bojo is king, brexit is on, stuff is fvcked, tomorrow starts here -- new govt new thread new battle

mark s arises after slumber and starts a new thread as requested

shake your chains to earth like dew
which in sleep had fallen on you
we are many -- they are few

^^^this may feel wildly wrong right now but it's still the correct baseline

I should have gone to bed like you!

anvil
Posted: 13 December 2019 at 10:26:57
The age breakdown of voters really gives the best indication of how 2024 might be. Though landscape in 2024 is of course likely to be substantially different


Where are you seeing this?

lol we're all gonna die

I feel it's worth noting that the only Northern seat I could find where Tory vote share decreased and the Brexit Party was the nearest challenger was one where the Tory candidate was called Iftikhar Ahmed. Though obviously you all understand the dynamics by now - a white working-class radicalised into a zero-sum culture war. It was still striking

Though landscape in 2024 is of course likely to be substantially different

yeah that'll be because of the widespread flooding caused by climate change

Climate change is good because it only affects Labour constituencies iirc.

Hate to think what the starting point for trying to make the country more egalitarian would be by 2024.
So could do with a working opposition and hoping its not going to fracture like the Labour party did in the immediate aftermath of the original Brexit vote.
Really am hoping that the Boris lead Tories are enough of a monolithically bad thing to catalyse a lot more grassroots level organisation.
Also wondering if there is anything that would prevent the new term from lasting 5 years.

c&ping from the other thread to avoid the wrath of mark s

I don't think anyone on here is denying the real implications Daniel, it's not so much lols either. It's more that a lot of people are thinking "a big majority of the people voted for their own people to suffer."

Well yeah, they did, and it's fair to be angry at that, but it's also true that there are few European countries that haven't recently had considerable portions of their populace vote for things that are worth getting angry over. And on another level, while I understand that in practical terms you have to use shorthand to talk about countries in these terms and it's not a judgement on everyone who lives there, it still always makes me uncomfortable as soon as someone suggests an entire country can be dismissed or made to pay for its mistakes. It's the first step towards very ugly things.

I know I'm perhaps overanalysing off the cuff remarks here but if there's one day I can forgive myself for being oversensitive I feel like today is surely it.

We're all gonna die.

― Matt DC, Friday, December 13, 2019 10:57 AM (one minute ago)

Best possible conclusion to the previous thread.

(Emphasis on 'all'.)

if there's one day I can forgive myself for being oversensitive I feel like today is surely it.

I certainly don't blame you!

This is a bit of a tangent, but how did you feel about the US when you found out that Trump got elected?

The most likely thing that would end the government prematurely is probably Scotland voting Yes to independence in a referendum organised without Johnson's consent. It'll probably happen.

if it does, we can look forward to the apparatus of the state being used to violently repress it, i guess

Boris won't last 5 years, I'd put money on it.

Ok, go on..

Obligatory:

Congratulations to Boris Johnson on his great WIN! Britain and the United States will now be free to strike a massive new Trade Deal after BREXIT. This deal has the potential to be far bigger and more lucrative than any deal that could be made with the E.U. Celebrate Boris!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 13, 2019

i wonder what odds william hill would give me on him being assassinated by a rejuvenated ira xp

Loyalists are more likely.

Don't know if it's already been discussed, but here is one Graun postmortem of many:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/dec/13/five-reasons-why-labour-lost-the-election

solidly dispiriting #content in this thread

I was talking to a guy on the doorstep in a really nice part of town. He was against but up for a chat. We spoke about all the things he cared about: mainly the environment, about the future. He didn't know anything about the Green New Deal but seemed interested. But then.

