RandoEFC

Expecting students to pay for accommodation in a year where it looks like many universities are going to be forced to move their teaching online is a disgrace. The Scottish government have offered a 4 week rent rebate to some of the students affected in Glasgow but it isn't enough. I know from my own experience of teaching during lockdown that the technology is there to deliver online teaching. It has its own challenges when you're trying to get 25 teenagers logged into a Zoom call for a lesson at the same time, in houses with shared laptops and general immaturity, but there's no reason you can't do video lectures for university students. It's bad enough this generation won't have experienced a freshers' week and year like their predecessors. This whole being forced to self-isolate and find out after signing up to paid accommodation that they could have just stayed at home, and talk of them not being able to go home for Christmas is nothing short of scandalous. I know Covid 19 was starting to slow down towards the back end of the summer but did universities and policy-makers really think you could just go back to cramming 300 young adults into lecture theatres again? This was always going to happen. I'm not having this "it's fine for them because it only kills pensioners" shite. Yes, we do need to bear that in mind when we're making sweeping decisions that destroy sectors of the economy, but at the same time, there are people in all age groups with underlying health conditions, and even if it doesn't kill you, there are plenty of stories out there of people still suffering from chronic fatigue, breathing problems and other symptoms months after testing positive for the virus. This virus is a horrible one but the situation these students have been put into is farcical and having taught some of them last year when they had to go through the exam results scandal and subsequent, uncertainty over university places, proms, last day shenanigans and leaving ceremonies cancelled, now this, it's really pissing me off. This generation have been shafted like no other by circumstances beyond anyone's control. They need an arm putting around them, not being told that they're not allowed to leave their flats even for Christmas.

Amazing .

Everton twitter on fire this weekend. Firstly, one of the most followed fans in our circles started dubbing 35 year old Everton's post match victory song "Spirit of the Blues" over various movie scenes, the trend spread like wildfire through the fanbase. Some of my personal favourites: The song is now in the top 10 of the iTunes charts and rising .

It's a deliberate ploy for the government so that when people rightly criticise the flaws in the Test and Trace system they can accuse their critics of criticising the NHS. Whenever it comes up at PMQs Johnson always uses the full name and accuses Starmer of undermining the NHS and their great test and trace system. Painfully transparent populism.

I actually haven't got around to watching it, which is unbelievable to be fair, but I've only heard good things. I really need to get round to it!

I've had minor experiences with police supporting the school but not worked with them closely. I do know that my cousin and an old friend's missus that previously worked in the police. Both absolutely had the best of intentions, the system was difficult and still is for new recruits over here. Sexism is genuinely a bit of a problem actually. Theres no doubt that there are structural issues in police forces. My experience may not be that relevant though as I live on a backwater island where all the local coppers here are your mate's uncle or your uncle's mate. What are your experiences?

Utterly, utterly hilarious. I'm very sorry to those people whose lives are going to be impacted by this but I'm actually pissing myself at the incompetence.

Defund the police will switch off probably over 90% of the electorate before you manage to engage them in a conversation about what it means. It's an easily attackable slogan because it doesn't sum up what you're trying to put across. Even Reform the Police would be much, much better but still very bad. I actually think our police force are a massive positive for the country. Put yourself in their shoes, the vast majority of them go into the job wanting to protect and serve the public. When both the anti-racism protests and the pro-"statue" but actually pro-racism protests went on in London, our police were spat at, abused, attacked, and stood up to it professionally without hurting the members of the public there, even those that actually attacked them. There's no denying that some of them have unconscious biases that don't make them sinister, with a very small minority, as you have in every profession, harbouring some very real prejudices. We all want to change that but you have to do it by parts. There's no leader who can meet your definition of properly supporting black people, i.e. making everything and everyone in the country perfectly fair in one manifesto and one term of office. Starmer will properly support black people better than Corbyn ever could because he's actually potentially electable. It might not be perfect but wanting the perfect leader before worrying about winning the electorate over is Labour's problem to a tee over the past 5 years, and is one of the reasons we've ended up with Boris Johnson, Brexit and the disastrous handling of Covid.

You don't start with "defund the police" though do you. I attended a voluntary three hour workshop last night run by a group of BAME residents of the island specifically for teachers to hear about their experiences of racism in school and what we can do to help stop that from happening. As far as social media is concerned, I'm an absolutely rabid "woke leftie" because I really care about shit like that. Again, though, you can have a Labour government which will make some if not all of the changes you mention above, or you can put another Corbyn in charge who promises utopia and end up with a Conservative government who will put Chris Grayling back in charge of prisons, make all of those issues you've mentioned twice as bad and create another half a dozen on top of them. If Starmer starts aligning himself directly with BLM and plastering defund the police all over his election manifesto he'll end up with less seats than the Lib Dems. He's playing a smart game. He's outpolling Boris Johnson (shouldn't be that hard but the man did win an 80 seat majority less than a year ago) and Labour have gained over 10 points in the polls on the Tories, helped by the Cummings and exam result scandals yes, but if Corbyn was still in charge the Daily Telegraph would have found another skeleton in his closet by now and Labour would still be also-rans.

