A long, slow death

Laurie Penny, from the Conservative Party conference a few weeks ago (that is to say, before the wheels fell off).

The unfortunate Toby Young, a living monument to the English Art of failing upwards, is on one of their panels, and seems distressed to be the most liberal person here by far, making an asinine but apparently genuine argument for academic freedom alongside some of the most racist speeches I’ve heard that weren’t improvised by thugs on a night bus. At one point, an old man next to me in the audience genuinely finds it necessary to comment that are “rather too many black players in Premier League football”. He turns out to be a former government minister.

What are the chances that we’ll see Boris Johnson back in 10 Downing Street in a week’s time?

(If the Tory membership were going to be given a vote, that’d be the way to bet.)

[Via Ongoing]

Levelling-up

Spotted in the Guardian‘s letters, a reader gives the government credit where it’s due:

I am pleased to say I have spotted the first concrete evidence of the government putting its levelling-up agenda into action. While viewing information on my NHS app, I found the guide to foreign travel under Covid regulations, with the following very useful guidance: “Find out what you need to do … to take your pet dog, cat or ferret.”

The inclusion of ferrets in this list really does show that the government takes the interests of northerners into account in its policies, don’t you think? Unfortunately, there is no mention of what to do if you want to travel with your ferret down your trousers or up your jumper – but it’s early days, so no doubt they will learn the finer points of ferret-keeping as we go along.
Philip Robins
Addingham, West Yorkshire

Boris Johnson will probably delegate the travel-with-a-ferret-down-your-trousers demonstration to Michael Gove.

Good Law?

The Good Law Project poses a simple question about how senior UK government ministers have used their personal email systems for official business in recent years:

[Why…] would Ministers choose to use personal accounts rather than official channels?

They seem to believe this is a loophole to avoid scrutiny. If politicians think they can evade oversight from the Courts or dodge Freedom of Information requests by using private email and Whatsapp, the question becomes: what have they got to hide?

If you think that’s a good question, you might want to consider donating to a fund to help the Good Law Project cover their potential costs in pressing the government for an answer.

[From a recent fundraising email]

This is an important case in the battle for accountability. But going up against the significant resources of the Government is expensive. In this case we have secured a cost-capping order which means if we lose, we will need to pay £125,000 for Government costs, as well as the costs of our own legal team. So far, we have managed to raise £76,000.

If you are in a position to do so, will you donate to the legal challenge?

Luck

Tony Blair can only wish he had such good luck

Domestication is key to the rebranding of Bush as a “good” conservative. His interview on The Today Show was conducted in part by his daughter Jenna, who is one of the hosts of the show. She explained for the viewing audience that although when her father left office, his approval rating was as low as 21 percent, it now sits at 61 percent. They played a clip of Will Ferrell doing his impression of Bush asking, “How do you like me now?” Laughing, the other host remarked that “history has been super kind.” It was the strangest euphemism for the Trump presidency I have heard.

[Via Memex 1.1]

In the long run, we are all dead

Tim Hartford on why the UK is braced for a grim Christmas:

Late in 2019, the British people decided that Chaos Kong would make a good prime minister and elected Boris Johnson by a large margin. Johnson has now decided to make a virtue of his own recklessness. After initially claiming that the shortage of truck drivers in the UK was entirely unconnected to Brexit, the government now boasts that the shortage is indeed Brexit-related and was the plan all along. True to the spirit of Chaos Kong, this tough love for the British economy is the only way to get it to shape up.

In preventing the easy recruitment of truck drivers, abattoir workers and care-home staff from the EU, the UK government is actively blocking the most straightforward way to get the economy running smoothly again. (To ensure everyone got the message, Johnson compared immigrants to heroin, complaining that businesses had been able to “mainline low-wage, low-cost immigration”.) The assertion is that if the government deliberately constricts the supply of essential workers, the economy will come out stronger in the long run. Chaos Kong worked for Netflix. Will it work for the UK? 1

One day, we’ll look back on all this and laugh. Or cry. One of the two, anyway.

[Via Memex 1.1]


Rescue at sea

Part of me thinks it’s a shame that the RNLI didn’t increase the default preset donation figure on their web site’s donation page from £20 to £50, because they could have really cashed in after Nigel Farage’s comments this week as people reacted by rushing to the RNLI web site and looked for the quickest, easiest way possible to throw some money in the organisation’s direction.

The RNLI are one of those charities that conservatives and centrists and left-wingers alike used to approve of, groups of private citizens voluntarily taking responsibility for part of an activity that one night imagine an island nation would definitely need, yet which governments don’t provide on the scale required. A shame the need to stoke a culture war has pushed right-wingers in this bizarre direction, where rescuing human beings from the risk of drowning at sea is deemed to be a political act rather than a humanitarian gesture.

Here’s hoping the RNLI see a huge surge in fundraising this year.

[Via RT by Neil Gaiman]

Punchline

From Dirty Feed, a magnificent, thoroughly documented deep dive into the history of one of the greatest punchlines in the history of British television:

Sad to contemplate that none of the three actors involved is still with us, but what a memorial to their work together on a programme that shaped a generation’s view of how government worked.

Fascinating to see the history of that joke pieced together, and the very different version of the punchline used in earlier incarnations.

[Via Phil Gyford’s Pinboard feed]