Labour could or should try to compete on. Grey managerialism isn’t the answer, and there is a very unaddressed danger that disillusioned and alienated young people looking for an outlet get swept up by the far right.