BC UK

An assessment of Johnson's press conference
Pros:
1. He has finally acted (better late than never)
2. He has extended the furlough scheme
3. He recognises test and trace needs to improve

Cons:
1. Even though coming 6 weeks after the SAGE call, with cases, hospitalisations and dealths now some 10 times as high, the measures are STILL weaker than proposed (e.g. no move to online teaching in universities)
2. No acknowledgement of the failures of the testing system, beyond numbers of tests (e.g. the falling proporttion of contacts being traced) and the need to root it in local public health structures.
3. A call for people to self-isolate, but no mention of the support needed to help people to do what is necessary: empty exhortations in the place of practical help.
4. No reversal of the laissez faire approach which simply hands over responsibility to others - employers, owners, head-teachers etc. - to create COVID safe facilities. No help to make this happen, no inspection to ensure it happens.
5. No strategy to keep infections low once restrictions (assuming they work) are lifted. Just an empty optimism that vaccines will come along and save us in the spring.
Overall verdict: A move in the right direction, and certainly better than nothing, but far too late, possibly too little, a last ditch reaction, and most seriously, no overall plan.

More from Uk

Yesterday, of course, Jeremy Corbyn launched his Peace and Justice Project, to much excitement on here. Laudable goals too:

Take on Murdoch ✅
Green New Deal ✅
Support for food banks ✅
Speed up vaccine delivery in developing countries ✅

That's all excellent.

I'm not sure if anyone can argue with those four aims: they're irrefutable and all massively important. You bet I'd like to see Labour doing likewise; you bet I'm frustrated that it's so quiet on all of it.

HOWEVER...

Contained within the announcement was exactly the same selective blindness which makes the entire thing all too easy to shoot down - and again, means Corbyn is pretty unlikely to persuade anyone who's not already persuaded.

The sort of blindness which makes me tear my hair out.

Peace and Justice - sounds great, doesn't it? So why did the Peace and Justice project proudly announce the support of a corrupt criminal not remotely interested in either of those


Rafael Correa, former President of Ecuador. Let's run through his record, starting with the positives.

Slashed poverty from 36.7% to 22.5% ✅

Reduced inequality from 0.55 to 0.47 on the Gini index ✅

So far, so good. Except, um...
Just finished reading an article by Iain MacWhirter that is so full of demonstrable falsehoods & logical fallacies that it requires a firm response: So seeing as I’ve done one nuclear thread this week already, I might as well do another... 🧵☢️🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🇺🇳

Iain is able to correctly identify that the submission that @SNP_SITW group made to the UK #IntegratedReview - and therefore wasn’t policy about an independent Scotland - but that’s where his grip on reality ends.

We called for unilateral disarmament, as I pointed out on Monday:
https://t.co/DwHt9knqHh


Iain chooses to elide the fact that our submission was clearly not about policy in an independent Scotland, and therefore seeks to portray our request to the UK Government to be serious about its own commitments to multilateral arms control treaties — like the NPT — as SNP policy

Despite revealing that he knows a thing or two about internal SNP procedures, he then goes on to conflate two unconnected things — our submission, and a putative conference motion that the democratically-elected conferences committee (not the Leadership) decided not to accept

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