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

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.

that's happening on a small hopefully insignificant level, except now it's an internet-based alt right, conspiracy shit etc

happening already i mean, obv it could get worse and the rona looks like a great petri dish

I think my autistic son has been radicalised by YouTube. Yesterday he was repeatedly playing a Boris press conference today it's a choir singing the Welsh national anthem!

uh-oh, it's important to dob him in to the cops asap so they can tactfully and sensitively deradicalize him

Oh no

Prime minister material. pic.twitter.com/kjmYrLiJcF

— Sir Kier Blobby (@kier_sir) May 12, 2020

Following

going back to the issue of where the tories get their ideas from, I think johnson is in some ways an extension of cameron's reformist/disruptive streak, which is p receptive to ideas from all over the place (in the name of the big society!). it's more modern than may's more cautious/perhaps socially conservative one-nationish shtick (not that she was really in a position to articulate much) and w/ his majority he initially looked to be more focused on internal enemies, but now he's busy firefighting I can foresee even more radical change being brought in, you know how disaster capitalism works

That twitter is a dubdobdee alt.

The nationalisation of the railways would have been on the agenda anyway, the base hated the privatisation because it's one of the few ways in which everything turning to shit actually affected them (and which having lots of money wouldn't ameliorate)

Dull competence isn't going to save anyone but no one here is arguing for dull competence. At some point Starmer is going to have to give people something to vote FOR rather than just a safe pair of hands and that's where my reservations lie. That's going to require vision for a country that will need rebuilding but it also requires enough people in the right parts of the country to believe that Labour are capable of delivering upon that vision. Competence (or at least a widespread enough belief in it) is a baseline requirement, not the be all and end all.

The Corbyn strategy was effectively a gigantic bet on new young voters, previous non-voters, and people who were so repelled by May and Johnson that they would vote for pretty much anyone else. There is no sense whatsoever in taking any of those voter groups for granted but only the youth vote is going to get any bigger, you do need to split off other voting groups. The SNP is the only other party whose voter coalition looks especially solid, so there's both winnable ground and a massive barrier there.

Look I know you didn’t want to see what the rest of us saw happen with the media in the run-up to the election, but it happened. None of this happened organically, there’s a reason great swathes of people are and were repeating the same attack lines fed to them by the vicious press. 7

Of course it happened, everyone knew it was going to happen from the start, but the fact is it worked, just like it worked against Ed Miliband. The question is whether there's any way through that doesn't involve either blundering into the same fire or folding completely. And it's not one I have an answer to.

This would be much easier to talk about if there were more than one person alive with experience of winning an election as Labour leader, and if that person wasn't a cunt.

The Tories did plenty well serving up the blood of foreigners and BAME people on Facebook with no press required. Hell, they have blanked huge BBC programmes. Whether Labour were just too inept to respond, or were being undermined from within is still an open question.

Either way, the appalling state of our press is something that can't be ignored in either direction. Genuinely don't know what the answer is: if you become "electable" to the press I probably don't want to elect you; if you're fully antagonistic to them they'll kill you like they eventually did Corbyn. Even if you're in the middle ground they'll find a bacon sandwich in the end.

Also a lot of what Johnson was planning pre-covid and was reflected in the (now completely swamped) Sunak budget was stuff that Cummings wanted to do anyway, this is best understood as part of an emerging (or re-emerging) tendency on the right rather than a reaction to pressure from the left.

Dull competence is exactly what the SNP have been doing for the last 12 years btw.

yep, and it works for reasons largely outside of their control (uk constitutional malaise & rift between scotland and tory england). I think there are more votes to be won from non-voters than from ppl who voted tory, even if you throw in ppl who voted nationalist and lib dem and green I think it's marginal, partly bc a lot of those ppl are fundamentally opposed to labour and require compromise to win over that loses you other votes. political apathy helps the right way more than the left, and in practice perceptions of competence are loaded to favour the centre/status quo/hegemony/anyone 6'2'' that looks smart in a suit, it's rarely going to be a criteria that works for the left (& often not minorities)

Has there been a collective penny-dropping moment from vocal anti-lockdown types when they realise what another four months of furlough is likely to mean for the transition out of lockdown? That coupled with Hancock's "sorry, you aren't getting on a plane this summer" announcement? Feels like the entire year has been basically written off now but the govt don't want to openly admit that yet.