Starmer isn't pandering to the right though. He's appealing to the centre. You might view them as right wing compared to your own worldview, but on the spectrum of the British electorate, they are the centre. There are a lot of traditional Labour voters in that centre, there has to be otherwise they'd never have been in power. I'd love us to have a public like the Scandinavians where their "centre" is a lot more towards the left than ours but we just don't. You can't fight politically on the battleground you want to exist. Corbyn's leadership made a certain offer to the public. The offer wasn't accepted and it gave us the most right wing government we've had in our lifetimes. This Conservative offer would never have won against Blair. If we want any chance of living in a fairer country, unfortunately Labour are going to have to get into power by going what we'd call more to the right to get into power, and then showing the country the benefits of a left wing government. You can also hardly say Corbyn had an opinion on everything. He basically stayed out of the EU debate in 2016, then when it came to the elections in 2019 he didn't have an opinion on Brexit in an election that was forced to happen because of Brexit, other than holding a second referendum. I respect the man and didn't lose a wink of sleep voting for his Labour Party, and I wouldn't if there was an election tomorrow with him as leader. Unfortunately though, he got fucking trounced by an idiot who hides in fridges and unless you want the Tories to keep winning every election for the rest of our lifetimes, Labour need to make significant changes. Johnson has absolutely fucked Coronavirus and it'll soon become apparent that he's fucked Brexit too, but because the Tories know how to win, they'll replace him for the next election with whichever leader gives them the best chance of winning again. I want a Labour Party that fights to make my life better by getting into government and getting the Tories out more than I want a Labour Party that represents my significantly left-wing views on every single matter.

The people who let down the Black Lives Matter movement are the actual organisation Black Lives Matter. We all agree with the movement but the organisation themselves are actual extremists. The policing system in America is in need of actual reform. Can you say the same about the UK? I wouldn't personally. The Labour Party needs to be a governing party. A governing party can't just be activists and the majority of the electorate don't want activists governing them. The thing with Starmer is he can't win either way when it comes to the loud minority on social media. When he took a knee and posted it on social media in support of BLM he was accused of pandering to Corbyn's woke brigade. When he wasn't there at the front of the march on Whitehall he was accused of being "Blue Labour" and pandering to those causing the problem. Luckily for him, the majority of voters aren't involved in the culture war of Twitter and the internet. As far as most voters are concerned, and I'm not saying I'm in their camp, both Starmer and Johnson reflected their views on Black Lives Matter in that the movement has merit and the protests were legitimate but it didn't require a heated conversation about tearing down statues, defunding the police and rewriting school curriculums in the middle of a worldwide pandemic.

I don't mind this at all. I think he nailed it with his line about patriotism meaning that he wants his country to be the best place to grow up in and the best place to grow old in. Reclaiming the concept of patriotism from the right-wing and the nationalists is very important. The idea of Britishness or Englishness doesn't have to be incompatible with globalism. Labour has been damaged by successful attack lines from the Tories and the right wing press that Corbyn allowed to happen because he continued to appeal to his core base instead of trying to appeal to enough people to win an election - the anti-semitism concerns, the anti-British rhetoric, all of that needs challenging. Corbyn may have made speeches that made you, me and many others feel as if there was finally a man leading one of the major parties who really speaks to our ideologies but after a decade of Tory Britain I'm more than willing to lose some of that in exchange for a Labour leader who is actually in power and can do some of the things that I believe would make the country a better place. I have to challenge you on the teachers point. Starmer's line was always that he wanted schools to reopen, but that it had to be safe to do so. This was the view of the majority of teachers as well. Don't let the media convince you that the stance of the loudest protesters at the top of the teaching unions represents the voice of the majority of the profession. None of us liked working from home, it was a nightmare. It has been a nightmare getting schools open again for school leaders who have had to make their own contingency plans in the face of inadequate and inconsistent guidance from the Department of Education, but every teacher I know or follow on Twitter is absolutely made up to be back teaching face to face. The problem is that the failed test and trace system has left (apparently) up to a million kids now being home-schooled again because a teacher or a member of their year group is waiting for a Covid test, or a result from one to be processed. This has only become an apparent issue in the last few weeks since schools reopened. Schools could not have stayed closed for any longer and really, really can't close again. The mental health toll on our younger generation as well as that on the teachers themselves would be disastrous. None of this was about being beaten into submission. In fact, when they tried to force all primary schools back before the summer holidays when it was clearly too soon, the government were forced to back down. At this point, the parliamentary Labour Party were fighting the corner of teachers where the majority at the time felt it was too soon and the suggestions made to make it happen were impractical. Starmer hasn't been left an easy job. You're being unfair for me expecting him to lead in the polls six months into his leadership when the party were anything from 13-17 points behind at the point he took over. He's had a lot of help from the Tories shooting themselves in the foot and these are extreme times but a swing of that many points in half a year isn't to be sneered at. Most of the journalists that represent those "swing voters" have had more good things to say about him than bad. Overall though, we're more or less on the same page.

