Inverted

He's not even a member of the Tory party which makes them look even more idiotic for defending him so desperately. He looks down on them, discredits them, and yet they're desperate to hold onto him.

The thing is that it's too late for the issue to be cleanly swept under the rug with just Cummings going. Pretty much all of the cabinet with an online presence has misled the public as to the facts, actively disparaged the lockdown guidance, and encouraged lawbreaking. Under normal standards of ministerial responsibility they would all be strongly expected to resign and that would be the end of their public lives. That's how far down the rabbit hole we are.

I don't think it is that unclear. If you wanted to make care arrangements, then you could have someone come and pick up your child. That's really the only way to square "don't leave your home for any reason" with "you can make arrangements for your children".

https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/coronavirus-covid-19/what-to-do-if-you-or-someone-you-live-with-has-coronavirus-symptoms/staying-at-home-if-you-or-someone-you-live-with-has-coronavirus-symptoms/ If you or someone you live with has symptoms of coronavirus: do not leave your home for any reason – if you need food or medicine, order it online or by phone, or ask someone to deliver it to your home The guidance is unambiguous. "Any" means "any". All other discussion is just noise and disinformation.

A big bonus of today is that the newcomers like Sunak, Braverman, Dowden and Schapps have all been given a chance to expose themselves as being just as inept and morally vacuous as the likes of Hancock and Gove. They've all blindly thrown themselves onto the grenade as commanded, only for another to appear. Especially Sunak, who after making a nice impression at the start of lockdown had the nation seemingly rushing to see who could blow the biggest load over him.

There was a period before Calderwood resigned in which she was obviously not going to be doing public speaking but was still the senior professional in policy. She presumably resigned under pressure from the government, and would have been removed by Sturgeon had she not resigned. Overall, I think that the SNP's electoral position would not have been jeapordised had she stayed - particularly in light of this new mess blowing up in the Scottish Tories' face. But they behaved as though it were important to maintain trust regardless. You can call that a sense of civic responsibility, or a sincere fear of electoral setbacks, but the effect is the same. The Tories do not seem to have either of these forces working on them.

Scottish Conservative twitter is experiencing possibly the quietest day in its history, not long after the loudest, when the Calderwood scandal broke out.

The point was that some parties are conscious of the expectations of the public even when not in the middle of an election period. I don't know if you consider a full year before an election to be an election period, but I can say reasonably surely that nobody in Scotland is thinking about next May at this moment. Some figures in politics think that trust, or legitimacy, is something to be maintained, not scrambled or bargained for in the few months before an election. In fact, even ignoring public perception entirely, some would go so far as to say that holding power - especially in a time of crisis in which thousands of lives ride on every decision - bears certain inherent responsibilities. And they behave accordingly, or resign or are removed. I don't know if that sounds trite or idealistic, but I can assure you that even though the UK government has discarded it, it's not such a radical notion. That's why I'm definitely not making Scotland out to be some wonderland because that notion is possibly still relevant up here. It's the norm, it exists in the cultures of most European countries.

Or maybe different political parties sincerely do have different ways of looking at social issues and different attitudes to government.

At this rate the United Kingdom has basically developed a humiliation kink when it comes to its choice of government.

It's also illustrative of the differences in political culture between different parts of the UK. Despite the SNP up here being in power for several terms with large majorities, they are still extremely wary of alienating voters - hence Calderwood being swiftly demoted when she had a similar scandal. They feel that public support can't be taken for granted even amongst their base. The Tories have learned the opposite lesson - any crisis can be survived because you can always keep a sufficient chunk of the electorate sufficiently stupefied or pliable. There's always a competing narrative, an alternative version of the facts which a decent chunk of people are gonna be happy to swallow, because it's in their interests to. They're still in power after all this time, so what harm is one more scandal realistically going to do?

It's the fact that we got sympathy wank stories in the usual rags about Dom being sick, forensically breaking down how the family was coping with the situation, and at no point was this mentioned. And now that it's been revealed, they're saying it's obviously within the rules and at no point did they conceal it. There are some times where things really are as simple as they seem. It's not a mark of deeper engagement with the problem to complicate everything, and infer nuance which isn't there. That's how spin works when you're on the backfoot - you throw out some explanation or counter-story, no matter how tenuous, and you can count on plenty of well-meaning nuance-junkies rushing to take that sweet, sweet middle-ground.

BBC and ITV already had the usual suspects Peston and Kuenssberg out batting for their "unnamed sources" about 5 minutes after the story broke. The repulsive slime that run this country are so brazenly contemptuous of human life and decency that I don't see why they need to bother. It's clear that people who care about these kinds of things are in a firm minority in this nation, and the majority is quite happy to defer to their supposed superiors.

Sounds interesting, I'll give it a look.

Deep Blue Sea is definitely in the "Shit but Amazing" gang. It's like watching a crap, rip-off slasher movie. But instead of a guy with a knife, the killer is a shark.

I like not having to travel, but having to phone or email to get support is terrible. Normally I'd just spin my chair and run a difficult scenario past a colleague or my supervisor, whereas these days I'm quite often totally stuck with customers.

I thought the Chinese and the French had discovered that only a few infected develop immunity, and they're not even sure if it's permanent. That was always he main issue of the herd immunity strategy. It wasn't just that it gambled the lives of potentially hundreds of thousands of people, but it did so without any solid scientific evidence that it would work. If you do nothing, and decide just to weather the first wave, you run the risk that after all the suffering and death, you're in no better position than anyone else to face the follow-up waves.

Maybe it's just because I sat through 5 years of it in uni, but I'm personally not big on the lawyerly approach. Its a bit boring, but the Tories make it look particularly devastating by the absolute audacity with which they try and dodge clearly provable facts. If they had went to law school they would have learned how to survive awkward questioning without resorting to outright lies.

It's amazing how many people will be shocked at a Labour leader being smeared using disinformation and identity politics, and never connect the dots and realise the exact same thing happened to the previous two.

Health minister, Nadine Dorries, has retweeted a right-wing extremist account's doctored video of Keir Starmer, allegedly defending Asian grooming gangs. Nice to see our far-right government can still make time to spread fake news in amongst their herculean efforts to manage the crisis.

I normally have a book in my backpack so I don't mind even if I have to wait 20 mins occasionally. My two local supermarkets, Tesco and Morrisons, have been pretty observant about numbers.

I know I'm late to the party but I don't have any issue with the policy of gradually loosening the social restrictions, which seems to be the crux of the issue. People are already stretching the rules, and to maintain credibility it makes sense to offer some minor relaxation of the guidance. The primary policy issue is the fuzziness around work - you cannot ask normal working people to go to work if they feel like they can. Most normal people do not get to call the shots about going to work or not - you have to tell their employers if they aren't or aren't allowed to call their employees in. Putting the onus on workers just means a lot of people who are scared for their jobs are going to go out, even if they don't feel it's the right thing to do. And you've got to be realistic that a lot of those people cannot walk, cycle or drive to work. The re-escalation of economic activity should be clearly defined and graduated so as not to create a dangerous transport situation, and you should work to improve public transport capacity and cycle infrastructure so to encourage the alternatives. It doesn't seem like any real thought has been put into this. People are just being asked to make things work, without any real help or guidance, and without the surrounding station changing in any way. And then finally the messaging is just beyond mockery now. The government has obviously given up on speaking to us like adults. Perhaps the country has given them justification for that, but it's still sad to see.

Clicked for the album art/band name, got to 35 seconds and was about to turn it off just before I got punched in the mouth by a fistful of fuzz and reverb.

On to part 2 of the Stalin trilogy.