UK Politics Thread

Blatant theft of public funds, PPE scandals and obscene hypocrisy aside I don't think any government can do anything about a global airborne virus.

The primary function is to pretend that there is a plan to avoid mass hysteria.

The Tories failed at that pretty miserably but in reality every country is Chief Wiggum shooting germs.

Thats not entirely true. Our pathetic response was also partially due to piss poor preparation. You would hope if Labour were in office that an adult would have seen long standing 'an airborne virus will fuck the entire country' audit findings and actually acted on them. If we had just done the absolute bare minimum it would have mitigated some of the shitty decisions these idiots had to make up on the hoof.

I appreciate that 100% of the governments mental bandwidth was taken up with brexit but it is an absolute dereliction of duty to assume thats literally the only thing of note that will happen during your term in office and on that front I'm sure Labour/anyone would have done better.

There were certainly plans in place for such an event and we already knew they were insufficient a good few years before COVID hit. If I remember correctly, it was David Cameron that decided to not pay any attention to the findings when the plans were trialed.

Plus, quite a few nations had gone through SARs and had learning from that. Many of them managed relatively well with COVID (such as Japan and Vietnam). No reason why we couldn't have had conversations with them to see what actually works.

Purely politics to not nix flights from china, too

Purely for the agony of watching the coverage it would have been “interesting” to see how Jezza vs Piers Corbyn would have played out given his brother’s attempt to be the new David Icke

Watching from outside, it seemed that the UK was doing about as well as many other countries, and seemed (at least) to be more led by science than a lot of them.
Politicians in every country were basically clueless about what to do, and most experts seemed to disagree as well.

In terms of deaths and finances, the UK seems to have come out of it worse than many countries. But that's partly because they went all-in on lockdowns and financial support (a very non-Tory thing to do).

With hindsight, maybe softer lockdowns and prioritizing the economy might have worked better. But even that's not really clear as there's still not much clarity on why some countries seemed to get hit much harder than others.

I'm happy to criticise the Tories and Boris for lots of stuff, but I doubt anyone else would have done much better/different. And if they did do better it'd probably have been largely luck.
Not that they didn't make mistakes.

Yeah we were in lock downs for way longer because they always fucking delayed it until they couldn't do anything else. If we'd have locked down sooner I'm sure we'd have been able to get back to relative normalcy sooner.

The Tories were typically focused on what would make for better politics, rather than what would be best for the country.

Remember when we were going to be allowed to travel and mingle freely in December 2020? Johnson and co. were so worried about being portrayed as The Grinches Who Cancelled Xmas that they left it until the 11th hour before scrapping those plans, which were fucking stupid anyway - did they think they'd negotiated a seasonal ceasefire with the virus or something?

On this occasion they should have taken advice from DJ Khaled regarding eating out.

That's a sensible option.

They were obsessed with getting people outside, get back to normal, blitz spirit, etc. Bonkers!

They wanted people to get back in the cities and a reason to stop giving money to the hospitality industry. What they care about is extremely selective.

Well, this is kind of the point, right? You'd hope *anyone* else wouldnt have been in those various positions in the first place. Yeah, every country had their own crosses to bear but we frequently found ourselves in a crisis of our own making. We were criminally under prepared for a pandemic, our health service has absolutely no surge capacity, our government was stacked with ludicrously unqualified people who frequently avoided making any decision until it was too late.... I mean, its all there in black and white in the covid enquiry.

So, yeah, I genuinely believe the opposite. I honestly believe it would be impossible to do worse unless you are actively trying to kill people.

Yeah but there was only a few months after 2019 to fix any of that. So that's testing Corbyn Vs May or Milliband Vs Cameron elections. The endemic problems were not getting fixed between December 2019 and February 2020 no matter who won.

I think everyone's perception of time post 2020 is fucked.

Probably an interesting study in how being holed up screws perception in time, for pretty much the entire planet.