Biffer wrote: ↑Thu Feb 04, 2021 7:27 pm
Paddington Bear wrote: ↑Thu Feb 04, 2021 6:58 pm
fishfoodie wrote: ↑Thu Feb 04, 2021 6:45 pm
Exactly, the law of unintended consequences !
To, 'Get Brexit Done'; the last two Cabinets have been packed with MPs who wouldn't have gotten within an asses roar of a Cabinet post, if being Pro-Leave didn't trump competence.
Put a lazy PM on top of the heap; & you aren't setting yourself up for success, if something comes along that needs hard work & intelligence at the top table.
The issue with this narrative is that key poor decisions, at least early, came from "following the science". I.e. we didn't close the borders because the government's pandemic response experts (forget the exact name but these documents are/were on the government website and were drawn up by civil servants, public health officials etc) thought it would be ineffective. Face masks etc took forever and we were told by officials that they didn't work. There's a number of other examples.
We also have a good point of comparison, Sturgeon had the same information and, particularly at the start, took very similar decisions.
What I'm getting at here is that we have seen a State failure with covid in the UK. Until the vaccine programme we hadn't had a success and this can't just be blamed on politicians as much as it easy to do. Of course Boris' indecision has contributed to this - the December spike was entirely avoidable - but I think there's a very strong case that
based on the expert advice the Government received we wouldn't have seen massive material differences in outcomes regardless of who was in Number 10/the Cabinet.
They followed the advice eventually. The scientific advice to lockdown came a week or ten days earlier in the first round and weeks in the current one. They may have saved tens if thousands of lives if they'd gone when the advice was given. The devolved administrations will say they couldn't do it independently until financial guarantees were forthcoming from Westminster - whether you believe that or not most likely depends on your existing political loyalties.
I think we have lost c40,000 lives since start of December? You would have thought that we would have learned from the first wave? The science was far more robust and the evidence was mounting about what needed to be done. The 2nd/3rd wave and virus mutations were entirely predictable and their impact was forecasted by the modellers - I know as I saw some of the modelling scenarios in mid December. The risks were clearly articulated then. The UK Gov took a conscious decision to not lock down earlier and tried to hold onto their commitment to Xmas, I would argue for political reasons, and by the time they changed their minds and change the message it was too late. They even brought kids back to school for one day, despite the modelling but to avoid the political embarrassment of not keeping to their political commitment. Their inaction has caused many, many thousands of lives in the last 3 months.
The devolved administrations were lucky and acted earlier. They saw the trends down south, they saw the spread of the new English variant and locked down before it could spread further afield. Scotland for example locked down when their number of cases was about half of that in England and they have continued to be about half the level ever since, hence the kids might get back to school earlier. The number of deaths per million in England compared with the devolved administrations has been far higher for the last couple of weeks, double that in Scotland for example, and will continue to be higher because of the significantly higher number of cases per million they have been recording in recent weeks. All of this stems back to the decision, or lack of one, by Boris to close down in time, getting the Xmas messaging fecked up and then bringing kids back to school for a day and letting all the mums spread the virus at the school gate. This isn't a Scotland/Wales/NI v England issue, this is looking at the figures and realising that the Blonde Bumblecunt fecked up big style and the numbers don't lie!
Vaccine strategy has been a success. The UK Gov managed to appoint a competent person to lead on this and we took calculated gambles on investments in drug companies and procurement that have paid off. The work of the uni research depts and drug companies has been fantastic. However the success of the vaccination roll out has been down to the NHS, PH leads and the forces support. It has been miraculous and demonstrated just how good the NHS is when resourced properly. You just wonder how different TTT could have been if we invested in the local PH systems and NHS in the first place instead of an incompetent leader and rip off merchants like Serco and Deliottes.
Does the success in the vaccination programme outweigh having one of the worst death rates and biggest drop in GDP in the world? can we use it to explain away over 110,000 deaths? Not in my book, not by a long way. It would be a sad irony if the herculean efforts of the NHS saves this current Govs bacon given the Blonde Bumblecunt and his Brexit Ultras have always wanted to get rid of it when they got into office.
