ForenSix Opposition - Politics in the Soon To Be Former UK in Autumn 2020

173 Labour peers abstained on a division to block 'up to 55,000 evictions'.

The Tories won the division by 140 votes.

— Craig Hackney Cub (@CraigHackneyCub) October 5, 2020

maybe time to ditch that spider brooch lads

it makes me laugh when Tory PM's sulkily threaten to flood the Lords with Tories when the odd bill gets voted down.. perish the thought.

I can't really take "Give £5m to Lawrence Fox for the Anti-Woke party" seriously at all, the sinister scheme is that people have more fucking money than sense.

Cant wait to see the video they spend some of that five mill on. A dramatic reconstruction of the true story of the bloke who got arrested for being white!

People finding money to fling at right-wing pressure group style startup parties when there is already a right-wing govt that doesn't need any pressing and doesn't even have a meaningful opposition. Just sing when you are winning sometimes ffs!

Football management 101. You strengthen from a position of power.
There's a really opportunity there to drag the whole spectrum of UK politics even further right.

claz: "he isn't an overt fascist like Plug from the bash street kids"

took me a while to unravel this apparent hate-filled defamation of a beloved cartoon character but that's bcz i was laughing too much at the realisation that leo baxendale drew a hypnotically ugly schoolboy and just laconically christened him "plug" (for some reason the joke hadn't landed any time in my first six decades)

yr new name is claz btw

#Coronavirus: @RishiSunak suggests musicians and others in arts should retrain and find other jobs https://t.co/6Y9xMaxl1I

— ITV News Politics (@ITVNewsPolitics) October 6, 2020

There's a really opportunity there to drag the whole spectrum of UK politics even further right.

Trying to formalise this into a political party headed by a lunatic doesn't seem like an obvious strategy when the same views are represented across the press, the BBC, social media, etc, by Spiked and Guido alumni, tbh. It's not going to be a serious electoral threat. Is Fox going to get more airtime, or use it more effectively, than Harwood, O'Neil, Whelan, Westley, etc?

Given the people behind it, possibly. I agree they've backed the wrong horse/fox but there's a gap for disgruntled gammons who don't have a brexit to fight for and don't want to appear full on Tommy Robinson.
Both UKIP and the Brexit party were successful in influencing the mainstream agenda without any significant parliamentary success.

This could have the same impact as there's still France/Germany to hate and still little boats full of scary brown people crossing the channel. Not to mention the recent embracing of a whole bunch of US right inspired garbage.

Weird how he doesn't say this to residential & commercial landlords. https://t.co/gWoU2aLBi5

— Ally Fogg (@AllyFogg) October 6, 2020

Plug got his own comic which I bought. It was supposedly an edgier Beano, it felt that way at the time.

plug-ugly (n.): "city ruffian, one of a gang who assaulted people and property in mid-19th century American cities," 1856, originally in Baltimore, from plug (n.), the American English slang name for the tall, silk stovepipe hats then popular among young men, + ugly. Sometimes as the name of a specific gang, but often generic

kickstarter for a scorsese movie abt the edgiest bash street kid

"edgy" in this sense was basically a bit wackier, a bit ruder, kind of precursor to Oink! i guess

https://comicvine1.cbsistatic.com/uploads/scale_small/11135/111350878/6407565-plug%2048%20-%20august%2019th%201978%20-%20cover.jpg

also more darts

also i think i joined the Plug Club

claz warfare

Too much bashing not enough substance? @BorisJohnson just called @keir_starmer “Captain Hindsight”.

Anyone got any better nicknames for the Leader of the Opposition? #Peston

Comment below 👇

— Peston (@itvpeston) October 6, 2020

Calz, Peston finally has a thread for you.

oh god thanks for reminding me of Oink. I had the issue with the Oink Rap on flexidisk ( which iirc was basically The Message with lyrics about not eating bacon)

oink! did brexit

Oink! would totally have a Keith Stammer strip

just to return to our elected representatives' love of war crimes and spooks for a minute, it's nice to see the bold leftists of the SNP and the Greens taking a stand

These are the MPs who voted against the Covert Human Intelligence Sources bill. That's total MPs - the SNP, Lib Dems, Plaid and Greens all abstained too. pic.twitter.com/czPuv2u4uj

— How Upsetting (@HowUpsetting) October 6, 2020

absolutely fucking dismal

love to live in a country where we empower and encourage our brave boys to commit war crimes

Trying to formalise this into a political party headed by a lunatic doesn't seem like an obvious strategy when the same views are represented across the press, the BBC, social media, etc, by Spiked and Guido alumni, tbh. It's not going to be a serious electoral threat. Is Fox going to get more airtime, or use it more effectively, than Harwood, O'Neil, Whelan, Westley, etc?

