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

🐦[Times Radio, the new Murdoch-backed ad-free talk station that may or may not be a rival to Radio 4, has a confirmed launch date of 29 June. Here’s the full schedule. pic.twitter.com/mHgo9cyHFG🕸
— Jim Waterson (@jimwaterson) June 2, 2020🕸]🐦

if you ever longed for more portillo or 3 hours of matt chorley on the radio 4 days a week and other unique content such as the amber and flora podcast then brace yourself for this

I'm sure that pompous arsewipe Pienaar got a payrise out of Murdoch but it still seems like a demotion from deputy political editor for BBC News, even as rotten as the BBC is.

as good a place as any to mention the quiz show i heard a bit of on Radio 4 yesterday afternoon, the least Radio 4-sounding thing i've ever heard, with some witless local radio Sunday morning host doing his local radio pop triv patter. i thought the radio must be broken so i checked the programme guide and it was Stuart Maconie.

lol jesus wept!

I probably haven't listened to the radio in about ten years. I had a housemate that listened to radio 4 in the kitchen and it used to drive me insane

i guess lockdown means they'll let anybody have a go, time to pitch my Ken Burns-style 12 hour documentary on the history of Toilet Duck

Wait, it's ad-free? Unless they're planning on doing mad sponsorship deals - and they'll need a big listenership for them - then it's just Murdoch pouring money down the drain and how long is he planning on doing that for?

Till he dies? (Hopefully a cheap prospect for him)

yeah i was thinking of the line from Citizen Kane

I was wondering what the middle class equivalent would be of those white van man ads on Talk Radio for widgets and wrenches and ballcocks.

Shepherd’s huts and posh sheds.

Thinking about yesterday's economic talk, the last few months have been a major blow to the idea that economic growth in all circumstances is ultimately a good thing. A recession, or at least a major suppression of economic activity, in this case is a good thing if it enables you to get to grips with the virus. If you haven't got to grips with the virus and it starts to spread uncontrollably again then you've essentially invited a deep recession and spent billions in public money for no reason.

One more month and the virus would probably have been at a low enough level to allow them to open things up in a more sensible way. You cannot run a socially distanced restaurant profitably without a massive reduction in rent. Same goes for a shop probably and I don't think clothes retail is going to come back any time soon. The economy in general isn't going to come back until people feel safe enough to go out and spend, maybe the public will just go out and do it anyway but if that causes another flare-up of the virus then they'll start to voluntarily lock down again pretty quickly.

There is probably a gigantic crash coming in commercial real estate - retail was in trouble in lots of the country even before the virus and bars, restaurants etc won't be able to survive without significantly lower rents. White collar work will probably adapt with more people working from home but there's going to be a ton of empty/unused office space out there.

Whatever happens we are probably looking at a slow drift towards more normal ways of behaving and in a couple of years I think people will be living more or less as they were - with some technological trends accelerated maybe. But the government trying to rush everything back to near normal by July is just an arbitrary deadline that could make the economic situation worse, not better. (Doesn't bode well for Brexit in December/January either and that's a whole other disaster in the making).

the arbitrariness is the real horror show: it'd be one thing if they were prioritising greed over lives but the overwhelming impression is simply that they don't know what they're doing. there's the real possibility that a decent summer might keep the R number suppressed for a while? combo of the virus not enjoying the weather and people being that bit more distant outside. if there's a spike towards the end of autumn/beginning of winter god knows how this government will deal with it, how it will be reported or what the public's attitude in general will be. i still have the idea that in the UK at least there could become a grim fatalism to a steady toll of "background" deaths mostly concentrated in sections of society that are already neglected.

in reference to the economic future i've seen no evidence that anybody in the public or parliamentary political sphere is taking advantage of this experience to advocate for changes to the way we organize economic activity as a state, never mind as a society. that's the most depressing aspect of all of this to me: something potentially world-altering is happening now and bar the kind of inevitable and marginal changes you mention Matt i don't see anybody grasping the possibilities.

(nb: this isn't specifically about the Labour leadership, but it is about the dead hand of the Labour party which wouldn't have been much different under a Corbynish direction)

never mind as a society species

"the dead hand of the Labour party"

I know I said Starmer is a f/t wanker, but I didn't mean it literally!

We've normalised 100 people dying every day. If it stays at that level you're still looking at 21,000 deaths by the end of the year. That's assuming it takes at least that long to develop a vaccine but also that we don't have another spike (we will). I can't believe that's going to end up as background noise.

also that CQC report is heartbreaking. This idea that your worth is attached to your ability to contribute to society via capitalism needs to fuck off forever

i've seen nothing in this country's politics during my lifetime that makes me think that will happen

Tbh it's not only the UK that is not taking advantage of this moment but I do see this pandemic as one in a series of events that will make growth and our way of living pretty much impossible as it is.

Although things will change, many will find perhaps frightening ways to adapt to the constant 'disruption' and barbarism to come.

unfortunately otm

Normalising hundreds or thousands of deaths is what human beings do. Think about the best day of your life - hundreds of people with worthwhile lives and grieving families died in this country alone, some of them in entirely avoidable ways. There are limits to human empathy when things start to seem normal.

