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

Letting ostensibly revenue-generating, economy-boosting, small-town-saving universities go under due to a temporary cash flow issue would be remarkable, even for this government. Given the profile of the universities likely to go under first, i'm not even sure it makes sense to see it as a culture-war attack on 'academia'. There's a real possibility that they don't think those students are going to be back for years and have decided that propping things up until then isn't going to work.

Yeah I think that's what I mean about theatres, it's not so much culture war as ignorant penny-pinching disdain

Jesus Christ:

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/revealed-uk-home-office-paid-80000-to-a-lobby-group-which-has-funded-conservative-mps/

The Henry Jackson Society (HJS), a London-based neoconservative pressure group, received £83,452.32 from the Home Office in four payments during 2015-17 to produce a report on UK connections to Islamist terrorism.

Ignore the trifling sums of money, getting the HJS to write security reports should be the real scandal.

Seems weird in a post-racist society like the UK

It's not just economy boosting, taking a university out of a medium-sized town or small city would have a massive impact and would kill some of them stone dead.

Like I know that's not what you're joking about bg but I've been quietly seething at this pretence that "the Arts" is some elitist irrelevance instead of the massive cross-class joy it really is for millions of people

no, you're absolutely right, the thought that life could trundle on as normal if live music or theatre or local radio or writing groups or art therapy or any one of hundreds of things that falls under the banner of 'the arts' went away and never came back is... insane

UPDATE: France has approved pay rises worth €8bn for health workers, with @EmmanuelMacron praising their role in fighting #coronavirus

The deal was signed with trade unions on Monday after weeks of negotiations, and will see wages rise by €183 a month on average

— Darren McCaffrey (@DarrenEuronews) July 14, 2020

wow!

meanwhile, in the uk, nhs staff are back to paying for their own parking

*clap clap clap*

new reasons keep piling up for potential recruits from overseas to look elsewhere for employment

400 staff are going at the NT.

https://tribunemag.co.uk/2020/07/the-governments-bailout-wont-save-the-arts

Very good, detailed look at the casualised staff that run the place and will now be 'restructured'

my own fault for probably tuning out a lot of covid new reports but this came as a bit of a shock to me

Hancock said the death rate of sales assistants and cashiers is 75% higher among men and 60% higher among women than in the general population. “As we restore shopping so we must keep our shopkeepers safe,” he said.

have the numbers for other jobs, outside of nhs/carers, which have continued during lockdown been reported somewhere? mechanics, plumbers, retail warehouse workers etc

Yes, security guards was another high risk occupation.

The other thing about Rachel Reeves is she's got a horrible voice, bring back Barry Gardiner!

― The Fields o' Fat Henry (Tom D.), Sunday, 12 July 2020 22:03 (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

lol @ yr enduring love for gardiner's sexxxy voice

lololol Cummings' "nudge unit" has said the government has no credibility left because of you-know-what and people won't listen to them on masks:
https://inews.co.uk/news/politics/government-coronavirus-messaging-no-longer-effective-538820

Me sowing: Haha fuck yeah!!! Yes!!

Me reaping: Well this fucking sucks. What the fuck.

— The Golden Sir (@screaminbutcalm) March 12, 2019

are there really grown adults who fear that wearing a mask is an affront to their masculinity or are the media just fucking with me?

Fogs up yer specs.

oh i know that, luckily i'm not short-sighted enough that i can't just leave my glasses off when i'm wearing a mask

i get laziness, i get right wing brain worms, but the macho thing must be made-up for phone-in responses or something

I think the backlash is exclusively from ppl knee deep into the culture war who view masks as part of the idpol 5g Rothschild BLM conspiracy to take away blackface and are distraught at are Boris caving in to that; masculinity is somewhere in the mix there but not a straightforward justification.

This also makes me hope the amount of ppl thinking that is relatively small tho I think plenty of others will go along with it just because of laziness and "hey my mate said".

xposts

There are plenty of people who will just do the opposite of what they're told as a matter of principle. It's not even a macho thing it's more of a master-of-my-own-destiny thing.

I do wonder if bored journos looking to stir up a bit of drama contribute to the dumbassery

No doubt.

It's all bollocks really, the vast majority of people in this country don't want to either catch or spread the rona and just want it over with, they'll wear the masks. They would also, I suspect, quite like to be let into shops in the first place.

I'm sure Toby Young or Brendan O'Neill has done an opinion on it but how many people do these guys represent really?

https://www.itv.com/news/2020-07-15/positive-news-is-coming-on-oxford-covid-19-vaccine-writes-robert-peston

I think Bobby P might be overinflating the balloon a little here but I hope not.

Desmond Swayne is correct, and I won't be spending any money in any shop that has mandatory face masks. If the government think this is going to encourage people to shop they're wrong. It will have the opposite effect. pic.twitter.com/uTUs7IyIxa

— 🇬🇧 Centaur_UK 🇬🇧 (@Centaur_UK) July 14, 2020

Lol, I'm literally waiting for compulsory mask wearing to be in effect before I visit any shop that isn't absolutely necessary. That said I haven't missed any shops or really any aspect of the capitalist dream and maybe I should go live off grid in a yurt in the Andalusian countryside.

