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

it's a fertility thing, also it's not black it's turkish

they decide its fate, not the Netherlands

it could be any colour

that said, we’re going to give it a lick of black paint

That head reminds me of one of those fortune-telling simulacra things you still get at some decaying seaside towns

simulacrum even

I do believe the Netherlands have some problems of their own with traditional figures which are racially offensive.

Matt Lucas shitcanned by i-player, netflix, britbox etc because of blackface content .. u loves to see it

Time for him to whip out his hilarious impression of Boris.

Happening now: We are hundreds of people gathered in front of the Cecil Rhodes statue in Oxford. People refuse to learn, teach and live under the shadow of slave traders, colonialists and racists.#RhodesMustFall pic.twitter.com/kSVEZlLg9D

— Dilar Dirik (@Dlrdrk1) June 9, 2020

Milligan statue removed although this one has more of a 'let's get this into a museum before it gets vandalised' whiff

All Labour councils to review their statues btw, a lot of them will be coming down before they're torn down.

they’d better be

The Milligan statue is about twenty years old, I can’t imagine which museum would be clamouring for it.

maybe the guy who made it wants it back

That Ashbourne sculpture story has definite League of Gentlemen vibes about it, the 'local consultation on its future' really really needs to be filmed and broadcast.

Hoddeston is one of those towns up the A10, just outside the M25, built on white flight from north and east London.

Yep. That stretch (Cheshunt, Broxbourne, Hoddesdon) had several BNP councillors not that long ago.

Yeah usually Essex has a great reputation.

Just over the border in Hertfordshire, though I'm not trying to claim Essex is better.

I know copper prices are down right now but you could pay a few weeks salaries curator salaries by melting these down, I’m sure any musuem would welcome the opportunity.

> Matt Lucas shitcanned by i-player, netflix, britbox etc because of blackface content .. u loves to see it

he was pretty apologetic about it a few months ago when it came up, said he wouldn't do it now. unlike the league of gentlemen who seemed fine with reviving papa lazarou for their recent comeback. (that said, LB did seem to go more for shock value than the others)

It's all very well apologising now but the wanker and his arsehole pal made 3 seasons of this shit, it wasn't some one off aberration.

Latest celeb-being-a-cunt-on-Twitter = Peter Shilton (though I understand he has previous)

All you people who are not happy with a government democratically voted by the people with 80 seat majority (and our great country )please go and live somewhere run by dictators (not elected )and see where your actions (like pulling down statues) gets you!!

— Peter Shilton (@Peter_Shilton) June 9, 2020

Meanwhile Neville Southall has been letting a gambling addiction charity take over his account, now that's a real goalie.

to be fair though, if anyone thought that dictators were democratically elected, they've been set right on that score.

xps

and clowning disabled people as malingering benefit fraudsters was just so fucking hilarious as a comedy run up to a decade of austerity when both main parties in the UK decided they were quite expendable.

lol just about all footballers apart from Nev need to be executed and Shilts (is no fucking exception)

love his his clunky use of brackets tbf!

Not really relevant to anything, but via Shilts I've found what may be the worst profile on twitter

https://twitter.com/NeilPenny9

My local rag have made a story out of someone tweeting that the Harold Wilson statue needs to go because of UK post-colonial shithousery during the Nigerian civil war in the late 60's. And Barry Sheerwaste never misses an opportunity for a bit of dimwitted grandstanding over a tweet that got 7 likes!

Hello @HouseofCommons @UKParliament can you find out who is sending out far-right threats from your IP address? pic.twitter.com/rorSTwD3FC

— Dan O'Hagan (@danohagan) June 9, 2020

you really have to be well ensconced in the Westminster bubble and completely full of shit to believe that apocryphal old bollox about football being a spectator sport for the working classes!

People are starting to realise that, not only is there no comprehensive plan for reopening schools in June, there isn’t one for reopening them in September either.

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/jun/09/johnson-urged-to-set-out-recovery-plan-for-schools-in-england

Nor is there one for what to do in the event they have to keep them closed. I missed 6 weeks of 3rd year for illness and it took me forever to catch up; the idea that kids can just move up a whole year this autumn is wild.

unlike the league of gentlemen who seemed fine with reviving papa lazarou for their recent comeback. (that said, LB did seem to go more for shock value than the others)

Papa Lazarou sketch is playing up and taking the piss out of the Middle England fear of the horrible outsider coming for your way of life though, Little Britain is white dudes depicting black people for laughs. (The LoG did decide to just double down on the Barbara stuff though although Mark Gatiss at least appeared to realise this and tried to balance it out with the bingo caller).

xp

Moran was questioning Williamson about this yesterday - on the idea that 100k laptops had been disbursed and another 230k were pending, pointing out that even if they sent 330k, that's less than half of the number of kids without any access to computers / internet, to which he inevitably had no response.

