Amiga500 wrote: ↑Mon Apr 06, 2020 7:28 pm
solidarity wrote: ↑Sun Apr 05, 2020 5:14 pm
I liked the cut of Kier Starmer in the run up to the Labour election (that all went off pretty quietly, didn't it?) but the first headline today is him criticising the government for its mistakes. If that's his best opening comment, shame on him. If it's an out of context line that the papers have chosen to emphasise, to make a story, shame on them. The simple truth is that we could never have been fully prepared for this; mistakes are inevitable at all levels; people will die who might have been saved if this or that had been different, etc etc.
Sorry Solid, but Boris and his bunch of clowns have made this 10* times worse than it needed to be. I include the arrogant assholes from Imperial College that flat out refused to learn anything from other countries and instead insisted on using a basic flu model for attempting to drive decisions.
Boris, Cummings etc were more concerned with the economy initially. Not helped by the Imperial lot fumbling so awfully and significantly downplaying risk.
One glance at what the Chinese were doing -
more or less stopping a Trillion dollar economy to fight the virus - should have underlined just how serious it was before it got to Europe. Did Boris and the assholes think China arrived at that decision lightly?!?!
Why were all schools not told to immediately abandon ski trips to Italy when it kicked off there?
Where was everyone travelling from an infected country not told to self-isolate for 2 weeks (and not just the symptomatic)?
Those two measures alone could have cut the current numbers in half by denying the thing anything like the same toe-hold in the country.
*could have made it a lot more than 10 times worse than it needed to be!
I don't disagree that mistakes were made, and bad mistakes, mistakes that cost lives but that's not the point. We are jn a situation in which even the best of the experts disagree, as is shown by the different responses in different countries, each driven by 'experts'. With the best will in the world, today's wisdom is tomorrows folly. That's life. Maybe, in ten years time people will look back and say, Why were they so mad that they stayed isolated when they should have hugged each other and got to grips with the pain in a short sharp shock, killed off the weak and let the strong live? Did they not see that the second wave would be hugely worse than the first and that the social disruption would cause violent revolutions?'
My point is that Starmer should have been looking forward, rather than back, being constructive rather than carping. There will be time for recriminations, but now is not the time.
By the way, do you really want to hold China up as a model for social structures? Yes, they can do things that we can't do, but this also allows them to do things that anyone a liberal democracy must reject with a passion. Or do we have to say that strong social control works and that's the price we have to pay to be able to respond best to times like this that occur once a century.
Makes my head spin, Amiga, or maybe I'm coming down with something.