He's more media friendly than any of those people so I can only presume the point is to get him as much airtime as possible, hope for a temporary poll surge that would justify even more airtime (as the leader of an after all legitimate political party enjoying a bounce in the polls) and use his deranged ravings to make everyone else look more reasonable, or to hope to drag the Tories in a similar but more respectable-looking direction.

i think a few million quid to keep pushing the political narrative towards actual fascism isn't a big deal to wealthy fascists

talk of Oink reminded me of that truly awful 90's comic from Huddersfield called Zit. My brother bumped into some of the Zit editorial team and artistes in a pub once and said they were typical bigoted Yorkshire bores like some unfunnier UKIP version of the Grumbleweeds (well I added that bit 30 years later!)

Plug was obviously modelled on Himmler. A high ranking nazi who had lost out to him was once quoted as saying something like: I wouldn't keep banging on about ideal Aryan genetics and stuff if I looked like him.

Uncle Pigg, whose staff were known as the Plops (apparently, sentient mounds of faeces) and who had an ongoing battle with conservative critic Mary Lighthouse (an obvious parody of Mary Whitehouse) (usually written by Mark Rodgers, artwork by Ian Jackson)

this actually sounds hilarious on paper but I can't remember much about Oink other than thinking it was bad, probably because my older brother would rave about any old shit with Brooker involved and I've spent my life shunning anything with even the most tenuous Brooker connection and this has served me well.

I think my brother's equivalent of Ilx.com was the cook'd & bombd forum, so I always shunned that as well

Charlie Brooker was only very slightly involved with Oink!, and mostly towards the end.
It was hit and miss, but it was a big part of my childhood.

I have some friends who were mad into cook'd and bombd, like a lot of things (including ILX) the social aspect takes over after a while.

the artistic rep of Chris Morris was sky high back then. He was Bunuel/Kenny Everett/The Goons rolled into one or something. Now he seems like a stale fart at a Hampstead dinner party.

Peston does not seem to be pretending to be a serious journalist now.

Actively encouraging members of the public to come up with derogatory nicknames for MPs is something I have never seen from a supposedly mainstream and respectable journalist in the UK.

I expect him to talk garbage, but I'm still a bit surprised by this.

it's an improvement on last week when he was jovially encouraging the banning of teaching/reading materials in schools

just to return to our elected representatives' love of war crimes and spooks for a minute, it's nice to see the bold leftists of the SNP and the Greens taking a stand

Fair play to the two from Plaid Cymru tho.

or to hope to drag the Tories in a similar but more respectable-looking direction.

Do they really need any help with this? I know it can always get worse but the days of Cameron's pretense at being socially liberal are far gone, govt pretty open and gleeful in these matters. And unlike with the EU there isn't really an economic downside...

UK political journalism explained in 3 images: pic.twitter.com/V6lZG8GH5G

— Spooky 'Client Journalism' Expert (@ClientJournoExp) October 6, 2020

The UK has recorded 76 more deaths. This is also a big increase on yesterday’s total (19). It takes the headline UK total to 42,445. But this figure only covers people who died within 28 days of testing positive. If you include all deaths where coronavirus was confirmed or suspected, the true UK death toll is currently 58,101. (See 10.04am.)

Yesterday's total was a Monday so that might have something to do with that jump, it was nowhere near as low as 19 for most of last week.

I expect we'll be at >100 daily deaths this month. Fuck knows what BJ's idea of 'bumpy' is.

― here we go, ten in a rona (onimo), Sunday, 4 October 2020 19:25 (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

I said this month not this week ffs

I hadn’t seen quite how wide the gap has grown between the cities. London is at 60 cases for every 100k people, Glasgow is at 160 and Manchester is nearer 600 on today’s numbers.

I think Manchester is possibly the result of the insane %age of students in the city, themselves and infecting others. Glasgow very high for students too, same for Sheffield. My hunch is that the levels of infection are actually not that different across most of the urbanised UK, we just don't know it yet.

(but that's they'll be showing in cities with very high uni populations for now)

Kieth's whole PMQs steez is like everybody's least favourite line manager at your quarterly review

ever since I had a complete mental breakdown and joined the Conservative party I think he's a brilliant Labour leader and the greatest orator since Bye Nevin!

My hunch is that the levels of infection are actually not that different across most of the urbanised UK, we just don't know it yet.

I doubt this a little bit, in that some places (eg London) had the virus spreading unseen in high concentration throughout a lot of February and then absolutely raging throughout March, so levels of immunity might be higher, slowing the spread now. But more importantly it was also a lot further along the curve by the time lockdown was eased than several northern and Midlands cities where restrictions were just relaxed too quickly - lockdown ended at more or less the right time for London but not for, say, Blackburn, there was just a lot more virus around in the latter group and it's come back faster as a result.

The university thing is a slightly different issue but it's obviously exacerbating the situation hugely in areas that were experiencing big outbreaks even before the students went back (like Manchester). But it's going to get worse virtually everywhere.

BREAKING: The U.K. government will pull out of Brexit trade negotiations with the European Union next week if there is no clear deal in sight https://t.co/TYgfLOyz0l

— Bloomberg Brexit (@Brexit) October 7, 2020

https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.full-stop.net%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2014%2F01%2Flolnothingmatters.gif&f=1&nofb=1

b-b-b-b-b-but

it's the freedom that gets you

'i'll give you 20 for that watch'

'no'

'15?'