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

literally the sick man of Europe

this fucking country

How many MPs of advanced age or with other underlying health conditions had to walk through the lobby yesterday?

thoughts and prayers for Peter Bottomley rn, my rosary beads are on fire!

and big bazza!

maybe the legendary miasma in the HoP of leaking piss will be some kind of antiseptic barrier

I once had this smackhead electrician friend who had his own "lungfish theory" that if you were a smoker, the layer of phlegm on your lungs created a protective barrier from the asbestos that we had breathed in on a school job. it sounds about as convincing as that piss theory!

his theory was based on this 80+ years old old smoker we once met who worked in a factory in the late 60's where his duties included sawing asbestos panels and having snowball fights with clumps of the deadly mineral on his lunch break and he said what people said about its deadly carcinogenic effects on the lungs were "a load of bollocks"!

a useful fact i just learned is that the word "empiric" means "1: one who is guided by practical experience rather than precepts or theory" and also "2: An unqualified or dishonest practitioner; a charlatan"

the lungfish guy is 1 and so am i

that's why you haven't got CB FRCP FFPH FMedSci after yr name!

CB DSc FRCP FFPH FMedSci.

oops I missed one

CB DSc FRCP FBPE FMedSci

the mekon, secret remainiac

Dan Dunty and the Mekon.

Gammons are from Venus, Remoaners are from Mars

Peter Bottomley and put it in your pocket, save it for a rainy day.

So, every front page (apart from the Guardian, Metro and the FT) have the front page given over to the latest 'developments' in the Maddie story.

More deaths today than the rest of Europe combined? pfft

it’s fine, global cases are only at 100,000

A DAY

lol

Figures obtained by the Guardian showed that in large parts of the north-east not a single primary school opened to more pupils on Monday, the government’s target date for reopening after the 10-week lockdown.

Data from 11 of the 12 biggest local authorities in the region, which has the highest Covid-19 infection rate in the UK, showed just 12% of their 856 primary schools admitted additional pupils on Monday.

Across England, a National Education Union poll of members suggested, more than two in five schools (44%) decided against admitting more pupils on Monday, contrary to government expectations.

In the north-west, the proportion of schools opening to more pupils was even lower, at just 8%, according to a survey by the country’s biggest education union.

So proud:

Yesterday the UK, population 66 million, had more deaths from #COVID19 than the *entire* EU, population nearly 450 million.

Not even @10DowningStreet can spin that fact away - it is utterly, irredeemably damning. pic.twitter.com/4NworFV1hb

— Rachel Clarke (@doctor_oxford) June 4, 2020

So so sorry we're not accepting you ppl from the UK, along w/ only Sweden, to smoke weed here lol

It’s really unfair to those of us who live here too. :,(

This is a remarkable piece

Why Scotland needs to acknowledge its role in creating the racial dystopia that is modern America https://t.co/hRboCSMzBx

— NeilMackay (@NeilMackay) June 4, 2020

Lol

I'm very pleased to say that @Keir_Starmer is joining @LBC for a new, monthly phone-in. He'll be taking calls with @NickFerrariLBC starting at 9am on Monday. #CallKeir pic.twitter.com/ualYlKxOm6

— Tom Cheal (@Tom_Cheal) June 4, 2020

That Madeleine story is such a dead cat. "All Lives Matter"... but we've decided a missing white girl from thirteen years ago does matter more than the failure to protect BAME people from being three times as likely to die, during our catastrophically mismanaged handling of a pandemic.

Ok last ones:

No coincidence, IMO, that political movements offering the kind of fundamental change (via democratic process) urged by young people generally, BAME communities specifically, have been thwarted both sides of the Atlantic in last half year. A wellspring of impotent rage out there.

— barney farmer (@barneyfarmer) June 4, 2020

Another commonality is that both were turned back in large part by a coalition of white middle-aged and older people apparently representing the spectrum of acceptable politics in both nations, and this most evident in the media treatment of both movements.

— barney farmer (@barneyfarmer) June 4, 2020

(xps) I've talked on ILX before about the fact that Scotland has a history of producing, and exporting, dangerous fanatics - though I usually just blame Ayrshire. The Wha's Like Us tendency of Scots to blow their own trumpet about being 'more progressive ' than the English hardly stands up to close scrutiny when there are Orange Walks the length and breadth of the country every summer. And how's that 'we don't vote Tory' thing going?

spare me most of all from "Scots were slaves too"

The way in which Corbyn energised the black working class vote (especially amongst younger men) was pretty much never commented on except for a few weeks in the summer of 2017. Did Sanders have the same appeal? Genuinely don't know.