Meanwhile..

This is the absolute classic form of British corruption. Ministers give a large benefit to a rich person or company, at the public’s expense. And then their party is paid a tiny sum of money. https://t.co/ORri8lTtmf

— James Mackenzie (@mrjamesmack) June 10, 2020

At almost every development stage this is going to lead to a big educational deficit that needs to be recovered, and not all kids are in the same boat on this one, it's obviously going to favour children with the most actively involved parents and those with more time on their hands. I don't see how they can get out of this without having everyone repeat a year and that's going to require legislation that the government is unlikely to put forward.

(Also every newspaper that normally wouldn't care about a story like that is going to want to give Richard Desmond a kicking).

I'm sorry but the Daily Mail doing a pros and cons list of slave owners has absolutely ended me pic.twitter.com/NsdfY3NgOF

— Zing Tsjeng (@misszing) June 10, 2020

£12k is chickenfeed. I think that is about how much Jess Phillips got from her property developer pal. Obviously it is just an initial down-payment.

I've been thinking about the education stuff a lot. I already hate the system we've got, it's Ofsted-run tickbox obsession, standardizaton, the vast swathe of kids it's not working for etc

Putting that to one side, repeating a year is a minimal requirement one way or another at this stage and I think I said weeks ago there is no apparent plan. If the country had a functional FE sector that might be one way of addressing the lost education but that's been pared beyond the bone.

Bottom line I suspect is this will just be bodged because it doesn't affect anybody the Tories care about and this government has got no interest in reforms that don't have electoral or financial benefits for them.

At minimum, i can't see next year's round of GCSEs and A-Levels taking place as normal and suspect there'll be heavy tweaking there.

I think 'write the year off and start again' makes much more sense but the open-ended nature of the threat means that there's no guarantee that they won't have to write next year off as well. As far as possible, the government should probably be planning around no students setting foot on school property for the next two years and hoping for the best that the scenario doesn't come to pass.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/ng-interactive/2020/jun/10/mark-duggan-shooting-can-forensic-tech-cast-doubt-on-official-report

The Guardian doing something vaguely useful for once.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/jun/10/uk-economy-likely-to-suffer-worst-covid-19-damage-says-oecd?CMP

When was UK economic output last 14% lower than it was at the start of this year?

the guys who named their fictional town in tribute to Roy Chubby Brown don't have any noble satirical reasons for using blackface even if such things existed

xp good. still bitter about 10 years of such scepticism of official accounts being treated as beyond the pale until recent events

well 9 years, or you could extend it back decades

As far as possible, the government should probably be planning around no students setting foot on school property for the next two years

I think you're overestimating the willingness and ability of parents to both keep money coming through the door and be full-time carers for their own children.

there's one of the big problems/fault lines that the lockdown has exposed. is school for education or for childcare?

A little bit from each column with the balance shifting as they grow older

I think writing off a year and shifting the starting age up a year might be a long term good thing but a hard sell to those most affected

it's pretty clear from the state of the economy, education, health, social care that the real transformation to a more socialized economy and a new kind of welfare state is gonna be *necessary* over the next decade or longer, not just as a quick-fix response to a few months of lockdown. god knows how an entrenched Tory government of any stripe, BoDom libertarian or otherwise, will respond to this but i can't imagine it being good.

if the Labour party is going to be any use at all they need to start envisioning a radical reinvention of the UK's infrastructure fast, and they need to start selling it to the electorate as a whole.

we're so fucked.

Arguably it's both and it should be - but also entire lives for generations have been based around children being out of the house most of the time. You can't just roll that back in a couple of months and expect people to be able to adapt, especially in the era where both parents are more likely to work. External childcare is also likely to spread the virus.

I think we are fast approaching the point where the government throws up its hands and goes "fuck it, we can't go on like this forever, people are just going to have to die". They're testing the water with that now but they may become more emboldened as time goes by.

The problem is that a society whose wellbeing is based around people being out spending money all the time is exceptionally fragile and susceptible to events like this. I don't think politicians and policy makers of any stripe have really cottoned on to the implications of it less still worked out how to move away from it or where we should be moving to.

Referencing Chubby Brown in the tile for a horrendous nightmare town hardly a ringing endorsement tbf.

I don't see how they can get out of this without having everyone repeat a year and that's going to require legislation that the government is unlikely to put forward.

This seems reasonable, but putting myself back in the shoes of a kid who hated school the idea of being told that I'll be getting a year extra would have filled me with so much despair.