— Senior Tory Source (@Mc_Heckin_Duff) December 13, 2019

Turnout listed as 67.3% - down 1.6 on 2017 - not a big deal in the grand scheme of things especially for a short notice election in December but ffs

Former Ulster Unionist Party leader Mike Nesbitt in a BBC interview tonight-
"The great irony of all of this is that for decades unionists have looked over their shoulders and decided that Irish nationalists were the great threat...but actually it’s English nationalism"

— Siobhán Fenton (@SiobhanFenton) December 13, 2019

Mike Nesbitt has just said the biggest threat to Union is English Nationalism If they weren’t prepared to pay £89 billion into EU. they may now look at the six counties and decide they are not value for money and cut them loose

— J_J@52 (@J_J52) December 13, 2019

Saw so many reports of queues at polling stations, and anecdotes about them seeming busier than usual, that a bigger turnout seemed probable.

I'd love to know a demographic breakdown of who didn't vote.

Re: that Senior Tory Source Twitter thread:

Blair did it and it didn't work and everyone called him an SJW liberal anyway. It doesn't work. Not doing it doesn't work. People want the hardest racism they can get.

This is where we're at right now, almost everywhere in the world, and it's bound to get far worse before it gets any better. Yes, it's depressing as fuck and I'm more than a little terrified by what awaits us all.

handy off-the-cuff 7-part breakdown of ways forward* (sadly all bad but it is analysis and we have to start somewhere):

*local ways forward but actually (per pom) ways foward genuinely have to be global now

Ok in the knowledge that it is is way too early, my thoughts on what next. Here are some options...

— Dan Davies (@dsquareddigest) December 13, 2019

it's not labour or europe that drove our economy off a cliff, it was bankers selling derivatives. the response? slash funding to councils and appoint a deutsche bank managing director as chancellor of the exchequer

brb just going to drink myself to death

This is a bit of a tangent, but how did you feel about the US when you found out that Trump got elected?

Well, sad for my friends who live there and terrified because of what it was going to do to the world at large? Plenty angry too, but "well fuck 'em" isn't even an option when you're talking global superpowers innit.

Scotland voting Yes to independence in a referendum organised without Johnson's consent.

Is this actually possible? I guess with the amount of overturning norms corrent legal procedure is no longer as much of an issue...

Former Ulster Unionist Party leader Mike Nesbitt in a BBC interview tonight-
"The great irony of all of this is that for decades unionists have looked over their shoulders and decided that Irish nationalists were the great threat...but actually it’s English nationalism"

How about reading about 1798 instead of sticking 1690 on your banners, you morons?

This is where we're at right now, almost everywhere in the world, and it's bound to get far worse before it gets any better. Yes, it's depressing as fuck and I'm more than a little terrified by what awaits us all.

untold millions of people who don't look like boris johnson are going to be displaced by climate change in the coming decades and they're going to be desperately seeking refuge in less-ravaged nations around the world - i don't see that lending itself to a more inclusive worldview in places like the uk without an unprecedented effort to address racism

Is this actually possible?

it happened in catalonia! it did not go well :(

Are there any stats on the vote breakdown?

Good luck joining the EU without a consensual referendum. Tories might be happy to cut Scotland loose for a guaranteed majority forever

Though

Feel like SNP fucked Labour getting a majority anyway

And on the "different context" point, I prefer to just use the numbers because everyone can make their own context adjustments. If you spot Brown the recession, at the very least you have to spot Corbyn and Miliband the rise of the SNP.

— Dan Davies (@dsquareddigest) December 13, 2019

5L callers keep saying this a.m. that they couldn't vote for corbyn because of 'his baggage' and 'the people around him', that he gave 'too much ammunition to the right wing press' - all from a kind of meta level that OTHER people would be put off. i guess this is the 'electability' mentality. nobody actually talked about what they themselves didn't like about him.

the electability narrative is such infuriating bullshit

Absolutely irate caller on 5L, just livid - can't believe he's got a Tory MP in County Durham.

'If you want Brexit, you vote Conservative, and that's what we've got. .... Why didn't you vote Labour? And if Corbyn was no good we could have just got rid of him? That's what the Tories have done the last four years! Just put in a Labour government and if Corbyn's no good get rid of him!'

absolutely irate caller on 5l otm

Tories got just a little under 300,000 more votes this time than in 2017

While Labour lost around 2.6M votes

What a staggeringly shit system

Feel like SNP fucked Labour getting a majority anyway

Post the Independence Referendum the Labour Party now has the handicap of being down upwards of 40 seats in General Elections.