Yeah, pretty flagrant how Corbyn's popularity in BAME communities was glossed over by the commentariat in favour of brocialist momentum stereotypes.

From what I heard Sanders had a roughly analogous relationship to latino voters in the US but not black voters.

TBH there's still something that sits badly with me about those Barney Farmer tweets, I see the point he's making but he's overemphasising one source of impotent rage over the much bigger, more prevalent and more obvious others that are staring us in the face. There will be a lot of people using what's going on in the US to grind familiar political axes but doing so feels... idk, disrespectful?

One of the main criticisms of Sanders was his lack of appeal to African Americans, iirc.

Black voters in the South went for Biden's centrist coalition in the end so those tweets don't scan at all.

Although there is a divide on age there too, it's more complicated by Sanders not being a Democrat.

grime4Corbyn has sadly been replaced by hurrah for the night courts

This is an interesting corrective on my previous tweet. Spain could be fiddling the numbers:

NEW: much has been made this week of Spain recording zero new Covid deaths for two successive days.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchéz called it "A success for all".

Unfortunately it’s also nonsense.

Story by me & @danieldombey: https://t.co/kThBKffKeD

Thread follows:

— John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) June 4, 2020

Feel like I read an article like that about Italy two months ago. Willing to accept everywhere's fucked it up.

Most of Europe, US, Brazil and most of India have. East Asia, China (if you believe the numbers), Kerala and parts of Africa have not.

it wouldn't be a surprise if everywhere was under-recording, but that wouldn't get the UK government off the hook

There's a difference between fucking up the pandemic response and fiddling the data more specifically. Feels to me like the government is fiddling the testing/case data more than the deaths data per se (they may have limited control over how hospitals and care homes report those).

Black voters in the South went for Biden's centrist coalition in the end so those tweets don't scan at all.

Nevada was the one where Latin voters really showed up for Bernie.

The breakdown in age is apparent among Black voters too (said that on my post below that one) but in the end Democrat centrism as a block was always in front. They finally coalesced around Biden before the Super Tuesday primaries.

In any case the Corbyn coalition is very different (young and very old plus cranks lol) and Corbyn is of course Labour himself.

And wrt Corbyn, it’s true that the majority of BAME voters went for Labour but there are some important variances - there were campaigns against Corbyn driven by pro-Modi elements in the British Indian community, and they claimed that their efforts contributed to the size of the defeat too. It’s not an exact science to compare obviously. But explain if you don’t mind Matt?

what is the official ukpol line on the BLM protest btw - personally speaking under any other circumstances i'd have tried to be there myself, but purely from a practical perspective, given COVID i'd have preferred it kept online. obviously voices have to be heard here but...now?

I have to say I'm not really sure why we're talking about Corbyn in light of what's happening in the US. Over here, the vast majority of black voters will vote for anyone other than Johnson (without a major change of direction, the Tories more generally). I don't see that changing regardless of who is leading the Labour Party, although obviously turnout and location matter here. (The same is probably true of Muslim voters for obvious reasons).

My experience is that a lot of British Indians have never been remotely left wing and I'm sure a lot of them have never needed an excuse to vote Tory. Whether pro-Modi sentiment drove the anti-Labour vote among waverers this time I don't know, it's possible it shifted the balance in some seats, it's also possible they're overstating the extent of the contribution given everything else that was happening.

Usual caveats about ethnic groups not being monoliths etc etc.

(or is lockdown just completely a lost cause and we're all gonna get the rona)

i work with a lot of british indians and quite a few of them went lib dem at the last election (admittedly from the london professional bubble) - i think it breaks down as much along class lines as race ones in this case? yeah exactly

It also sometimes helps to look back a few generations and get a sense of what these people's grandparents and beyond did during the Empire (and this is particularly true with British Indians whose families arrived via Africa). Many of these people are very aware of where their ancestors sat in the colonial hierarchy and it can shed a lot of light on familial/inherited attitudes to power. This is as true of my extended family as any other.

The BLM protests here have been huge in terms of turnout. The first one, in Amsterdam, had way too many people for an individual to keep distance. The mayor said she allowed it because it was important, getting a lot of flak for that from basically the whole country/tories etc. In the aftermath it's mostly been about protesting in rona-times, instead of what ppl/media should really be talking about: racism. Basically, Rona made a great argument for right-wingers to say: "sure this is important but NOT NOW, is this why we tried to contain the virus, you're putting us at risk and protesting is unnacceptable" etc (also racism doesn't exist in the Netherlands, and all that crap).

The protests in other big cities that followed have attracted big crowds as well, more than expected, and - learning from A'dam - ppl kept their distance. It's possible to do this, and if not now, when?