Unnecessary Legislation: the Coronavirus Bill

This was first posted on Facebook on 23rd March 2020, with support from my Ko-Fi network.

Look, imagine an afternoon when you settle down to listen to Parliamentary debate for eight hours (with breaks for tea and food and actually a glass of wine about 8pm because OMG) and it is interrupted by:

The Alex Salmond verdict (at least 8 out of the 13 jurors decided Not Guilty for most of the charges, Not Proven for the attempted rape charge, and a horde of sexist gits all over Scotland rose up to cheer, including, unfortunately, SNP MPs Angus MacNeil and Joanna Cherry).

The Tokyo 2020 Olympics have been postponed by the IOC to 2021.

Boris Johnson announced at 8:30pm that from tomorrow the UK is in lockdown.

And all the while, in the Commons, the Coronavirus Bill is passing at a gallop through the Second Reading debate, the Committee of the Full House debate, and he Third Reading vote. It’s now off to the House of Lords.

More homes, more jobs

There is a story – probably untrue – that a famous Nazi speaker was invited to address Italian peasants in a pro-Mussolini village shortly after Mussolini and Hitler became allies. He made a speech culminating in the rhetorical demand “Which will you have – guns or butter?” and was startled when the Italian peasants bellowed back in unison “Butter!”

During most of the BNP demo yesterday, there were just three of us and three of them. One of them didn’t talk to us: he stood handing out anti-halal leaflets, or trying to, to everyone who entered KFC.

The other two talked to us. In between saying things like they weren’t racist, but Britain is a white Christian country and ought to stay that way, got nothing against black people but British people ought to get first crack at the jobs that are going, they said: There aren’t enough jobs. There aren’t enough houses. People are unemployed, people are homeless.

These are facts. We all three tried to argue with them that the fault lay not with “the immigrants” nor with “the Jewish bankers” but with governments that consistently won’t spend money on job creation or building new homes, but they were absolutely sure that the problem was “too many immigrants” and “too much money spent in Europe”.

But the plain fact is: when the economy is in recession, the government needs to spend more, not less, to save jobs, not to make people unemployed. Austerity doesn’t work.

Irregular nouns: Fair use and libel

It would appear to be one of those irregularly-inflected nouns that I was not previously aware of.

When Paul Routledge of Landlord References quotes (word-for-word) an entire article from the Edinburgh Tenants Action Group website, he defends his doing so

“Those is the rules – if I quote you and if you don’t like it don’t write it!”

When other people quote things Paul Routledge has said, in broadcast media or on Twitter, this is (according to him) libel.

It began with an article written for EPTAG:

Stop criminal landlords

‘Cos I’m frae Govan an’ ye’re frae Partick
This yin here’s fae Bridge o’ Weir
And thon’s fae Kinning Park
There’s some that’s Prods, there’s some that’s Catholic
But we’re Mrs. Barbour’s Army
And we’re here tae dae the wark.

Probably the worst private landlord I ever had to do with was the one in Reading who reacted to the news that I had been burgled: had the burglar had damaged his property getting in? No, I said. “Well, that’s all right then.”

I’ve rented from 11 private landlords, for periods ranging from seven years to a few weeks, and mostly found that the less I saw of my landlord the better I liked them.