Absolutely empirical proof exists that the Tories are better at committing regicide than Labour.

It's like dragging a ball and chain about.

(xp)

thank you david, very cool!

Betrayal is the cry of the Left against Labour in govt. Now we have seen the truth: Betrayal is when an in-credible, sectarian Labour opposition fails to provide a viable alternative to a distrusted Tory party. They get rumbled. The Tories win. The country loses. https://t.co/IlHhescGYF

— David Miliband (@DMiliband) December 13, 2019

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ELqLYbmWkAMqQz4?format=png&name=large

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ELqLvMYXkAAf9YJ?format=png&name=large

johnson's slogan: get brexit done
sky's strapline: the brexit election
every centrist melt: whyyyy don't you back remain

same melts on 13 dec: ACTUALLY it wasn't really about brexit

great to see the politics of aspiration breaking through to the most deprived areas in the country, looking forward to local people bootstrapping their way to prosperity through enthusiastic entrepreneurship

(kill me)

Gary Younge is typically clear headed here:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/13/labour-why-lost-jeremy-corbyn-brexit-media?

was just about to post that - excellent piece

Benidorm + Coronavirus = Managerial mayhem!

As Spain becomes the fourth most infected nation in the world… Some Brits are doing their best to avoid virus precautions and carry on with their holiday as normal. pic.twitter.com/9r79Iz3LjZ

— RT UK (@RTUKnews) March 16, 2020

great bunch of lads (but not one bit worse than some of the twats i know who spent the weekend on a skiing holiday in the alps)

Requisiotining property is Bolshevism. Corbyn is a wannabe Lenin

Today:

and all of the sudden Housing for All was possible... https://t.co/NwS4AEdOtb

— gal debored (@__acadame) March 15, 2020

great bunch of lads (but not one bit worse than some of the twats i know who spent the weekend on a skiing holiday in the alps)

― ymo sumac (NickB), Monday, 16 March 2020 20:51 bookmarkflaglink

these fucking people. bloke i know tried to go skiing in the alps at the weekend and even his wife thought he was being a dickhead. he got there, tried to go to the skiing village straight away, got a call from the hotel saying he had 15 minutes to get out of there before they closed the village, had to go back through a roadblock, and then drive back via germany. one of our lawyers at work tried to go to chamonix and the flight got turned back just six minutes from landing. bellend.

Never have I wanted to see a police baton charge more than in that video

attn music fans:

Fucking awesome. You can watch live gigs from @Cafeoto, right here, right now. Crystabel Riley/Seymour Wright/Ute Kanngiesser nphttps://t.co/eDcRjbkJ8u

— derek walmsley (@derekwalmsley) March 16, 2020

From an old friend in Berlin, something to lighten the tone

Hamsterkäufe

USA: Medikamente und Waffen

Italien: Zigaretten und Grappa

Frankreich: Kondome und Rotwein

Holland: Haschisch und Käse

Schottland: Whisky

Deutschland: Klopapier und Mehl

Ich bin im falschen Land!!

Government update re pre-exsiting medical conditions and social distancing

We are advising those who are at increased risk of severe illness from coronavirus (COVID-19) to be particularly stringent in following social distancing measures.

This group includes those who are:

aged 70 or older (regardless of medical conditions)
under 70 with an underlying health condition listed below (ie anyone instructed to get a flu jab as an adult each year on medical grounds):
chronic (long-term) respiratory diseases, such as asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), emphysema or bronchitis
chronic heart disease, such as heart failure
chronic kidney disease
chronic liver disease, such as hepatitis
chronic neurological conditions, such as Parkinson’s disease, motor neurone disease, multiple sclerosis (MS), a learning disability or cerebral palsy
diabetes
problems with your spleen – for example, sickle cell disease or if you have had your spleen removed
a weakened immune system as the result of conditions such as HIV and AIDS, or medicines such as steroid tablets or chemotherapy
being seriously overweight (a BMI of 40 or above)
those who are pregnant

Note: there are some clinical conditions which put people at even higher risk of severe illness from COVID-19. If you are in this category, next week the NHS in England will directly contact you with advice the more stringent measures you should take in order to keep yourself and others safe. For now, you should rigorously follow the social distancing advice in full, outlined below.