"Nobody who is on the furlough scheme wants to be on this scheme,"

workings shite mate

A negative Boris is even more pointless than a serious Boris, so leave the tough stuff to Sunak and Hancock

The thing I am having trouble accepting myself is that there's nothing special about the end of year – next year is just as much written off as this. Absent an incredibly solid TTI infra (which we don't appear to be even getting close to), a really robust treatement or vaccine turning up, what would change that?

and so at this point, I could give a shit about perceptions of competence – I want actual competence-at-implementing-TTI to take the reins, sooner rather than later please.

Plenty of appetite to pull the plug on furlough. Any reduction will mean many job losses.

Stage 1 of the government deciding who "deserves" furlough pay and who doesn't. Expect mass redundancies in the creative industries and smaller businesses, and total protection of big business and financial sector jobs. https://t.co/qfgldwCoCm

— Uncle P (@PasqualeLDN) May 12, 2020

it’s hard to see any way that next winter/spring are any better than this one given we’ve already got global reach for the virus, plenty of countries will have lifted their social restrictions, and a bunch of us will have been softened up by bouts of cold and flu. nice time to be leaving the EU hey? oh by the way has the remainder of the EU settlement scheme been sorted out yet? no? all the document verification centres have been closed you say? and no postal applications either? and EU citizens without settled status are already being denied UC? hmmm!!

It'll be interesting to see what's coming down the line on home-based learning if you have another four months of people staying in and getting paid for jobs that likely won't exist by the time business are theoretically able to re-open.

it’s good money after bad. why pay people not to work when you could be paying them to train up - as contact tracers, first and foremost!

Difficult to see how they could discontinue furlough given it's effectively turning off life support for hundreds of thousands of small businesses, the owners of which make up a hefty chunk of the Tory vote. It's also going to make economic restructuring much harder whenever the other side of this turns out to be.

The only way I can see out of this in even the short-ish term is the discovery and widespread distribution of effective antivirals and lord knows how far away we are from that.

not everyone wants to be a tracer

first i’ve heard of it

Someone I vaguely know runs a business (with their partner) related to the live events sector, which of course has died on its arse. Their turnover is in the six-figure bracket with a bunch of expenses, so I don't think they're earning vast amounts. Furlough or no, they're getting precisely FUCK ALL government help, and will probably go bust/lose their house etc. Sunak et al are well aware that most small business owners are set up as limited companies and taking a minimal wage with the rest as dividends - which of course aren't covered. So a lot of small-to-medium size businesses are set to go under, Tory voters or no.
Since there probably won't be an election until 2024 they figure it doesn't matter I guess, and the void in semi-essential services to get things up and running again can be *waves hands* sorted out. Dunno, maybe business owners can all be retrained as grave diggers or something?

This is it, quite a few people falling through the cracks already. Also Tories will have little idea on how to do anything like re-structure the economy, hence why I can see the plug being pulled to some extent, earlier than it should be.

But also I can't see Sunak fucking it up at some point.

*not

Also Tories will have little idea on how to do anything like re-structure the economy,

Also ties in with the questions about re-training. aiui there's a huge online learning programme ready to roll but what kinds of jobs are the Tories envisaging are going to be required if tourism, hospitality, catering, etc are all going to be wrecked for the foreseeable?

posting

We'll be getting this situation here in a few weeks I guess

Abattoirs and food-processing plants in Lower Saxony, Schleswig Holstein, North-Rhine Westphalia and Baden-Württemberg have been identified as the centres of the outbreaks and could be responsible for the recent increase in Germany’s R-number to above 1, the country’s disease control agency, the Robert Koch Institute, said.