It's why fixating on the death rate alone - no matter how high it is - isn't enough and why it isn't constantly on the front pages. The thing that might drive behavioral change - and almost certainly already has - is the deaths that might still happen, particularly if its your parents, grandparents, your friend who had a heart transplant etc.

you could argue the same about public attitudes to the welfare system - exposure to more friends and loved ones struggling to survive thru unemployment benefits etc - but again without being melodramatic i wouldn't bet on it

the spikes will become more and more concentrated in more vulnerable populations and it will disappear from headlines/the minds of those not affected

Just depends, it's quite an unknowable situation. I'm inclined to go with a lot of bad things happening before the good, i.e. basically money running out for enough people to drive change. In the meantime many will die, but the rate may matter if we get back to near a thousand deaths and the NHS being overrun.

xp that assumes the government could manage the spike and tracing things to a local level and I'm not sure they'll ever get that right.

I am furious that the vanity of Boris Johnson the Prime Minister will prevent me the longest serving Member of Parliament on the Opposition benches from speaking or voting today!

— Barry Sheerman MP (@BarrySheerman) June 2, 2020

lol I forgot this non-entity had beaten off Frank Field (with his dead hand) for the father of the house status since they killed big beast Kenny.

He's not quite Father of the House yet.

who is?

Peter "Wake me up when he's finished speaking" Bottomley.

lol another non-entity

The only thing I know him as is Virginia Bottomley's husband tbh

Yes, married to the woman whose name is an anagram of I'm An Evil Tory Bigot.

lol at Sheerman getting pissy about somebody else's vanity

just looking with wonder yet again at the uk's tests / deaths ratio, which today stands at 276,332 / 39,045 and thus suggests the death rate in these united kingdoms is 14.1%

clearly it's not anywhere near that, and the colossal ratio is a side-effect of the woeful approach we've taken to testing so far, but i don't think i've ever seen anyone questioned about it and it seems like a missed opportunity to me

yeah check yrself barry ffs xp

Weekend COVID press conferences have been suspended 'due to low ratings'.

If it's not as popular as Midsomer Murders, it's clearly not worth doing.

that's some trump-level reasoning there, very reassuring

maybe get Ant and Dec to do the weekends, problem solved

some kind of care home death bingo where viewers at home get a chance to play for a car if their grandma dies

Liz Truss to lead further review into why BAME people more at risk from coronavirus, MPs told

oh no

The obvious choice.

Can't Truss It

The ratio obviously means testing is fucked but it might also mean that there have been enough symptomless carriers or mild cases to slow the spread of the virus in some areas. I'm not saying herd immunity here but it will have an effect. What happens in Sweden will probably be instructive here.

Has anything reliable or intelligent been written about whether there might be a proportion of people who were immune from the start? Assuming there is any long term immunity of course.

not that i've seen - feels like if that is a factor it'll be a long time before we have a large enough pool of data on populations to draw those kinds of conclusions

The conclusion to Truss's oh so probing report into bame c-19 deaths: isn't Wensleydale great, erm couldn't finish off my homework because some nasty pasty stoley wolled my special left-handed penny wen.

bloody italians can't keep their damn mouths shut, this is why brexit happened

Boris Johnson told his Italian counterpart, Giuseppe Conte, in early March that the UK was aiming for “herd immunity” as part of its approach to coronavirus, a TV documentary claims.

Channel 4’s Dispatches spoke to the Italian health minister, Pierpaolo Sileri, who said this is what was said in a conversation between Johnson and Conte on 13 March. Sileri told the programme:

I spoke with Conte to tell President Conte that I’d tested positive [for coronavirus]. And he told me that he’d spoken with Boris Johnson and that they’d also talked about the situation in Italy. I remember he said, ‘He told me that he wants herd immunity’.
I remember that after hanging up, I said to myself that I hope Boris Johnson goes for a lockdown.
In late February and early March the government’s scientific adviser were relatively open about saying that they thought it would be impossible to entirely suppress coronavirus and that there were advantages from allowing “herd immunity” to build up. Sir Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief scientific adviser, said this publicly, including in a Today programme interview on 13 March (the day the Johnson/Conte conversation took place). But very soon afterwards the government abruptly changed policy, in response to modelling saying that anything other than a policy aimed at full suppression of coronavirus would led to the NHS being overwhelmed.

Subsequently ministers became averse to being associated with the “herd immunity” concept, because that implied toleration or even support for people dying from coronavirus in manageable numbers, and now they insist it was never part of their policy.

Everyone already knows this Giuseppe, they literally said it out loud on national TV.

look just because they said it on tv and just because it was their actual policy when they said it, that doesn't mean they ever said it nor was it ever their actual policy

that is the old politics

Worth noting in relation to the worryingly high death rate among people of Bangladeshi origin, that Bangladesh itself - with a population of 161m and poor health care - they have recorded 709 deaths. The U.K., with a population of 66m - has recorded 40,000. https://t.co/JDd7x7QDhR

— Tim Walker (@ThatTimWalker) June 2, 2020

fucking hell