Niasse saving Koeman's job with a brace against Bournemouth and then scoring the last goal of his tenure at Everton in the 5-2 defeat to Arsenal has a decent case to be peak banter-era Everton. Plenty of competition though.

I disagree. Where are the shite points? It's not like this is a Momentum twitter feed. I read about 6-7 posts in a row before posting that and all of them are rooted in truth from the PM deliberately referring to it as NHS Test and Trace when it's actually run by Serco, a private firm with links to Dominic Cummings and, if I'm not misremembering, one of the half a dozen or so companies that have been awarded multi-million pound government contracts without a competitive process taking place, to the fact that Survation and Ipsos Mori also released polls this week which have the Tories 2-3 points ahead despite the one YouGov poll that has them tied with Starmer edging Johnson for preferred prime-minister. You don't need to analyse the regional data to know that England is by far the most Conservative and pro-Brexit out of the four countries in the union. It might be less Conservative than it was when it voted in December but it's still true. I know you like to come and offer a "more sensible" point of view in this thread but you've made your own set of claims in this post which look to me to be more based on posters' previous contributions to the thread and their biases than what they've actual posted. I'm more than happy to see what you mean if you can point out which ones are shite points.

A bunch of vaguely intelligent (too generous? ) randomers on the internet, most with no relevant qualifications, can make about 10 valid points in the space of a day in this thread, blindly obvious criticisms of this government, this Prime Minister, and their response to this pandemic. They're still leading in the polls you know. That's England (yes England, not Britain).

Incredibly worrying as schools simply cannot close again.

The new breed of Tory MPs are actually terrifying in their incompetence and zealotry. Dehenna Davidson, Andrea Jenkyns may or may not be new - today she picked a fight with James O'Brien on Twitter with what looked like a parody patriotic tweet include the hashtags #ProBrexit and #ProTrump, the only problem being that she spelt British wrong but she loves the country and all those Labour MPs are Marxists who want us to get fingered over a hay bail by the nasty EU, or something. There's a moron who's an MP in Stoke now with a silly name who tweets ill-informed shite on Twitter on a regular basis. Nadine Dorries too. Then you've got the other breed of frightening old Tories like Desmond Swayne who is essentially an anti-masker, always perched on the back benches pressuring the more media-savvy Number 10 and cabinet to make sure they don't pander too much to the filthy majority. Not even mentioned Duncan-Smith and Rees-Mogg. I completely agree that Boris Johnson doesn't really believe in anything and instead has just spent his life hitching his wagon to whichever cause he thinks will benefit him the most. Nothing epitomises this more than the fact that he wrote a pro-Remain and pro-Leave article during the referendum campaign and decided the day before which one to publish based on personal political gain. An absolute empty vessel of ambition. There's some lemons in the Labour Party who are MPs as well. Then you've got the Lib Dems who had Layla Moran who's absolutely bonkers as one of the last two contenders for leader a few weeks ago. Sadly, the majority of people who have their heart set on politics from an early age seem to have real issues relating to anything that actually happens in real peoples' lives. Those predominantly Tory MPs though who think we're still living in the 1950s and think they're geniuses because their rich parents bought them an elite education, then left their fortunes or companies to them to inherit so that they never had to get a job themselves, say they worked "in the city" as an investor for a decade with money they've never had to work for, before being parachuted into a safe Blue seat in the South-West so they could take their rightful place presiding over the little people are definitely the hardest to swallow. Keir Starmer made another impressive speech today. He talked about patriotism in a way that really resonated with me. Not "get your union jacks out lads, everyone else is worse than us because we're British and we won the war mate" patriotism. He said "I want this to be the best country to grow up in and the best country to grow old in". That's real patriotism. What hardline Brexiteers call patriotism is a slightly polished version of xenophobia which I cannot relate to at all. If Starmer keeps sticking to messaging like that which will appeal to the majority of Labour's lost voters, while sticking to the values of making life better for normal people, there's no reason why he shouldn't be successful. Reaching out across the media is massive. He already goes on LBC with Nick Ferrari once a month and writes for the Telegraph and he's consistently had plaudits from Dan Hodges from the Mail on Sunday who is a rare case of a right-leaning journalist who also has it in him to criticise a Tory government and praise a Labour opposition. All of this sees him reaching a wider audience than Corbyn ever could.