People falling into this group are those who may be at particular risk due to complex health problems such as:

People who have received an organ transplant and remain on ongoing immunosuppression medication
People with cancer who are undergoing active chemotherapy or radiotherapy
People with cancers of the blood or bone marrow such as leukaemia who are at any stage of treatment
People with severe chest conditions such as cystic fibrosis or severe asthma (requiring hospital admissions or courses of steroid tablets)
People with severe diseases of body systems, such as severe kidney disease (dialysis)

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/covid-19-guidance-on-social-distancing-and-for-vulnerable-people/guidance-on-social-distancing-for-everyone-in-the-uk-and-protecting-older-people-and-vulnerable-adults

The student case in St. Andrews brought it back from skiing in Switzerland.

You had a budget last week.

From @bbclaurak: It’s expected that the government will announce significant additional financial measures tomorrow to help support the economy during the corona virus crisis.

The Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, is likely to appear at the daily Downing Street press briefing.

— Chris Mason (@ChrisMasonBBC) March 16, 2020

to help support the economy, which is different to supporting people

Thanks for that cafe Oto thing it just sparked an thought. I’m sitting in my local cafe chatting to Tina who makes the weekday coffees. She’s a drummer wondering how she’s going to make rent now all her gigs have dried up. We now cooking up an idea about how we can use the cafe space to livestream gigs and pass the (virtual) hat around.

NV - yup. Putting it down as the kind of thing Tories can't communicate, but given what I am seeing elsewhere they better do a substantial amount for actual ppl.

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/cbe10532a983c95c91672190e573076292b7a3bc/0_0_1170_780/master/1170.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/Th6Efvx.jpg

they seem to have missed off the 'send your kids to school column'?

'advised'... is not that strong. even 'strongly advised' is going to have people still travelling into work and not wfh. also what does 'vary commute' mean

Ed - good luck with your plans, hope you pull it off!

Yup. Seen a couple of livestreaming ideas around

'vary commute' just sounds like advice for bank managers who don't want to be taken hostage

source is stan collymore but

Confirmed French Republic policy.

☑️Total #lockdown/ #SocialDistancing
☑️Rents/Utility bills suspended
☑️No business at risk of bankruptcy
☑️No French Citizen will be without resources
☑️Tax/Social contribution postponed
☑️Solidarity fund by State for Unemployed

— Stan Collymore (@StanCollymore) March 16, 2020

Those are all things Macron said in his speech tonight.

that's great news then, hope that package is as good as it sounds

Stan Collymore tweets and Macron is good, might as well go out on a fucking suicidal banister licking run Nick ffs!

yes, thanks for the Cafe Oto link. hope they're doing this for future gigs too, there was something I was interested in and lamented my inability to get to even before all this plague business...

that's a pretty sweet list from Macron there if any of it actually comes to pass, in contrast to Johnson's "everyone should stop going to pubs, but we're not going to tell pubs to close, because then they could claim on their insurance, and my donors wouldn't like that"

they're going to need to do the same in the UK soon. some seriously choppy economic weather and immiseration coming if not

let's remember to heartily fucking congratulate Johnson when he does compromise as well, and forget everything else he represents.

so against every single impulse in johnson's body, it would be fucking hilarious if he was forced to approve that (if we weren't currently powerboating up shit creek)

God I wish we were in the world where labour got in and had by now instituted emergency measures to house the homeless and stop evictions, freeze mortgages &c and the emma kennedy piss diamonds were screaming at them about it

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/sph/ide/gida-fellowships/Imperial-College-COVID19-NPI-modelling-16-03-2020.pdf

This is the modelling paper. It's a good and pretty clear read, but it's bloody sobering. You can absolutely see why they started with trying to mitigate the epidemic (have a small manageable spike) because the alternative we're looking at is, at best, up to 2 years of this sort of suppression. But, the paper says, with the latest data the death count is just too high under the mitigation strategy (250k+)

I'm not sure I can imagine what the next year or two look like with this level of suppression, though. And if it doesn't hold, the paper suggests we risk a larger epidemic than we would have had in the first place.

