Westminstenders: Where are we now?

[RedToothBrush]

Twenty thousand people
Cross Bösebrücke
Fingers are crossed
Just in case
Walking the dead

Where are we now, where are we now?
The moment you know, you know, you know

Just that.

Don't really want to reflect more than that right now.

Not sure I identify as a "lovely mum"...

Perhaps John Lewis is expanding its range of soft furnishing as well as cast iron cookware - Roman blinds, roller blinds, Venetian blinds, gender blinds ...

AFAIK, pansexual is the fashionable version of "bi", with the addition of "would date a trans person."

However, I am out of touch and happy to be corrected if kitchen crockery is involved.

Oh.

I thought bi meant happy to liase with male or female human.

And assumed pan meant happy to liase with animal, vegetable or mineral, male or female obvs.

What's that called then?

Asking for a friend

Sounds incredibly ... um ... busy.

I jest above as we all know what Alexa/Google/Siri tells us what pan sexual is but wtf - who cares and why is it all about sex and who or what etc etc??

I thought she/he/it is a Liberal MP literally stretching the definition of liberal to the extreme.

Can’t said person just focus on the politics (job) and not side track to sexual orientation or is that yet another minority bandwagon these days!?

What’s next the vegan one legged animal loving lesbian (but only on the weekends) transgender formerly bloke minority?

Layla Moran was forced to come out because her girlfriend Rosy Cobb was a paid LD staff member who was in trouble with the party after being accused of forging an email during the general election campaign and was suspended. Cobb no longer works for the party.

Moran probably wouldn't have got the job but got her pan beliefs IMHO. The party have become completely obsessed with identity politics.

Does it really matter? How bloody tedious all this identity politics is.

Fuck who you want as long as it's consensual!

Sadly, the Govt have been fucking plenty of us without our consent for years....

Today's front pages are interesting.

Johnson accused of a colonial mindset by dozens of commonwealth countries after he has tried to hinder the reappointment of the Secretary General of the commonwealth Baroness Scotland.

Given that the entire government is driven by a post Brexit colonial trade policy this is something of a problem.

And Japan have given us 6 weeks to complete a trade deal (sounds like they are getting fed up). They don't wish to have a 'gap' in trade deal in January. (Sounds a lot like pressure to avoid no deal cliff edge bullshit which will damage Japanese investments and interests in the UK)

I question whether we are in a position to do this with the EU deal unresolved tbh.

And the student nurses who were contracted are now having contract binned (this one won't go away BTW. Expect legal action / backlash before government forced to uturn but damage will be that student nurses will seek employment abroad rather than deal with this shit.)

Is Moran any good as a politician- all I know is that she has had relationships with two people one of whom was a bit dodgy. Unlike the prime minister who is running at eight relationships (mostly while married). As Johnson''s now very publicly engaged to the mistress, that creates a vacancy if anyone wants to apply. I wonder what sort of sexual he-is spam/ jam/ stan/ noplan/ glam/ wham/ bam sexual.

On a separate note I see that a sensible Congress person is querying why Farage is deemed an alien of national importance. Perhaps they could ask the BBC as they seemed to share the same view of his importance for many long years.

“After conducting a thorough review of the relevant facts and circumstances, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) determined Mr Farage’s travel to be permissible under section 2 (a)(xi) of the presidential proclamation: any alien whose entry would be in the national interest, as determined by the secretary of state, the secretary of homeland security, or their designees authorising Mr Farage to board his flight”. (from the Independent)

I can write an essay on why it matters to the LDs but tbh I can't be arsed and it's summed up by middle class guilt combined with a desire to have an appearance of being diverse whilst actually reinforcing white male control. It's completely detached from reality and prioritises things which are ridiculously niche over the issues that matter to most people. It's tedious and this blindness to the real world condemns the LDs to be increasingly marginalised at a time when Starmer is already eroding their base. The whole thing damns them to irrelevance because since they forgot what liberal democracy was and became sucked into stopping Brexit at all costs, the party stand for precisely nothing else. They are completely directionless and clueless and identity politics top Trump's is just mindless and easy to do in the absence of any kind of critical thinking and pragmatism.

They were the party which was away with the fairies had a blip with Clegg and have returned to being the party away with the fairies. They lack any serious clue about pretty much anything.

And this is the abbreviated explanation minus the swearing.