Swayne Flu.

https://i.ibb.co/c3FNdVf/Capture3.jpg

christ, is brendan o'neill launching his own range of beanies?

welp!

Apparently washing your glasses in soapy water before putting your mask on stops them fogging up

It's called breath control breath control breath control stylee!

Yeah I mean I haven't been in any kind of shop since the start of April but we have good delivery options here. The few weeks before that the whole process of shopping was physically anxiety inducing and I don't miss it as an experience at all.

The one thing I do miss is the ability or go to someone's house but there's no economic benefit to that so the government is quite happy to let the science to the talking.

There are plenty of people who will just do the opposite of what they're told as a matter of principle. It's not even a macho thing it's more of a master-of-my-own-destiny thing.

Its somewhat in line with seatbelts and motorbike helmets

I'm sure Toby Young or Brendan O'Neill has done an opinion on it but how many people do these guys represent really?

This is really worth remembering, their job isn't to reflect or represent any particular constituency, they are there to provoke reactions (and to disrupt the cozy homogeneity that has crept into the marketplace of ideas and is pushing free thinkers onto the sidelines)

I have been going to nearby shops the whole time (gloves and mask on) and I don’t Deliveroo or order online because I feel like I’d be allowing a certain class of worker to carry risk for me. Since we’ve been allowed to ‘bubble’ I go to one neighbour friend’s house because she also lives alone and that’s fine.

There are plenty of people who will just do the opposite of what they're told as a matter of principle. It's not even a macho thing it's more of a master-of-my-own-destiny thing.

There's hardly any of them too.

The one thing I do miss is the ability or go to someone's house but there's no economic benefit to that so the government is quite happy to let the science to the talking.

TBF going to someone’s house generally involves being indoors with them for several hours, without a mask. Shops might be half an hour tops. There’s a difference there.

I don’t Deliveroo or order online because I feel like I’d be allowing a certain class of worker to carry risk for me

this is tricky cos if everyone piles into the shops then that also carries a risk. and all the background warehousing and distribution stuff is going on whichever path you take. definitely important to think about this stuff though. don't know what the answer is - maybe do as big a load of shopping as possible at any one time and maybe that will cut down the number of potentially hazardous interactions?

Much more into people that want to get back to office discourse. Which is having its own moment (and something we talked to on here yesterday).

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2020/jul/14/end-of-the-office-the-quiet-grinding-loneliness-of-working-from-home

This report does actually cover quite a few sides of the issue. From the lack of space at many home to perhaps greater invasion of privacy from new apps attached to work computers.

(The people who talk about how much they like the office is a thing, but I assume that's younger people who have just started working...I find that one weird but I'm old)

I was the only person wearing a mask in small local food shop yesterday (the owners were doing it during the first weeks of lockdown only) but tbh have been very slack when it comes to mask-wearing in small places I'm in and out of within a few minutes.

Where I live (WC1) the shops are queue-free for the most part - maybe five people waiting, tops, on a Saturday - so I don’t feel uneasy about popping in for milk and Interesting Reductions a couple of times each week, or buying replacement items from eg. Superdrug in person. I get the bulk of my food from my local veg stand or the farmer’s market and the latter has very short supply chains.

Yeah I think being physically in the shop might be more dangerous for workers, our supermarket delivery drivers have just been leaving things outside the door, knocking and moving to a safe distance before we open. It's not risk free, particularly I suspect at the pick-up points, but it's probably safer than being in a space with hundreds of people going in and out every day. Otherwise we have a butchers and a fishmonger and a bakery nearby who club together and send someone round on a bike with a basket on the front to leave stuff in front of your building, which the most middle class thing I've ever seen but it works pretty well in this scenario.

I wouldn't use Deliveroo or any other rent-a-slave start-up even in a pandemic.

Meals I've ordered from one company that isn't Deliveroo is actually turning up from people with Deliveroo-branded bags as if there has been some sort of loosening up of things and more and more people have signed up with multiple operators, regardless of which one you actually order the food from. Might've been a thing before the pandemic but didn't notice until recently.

I have never used Deliveroo or Uber and obvs won’t be starting now.

'He’s like a political Roy Cropper' – What Conservative MPs make of Keir Starmer’s first 100 days

I've spoken to members of the government and Conservative MPs to get their verdict on the new Labour leader so far:https://t.co/i8CtuksCLR

— Katy Balls (@katyballs) July 14, 2020

Labour source gets in touch to point out that Roy Cropper (played by David Neilson) actually had a winning streak - won best actor at the 2013 soap awards 🥇

— Katy Balls (@katyballs) July 15, 2020

^the kind of rapid-reaction response so sorely missing from the Corbyn years.

I don't think there'll be that many people kicking off about wearing masks as long as they're freely available and inexpensive. The right-wing reaction seems like an attempt to jump on to the coattails of what's happening in the US.

oh that has made my day!

RAPID RESPONSE TEAM! wow team labour should be 20 pts ahead with that kind of setup!

Yeah it's an import from the US. There will probably be the odd video or two of someone getting kicked out of a supermarket for not wearing one but that'll die pretty quickly, I reckon xxp