Yeah they're being really stupid by describing it as "pubs". They'd sound less dumb making the point that it's about the locations where people are cramming into bars and dance floors together at 3am.

Koeman was a massive twat to Niasse then eventually was forced to throw him on to save his job against Bournemouth at home. Niasse was a championship level striker but will be much more fondly remembered by Evertonians than ham face.

Don't. The right wing free speech mob will be out in force trying to put a pro-Brexit Conservative peer in charge of Westminster Abbey to stop them from being biased towards the woke lefties.

There's been rumours from various sources that Johnson will resign early 2021 after the Brexit transition period. Makes sense to me, he can dine out on having been Prime Minister and call himself the man who delivered Brexit while someone else cleans up the mess he leaves behind and has to put their name to the electoral pain the Tories might take in the coming years.

This second wave starting to look real now sadly. When the positive cases started going up and hospitalisations and deaths were staying low, it looked like it was just more cases getting identified because of better testing and contact tracing. Now it looks like a combination of that and an increase in the spread again. Difficult winter ahead. On the island we've had our first three cases for almost 100 days in the past week or two. All returning from overseas so we don't have it back in the community yet but it feels like a matter of time. However, if the UK gets any worse I can see us going back to people not being allowed to leave the island at all. The teachers' unions are in talks with the government over here about extending the Christmas holidays to 3 weeks in exchange for reducing the summer holidays by a week in 2021. As the rules over here are still a mandatory two-week quarantine on return to the island, without putting something like this in place, many of my colleagues won't be able to go and visit their families in the UK for Christmas. What an utterly depressing year and that's coming from someone living on an island where we eliminated the virus months ago and are essentially living as normal within our bubble. Luckily all my family live here too so the Christmas issue isn't a thing for me.

Pubs and hospitality is a difficult one in general. On face value, they're trying their best not to crash the hospitality sector by forcing it to basically shut down again. Bailing them out would probably become necessary and that' s a huge outlay for the Treasury and a further inevitable increase in tax for all of us down the line. That's how it looks from a policy makers point of view. When it gets to ground level and you're told you can't see both sets of grandparents at once but you can go to the pub with 4-5 mates, yeah it feels pretty silly. Saw a report this morning saying that there could be up to 40,000 active cases a day in the UK now but the official numbers aren't that high because of the delay in processing tests. That number seems steep but it does seem likely with the number of people saying they can't get a test or it's taking days to get their results back that daily cases are more than the 3-4k being reported. What a nightmare. Having schools open again seems to be causing a major issue. One element of the problem does seem to be people booking coronavirus tests for a runny nose which is overly cautious in my opinion. I've heard horror stories though of whole classes or even year groups self-isolating because one teacher or student is waiting for results from a test. Seems like a failure in risk management to me but the testing system does seem to be on the verge of collapse in many parts of the country. The government are saying that they're still "carrying out" almost the most tests in Europe which is fair enough. I'm guessing this means that they're counting tests that have been carried out at a test site and sent to a lab because reports from across the country suggest that the number of tests being processed is lagging behind. They either need to raise the bar for being qualified to take a test which isn't ideal, or start increasing lab capacity somehow.

It's very simple for me. Last year, the deal was "oven ready" and "got Brexit done". Now, the deal is nothing short of a national threat. So (if we're being generous) one of three things is true: a) The deal is bad and Boris Johnson was lying during the election campaign. b) The deal is good and Boris Johnson is lying now. c) Boris Johnson genuinely thought the deal was a good one and it has taken him almost a full year to realise that it actually isn't very good which makes him incompetent. The central issue with Brexit is that you have to have a border somewhere if you want Great Britain to have different regulations to Europe. Your options here are: a) Create a hard border between Northern Ireland and Ireland, violating the Good Friday Agreement. b) Create a trade border between Britain and Northern Ireland, effectively leaving Northern Ireland in the European Union in all but name. c) Somehow force the Republic of Ireland to follow the regulatory changes in Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK which is impossible as Ireland is still an EU member. The fact that after 4 years, people still don't understand this fundamental clash between the Good Friday Agreement and Brexit says all you need to know about how well-informed they think we deserve to be.

Sadly this is changing too as for younger football fans Hollywood football is becoming normalised through the increasingly Americanised pay per view coverage, the celebrity status of even squad players in the Premier League, including the absurd micro analysis of utterly boring transfers and stuff like FIFA Ultimate Team commercialising elite players by making them difficult to obtain. They even have a reveal day for the updated player ratings weeks before the game is released each year now. The modern football fan will spend 1000% more time arguing about whether Salah should be an 89 or a 90 on EA Forums for the rest of their life than actually being in a football stadium.