The Lib Dems are ridiculous and have been pretty much consistently ridiculous for decades. But we're stuck with FPTP which means no chance of new and sensible political parties coming through. And once the Tories have pushed through their boundary changes, that'll be it - a one party system.

This whole TRA delusion of the LDems and many on the left is because fantasising in la-la land is easy,

but developing policies to deal with problems of the enormous financial & social inequality, inadequate infrastructure, public services etc
is very complicated and involves making tough decisions.

Basically they opted out of genuinely radical policy-making to leave the status quo as it is
.... which is heartily encouraged by the ruling class

... in case you wondered why TRAs have been allowed such power to have people's careers ruined, visited by the police etc for stating biological facts

A brilliant diversion of so much reforming zeal away from the danger of actually tackling anything important

On the one hand you have la la land of reimaging biology and history and on the other hand you have promises of reinventing history and geography.

No wonder teachers are demonised.

La-la land is very lazy land which substitutes fantasy slogans for hard work.

to avoid having to learn about complicated subjects like trade, food supply, economics, education, health, transport, environment

We've seen the disasters with a workshy PM who has never bother to learn about these topics that his job requires

The Tories can get a PM like that elected; the LDems can't
(just as well; the last thing we need is a pansexual version of BJ)

www.bmj.com/content/369/bmj.m2486

Local health protection teams have traced nearly eight times more contacts (77 642) than the national call centres and online service (9997),
latest figures show.1

The NHS Test and Trace system brings together the local health protection teams that handle complex cases,
and the national call centre and online system—run by two private companies, Serco and Sitel.

The contracts awarded to operate test and trace are reportedly worth £108m (€120m; $134m) in total,2

and some experts have said this money would have been better spent on resourcing and funding local public health teams,
who were already in place and could have led the initiative.

< but that would mean boring old tried and trusted systems that boring old fuddy-duddies like Germany has been using.
No chance for UK bungs to private companies world beating new systems >

I can understand socialists being keen on centralisation - it is an enabler for their policies -

However, the obsession of the Tories to remove tasks from local organisations in favour of - grossly inefficient and expensive - centralisation
looks like further power grabs, a political penis extension
as well as retaining the power to dole out bungs to favoured companies

Local health protection teams have traced nearly eight times more contacts (77 642) than the national call centres and online service (9997)

I watched the Salisbury Poisonings last week on BBC1 and was impressed by the Public health trace system and by Tracy Daszkiewicz.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracy_Daszkiewicz

Remind me why we outsource so much to the private sector?

Remind me why we outsource so much to the private sector?
So it can give expensive jobs to retiring MPs and ministers

its one reason Sunak is interesting
his wife is so unbelievably rich that no job offer in business could turn his head
so he might focus on doing the job well

Also BCF - if the used the picking health teams - then the LA would have access to data to know exactly what infection rates are like in their area - and you can't have that.

Sorry - should have been "local health teams"

I can't say as I've noticed many trends towards "unimaginable wealth" leading to an urge to do right by wage earners. Rather, I've been marvelling over how it doesn't seem to matter how much wealth people accumulate, it just seems to make them covet more and become further and further divorced from understanding what might be worthwhile in life for anyone who isn't unimaginably wealthy.

I've seen that argument about Sunak before, though. Is it some sort of meme?

Interesting article on the Republicans campaigning against Trump and what the left could learn from them

TL;DR: you win by being ruthless, focused on the votes that matters and highlighting values rather than policies. Surprisingly (not..) an obsessive focus on sexual identity politics is not among the recommendations

www.politics.co.uk/comment-analysis/2020/06/22/swimming-with-the-sharks-what-progressives-can-learn-from-re

singasonga
He is still a pro Brexit Tory MP
but
he has more competence than many in the cabinet
and will not be running for the revolving door as many others have done
(Clegg, Osborne, Blair et al)

Below is part of an email just popped into my work inbox. Maybe we are getting a US trade deal. If DIT are running seminars, it must be for an upcoming reason. Or by going e-commerce could we cut out all of this trade negotiation nonsense?

Selling your food & drink products directly to US customers via e-commerce*
24th June 2020 @ 2pmpm*

Join this webinar by DIT in collaboration with Infinity Blue Marketplaces to learn what you need to know as a UK company to start selling food and drink products from the UK into the US market. For details see heree.