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

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.

Two years out of school is absolutely a worst-case scenario (at least i hope there are no scenarios worse) but i don't think you can avoid planning for the worst, while hoping for the best. In reality, it'll likely be intermittent disruption, rather than one long stretch, so there needs to be an ability to switch between two models at will. The alternative, which tbh is more likely, is that we just abandon lockdowns as unsustainable and plough through.

i accept that de facto schools have always covered multiple functions. my argument is that those functions have never been properly defined, or theorised, or done as they should be. and they're not straightforward, "somewhere to send your kids for six or seven hours a day" doesn't cut it as childcare for a lot of children, especially vulnerable ones. the system was already dysfunctional, trying to bodge it back up is only going to make it worse.

i recognise there are other realities or imperatives.

fuck it, we can't go on like this forever, people are just going to have to die

So are Vic and Bob ever going to get pulled up over their Otis and Marvin sketches?

The only sensible conclusion is that they are just inept. Even before the pandemic this was the single stupidest and most ideologically blinkered Cabinet in our lifetime and they are dealing with a crisis that is several orders of magnitude bigger than that faced by any of the others.

Boris Johnson is least popular leader in the WORLD according to poll

As keeps getting pointed out, they lost most of the semi-competent time servers and have been left with a bunch of cranks.

Fascinated to see how long it'll be between pulling Little Britain and next having Melanie Phillips on the Moral Maze / Question Time / Any Questions. Will we make it a week?

severely doubt it

meanwhile - and i'm not having a dig, i'm in near-catatonic despair myself - this thread is gonna have months of "i can't believe they're seriously gonna do nothing/ignore this/fuck this up" while this government continues to do nothing and fuck up and kill people and watch more and more and more people face poverty and illness and mental health crises and i'm not remotely convinced it will be their "undoing" as a government

it might end up being their undoing, but alas we might be undone by the time it happens and even so, I can't feel anything positive about the prospect of a Labour govt in 5 years so fuck it all basically!

they could kill thousands a month for years, ramp up unemployment and poverty wages and leave a few million children woefully uneducated and still win the next election tbrr

The inability to stand up track and trace so far needs more reporting but from what I see it requires centralised effort which goes against everything government has done for the last 25 years. It would need heads to apply the thinking government hasn't had to do in a long time.

They could send a delegation to Kerala to try and re-learn it (hollow lol).

The biggest issue is that people will simply spend and consume a lot less even if they forcibly open things. Partly because confidence and partly restrictions. Many won't go on holiday this summer.

They will not even begin the challenge of meeting this and will probably carry on their Brexit shitshow instead.

as in the last decade, ramping up poverty and cutting funds to education and the criminal negligence of 100,000 + deaths on their hands never harmed them too badly in 3 elections , so why not again.

The Brexit shitshow is getting stellar tho – you've got to wonder if there aren't 40 rebels somewhere in the soup of chlorine-washed chicken and damaging Northern Ireland so much that it decides it's better off with Ireland.

I've interviewed a number of educators in the last couple of weeks and they have all told me that for primary kids, losing 4-6 months of school is just not that much of an issue.

However, parents are starting to lose their minds.

And what I don't understand is how anything is going to be different in September from how it is now in terms of distancing requirements. So that 4-6 months starts turning into more like a year.

Of course none of this would matter so much if we'd locked down harder and earlier to get the R0 number down and had a robust tracking/isolating regime in place.

The size of the anticipated recession on its own would be enough to finish off most governments, if the worst really does come to pass and they are still able to survive then there is basically nothing that could finish them off, it would comprehensively disprove the line about governments losing elections rather than oppositions winning them. Of course it would help if Labour wasn't in an 80-seat hole but given the extent of the upheaval I'm not sure that will even matter, we're in uncharted territory here.

In the end it's probably not the death toll that's the biggest danger for them, it's the ostensible return to normality being profoundly unsatisfying for millions of people and grinding on like that for years. Or that things genuinely do recover and start booming again and the enough of country feels comfortable enough to roll the dice on a new government - but there are major structural issues getting in the way of that so I think it's unlikely.

Of course none of this would matter so much if we'd locked down harder and earlier to get the R0 number down and had a robust tracking/isolating regime in place.

Checking in with colleagues in China feels like opening a wormhole to an alternate universe atm.

Fascinated to see how long it'll be between pulling Little Britain and next having Melanie Phillips on the Moral Maze / Question Time / Any Questions. Will we make it a week?

Farage was on Good Morning Britain the other day to say black lives matter less than property damage so that Piers Morgan could continue trying to make himself look good.

Newnight was good on the schools stuff last night. Lewis G saying there can be real damage to the poorest kids in particular:

To contextualise how catastrophic six months off school could be for Britain’s poorest children, remember this: it’s estimated that the summer holidays (only six weeks) puts the poorest kids back five weeks in attainment-five weeks where they were when the summer holidays start.

— Lewis Goodall (@lewis_goodall) June 9, 2020

i think it's true that the impact is disproportionately on the poorest kids but again, it makes schools a panacea for problems they're not designed to fix and a school-centric view of the problem allows some people to ignore the broader social issues

They provide the function of childcare, soup kitchen, social worker and a million other things on top of education. I'm not sure what you mean by "designed to fix" but in my experience they've adapted and evolved to be all kinds of social safety net.
Of course many are not resourced or trained to deal with every explicit need but maybe a properly funded school centric approach to managing societal problems for children isn't the worst model.

Feel like I've seen a lot of middle class parents being interviewed on tears, the pain, the laughter that accompany home schooling but absolutely no coverage of those household where home schooling, for various reasons, is just not happening.

I only have one child still at school and she's fairly self motivated and old enough to manage most of her own work but it's still a struggle for us as I'm working full time at home and my wife has to go out to work. I can't imagine how hard it is for people who are much worse off with 2 or 3 younger kids and no access to their usual carers, the grandparents

personally I'd title the next thread: one thing is clear: the Tories must stop this and they must stop now

what about "We're putting this government on notice" ?

"a responsible Opposition is constructive with the Government"

We need to set up should strongly consider setting up a committee to report on when the next thread should be, and look at our options then.