Health authorities believe that while the virus may not have spread in the processing plants themselves, it may have found fertile ground in the overcrowded housing units shared by mainly eastern European contract workers. Germany announced on Tuesday its weekly test capacity was now at 838,000.

what kinds of jobs are the Tories envisaging

I do think there's something in the idea of adding back in all the redundancy that has been stripped out in the name of efficiency. Trivial example: milk processing. There used to be 35+ milk processors in Scotland, spread across the entire country. There are now just 5, using 3 processing locations. If we switch to a TTI world, what happens to milk processing if they're in regional lockdown for a time?

A logistics chain that is less efficient on paper, but more resilient to local interruption and lockdown is one that is both better for surviving CV and for employing more people. And theoretically brings lots of ancillary local jobs back along with it.

But enduring inefficiency is hard to stabilise, so they'd need stomach for more market intervention than they're ever willing to do for any industry (except finance, obv). And you'd need to accept that this isn't over in 6 months.

good xp - it also reduces the contagian risk posed by massive centralised processing like that

Horrific stories about meat-packing plants in the US. A few heroes:

Mike Cockrell, the company’s chief financial officer, says Sanderson expects its chicken production will be 4% less this fiscal year than it estimated before the pandemic. But “no one even asks how much it costs to protect workers,” he says. “We’ll add it up when this is all over.”

And a lot of villains:

Each time he arrived at work, Benjamin saw a different reality emerging. A quiet, powerfully built man, he wasn’t the sort to open up about his fears, but during daily calls with his three adult children, he confided that he was afraid of getting sick. On March 25 one of his daughters gave him a face mask to wear at the plant, where he operated boxing and loading equipment near the entrance and was often the first person to greet arriving co-workers. “He was always so respectful,” a shiftmate says. Two days later, Benjamin told his kids a supervisor had ordered him to remove the mask because it was creating unnecessary fears among plant employees.

On Saturday, April 4, Benjamin called in sick. So few workers had shown up the day before that he’d had to do the work of three people, he told his family. By Monday his cough and fever were much worse. The next morning he could barely move. An ambulance took him to the hospital.

While he was in the emergency room, Cargill shut down the Hazleton plant to disinfect everything, install barriers between workstations, and give employees time to heal. Later that week, the union said 164 workers had been infected. The local testing center, running low on supplies, was refusing to test most Cargill employees. If you work at the meatpacking plant, they were told, assume you’re positive.

Benjamin was admitted to the intensive care unit and spent his work anniversary on a ventilator. He died on April 19. The next day the plant reopened after a two-week cleaning.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-05-07/coronavirus-closes-meat-plants-threatens-food-supply

We have responded to the publication by the Conservative Party of the terms of reference for an independent investigation into discrimination and prejudice. Read our statement here ➡️ https://t.co/MV9OyHjFwC pic.twitter.com/mQEqXVdZDN

— EHRC (@EHRC) May 12, 2020

lol

incredible

I do think there's something in the idea of adding back in all the redundancy that has been stripped out in the name of efficiency.

this is where I think there can be curious overlap between your modern Taleb-reading disruptive semi-libertarian right logic and a leftist move towards local control and common ownership. this whole point about risks being greater for large unresponsive bodies and the disasters possible when those in power have no skin in the game are essentially arguments against millionaires and centralisation

you see the tension on the right with the way small businesses are treated vs big business. the likes of deborah meaden complaining that the tory govt isn't pro business at all. you could easily make labour appeal to these ppl by focusing on small business, clamping down on tax evasion and other big business bail outs and hammer the tories for all that corrupt nonsense, split the 'business lobby'

627 today. can't wait for the 900+ VE day street party spike in a few weeks.

Is that up on the end of last week?