We really need either to actually build those 40 hospitals we were promised and/or a good treatment to be found.

Macron is simultaneously better and worse than he seems. Keep in mind that the French centre-right would scan as socialist to most ‘Muricans (and many Britons).

when you start playing that silly bugger relativism game Theresa May is more of a socialist than Trump etc..

just because we are going through a global crisis right now I'm not going to start forgetting who the fucking scum of the earth are.

https://t.co/iCqOK1NgA9 pic.twitter.com/eTXUi0ghQg

— ryan 🚩 (@ryxnf) March 16, 2020

Now *that* is some mighty big spin. https://t.co/vm7GTxfnMG

— James Meadway (@meadwaj) March 17, 2020

When this is all over, remember how landlords behaved - and let's build a society without them. pic.twitter.com/SOhb2RSfy0

— Gordon Maloney (@gordonmaloney) March 17, 2020

If we are doing tweets have we done this?

Tweeted my MP @Pauline_Latham about abysmal level of the statutory sick pay that families are going to be forced to live on if they get ill (if they’re lucky). Her reply?

“Get a life.”

This is my MP who will NOT have to live on £94 a week if she gets ill. pic.twitter.com/RpdVBdfLu5

— MHughes #Environment #Wildlife #RSPB (@ML1Hughes) March 15, 2020

Calmly doing tweets.

It would be remiss of me to imply, however, that Labour MPs were conducting themselves with grace, humanity & dignity. https://t.co/7eOe13pUMf pic.twitter.com/S2f6Tn0dag

— Tom Gann (@Tom_Gann) March 17, 2020

buried in that thread somewhere:

the people who keep trying to invoke blitz spirit seem to think the lesson of the blitz was to “carry on as normal” and not “coordinate a rapid and serious response on every level to prevent unnecessary deaths”

— jonathan nunn (@demarionunn) March 16, 2020

Credit where credit's due, those Macron measures are excellent - one of the things about making no ideology your defining personal brand is that enables you to get away with things like this. Johnson may have to do them in time as well because he has few firmly held convictions in any case. The fed cutting interest rates to zero is basically asking for intervention like this. If there's a big rally on the French stock market then the right will be on board anyway - it's better to help businesses and individuals now then let everyone fail and have to spend big to deal with the fallout later.

Everyone concerned - governments, economists, creditors - will have to change their attitude to money over the next few months.

More to the point if he didn't then there would almost certainly be widespread rioting across French cities.

how much credit do we give the rioters

Can’t wait for a grudging Johnson to nationalise everything and get tonguebathed by the same bootlickers screaming about communism and sneering “are you going to nationalise sausages” at Labour.

I know we're very day-to-day right now, but I'm wondering what/when restrictions easing will look like. This is going to turn into the Boxing Day that never ended soon.

not to be that guy, but maybe a new thread makes sense? bojo is still king sorta kinda but is brexit still on? and obviously stuff is fucked except we found new levels

new level new thread :|

The Politics of D(ist)ancing

altho tbf the world is on hold so it's not like there's gonna be much in the way of non-Covid politics or apparently non-Covid discussion of anything else for a while

Reminds me of a thread I need to make though, the important thing wrt this thread is that we’re still all gonna die

Macron measures are good yes but also just common sense in avoiding total societal collapse. The idea of somehow keeping the economy going via keeping pubs, shops, etc. open will seem like a sick joke pretty quickly as the deaths start piling up.

I mean I know right-wing ideologues have been getting away with encouraging total societal collapse for ages, but not at this speed.

Just common sense yes but it's not as if other leaders have done it.

how much credit do we give the rioters

100% but crowds on that scale probably not the best idea right now.

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