Whether I am or not is peanuts compared to the electorate considering this to be the case. What’s more likely? Millions of people have had a lobotomy or millions of people see no credible alternative to Borris Fucking Johnson? Occam’s razor here I think.
Blaming the electorate really is madness.
Whilst the Labour party is currently a non-entity and the lib-dems don’t seem to exist, it’s a blue vote from me. I’m shooting myself in my left foot because it’s fractionally my less favourite.
OK. Let’s Occam’s Razor it.
This government have caused the deaths of thousands of its own citizens. Boris Johnson has taken personal responsibility for this macabre failure.
Is it more likely that the Labour Party is so shit that it’s actually preferable to continue with a party who have failed in their most basic responsibility to this horrific degree, or that there is something broken about our democracy and our country.
It’s number two, obviously.
Then you are part of the problem.
You are saying you would vote for a party that has led to the deaths of tens of thousands of its own citizens. Because you think the Labour Party are a bit crap.
That’s utterly perverse logic.
At least when Tony Blair killed 100,000 Iraqi’s I recognised the horror of this, left the party, and didn’t vote labour again until he had fucked off.
Except this counters your own point. The volume of traffic (migration) within Europe is far greater (and travels far more freely) than the volume of traffic between China (and in particular Wuhan) and South Korea, Japan or Thailand. They are just wildly different situations.
As at 23 February 2020, South Korea was dealing with a 7 day average of 143 new cases per day, Italy was dealing with 93, and Japan just 18.
This doesn’t suggest to me that Japan was ever seriously “under the pump” early doors. Indeed, Japan’s 7 day rolling average didn’t go above 600 new cases until 23 July, whereas Italy’s went above that by 7 March and went above 5,000 on 23 March.
South Korea hit 600 on 3 March (just 4 days before Italy), peaked at 617 two days later and then remained below 110 from 21 March to the 16 August. A level of new cases that Italy have never managed to get to since 26 February last year.
Japan didn’t hit 5,000 new cases throughout the whole of last year (but did in January of this year, peaking at 6,446 on 11 January 2021). South Korea’s rolling 7 day average peaked at 1,047 on Christmas Day. By contrast, Italy’s peaked at 35,073 on 16 November.
Once it hit Europe (Italy mainly) containing the spread was always going to be nigh on impossible, which is why ALL European countries cannot be meaningfully compared with Japan, South Korea and Thailand.
No, it’s not. That would be to make the assumption that the bulk of the population is fundamentally insane. The truth is there is no credible alternative. Nobody wants to vote for Boris, you do know that surely?
Nobody votes for me so it’s their fault. That’s just batshit crazy.
I wonder how long I’d have lasted on this forum if Labour had have won the last election and managed this crisis and I stuck the boot in in every post, every day?
Yes the blues fucked up royally but that does not mean (by any means) that anybody else would have done a better job. Compared to the USA we’ve been nothing short of incredible.
Currently I don’t think the Labour party could manage a tea party let alone the country.
No it doesn’t. I never said anything about them being insane. I said there was something wrong with our country. I said there is something wrong with our democracy.
This isn’t about voting Labour. I don’t give a shit who you vote for. Vote Lib Dem if you want. Vote UKIP. Just don’t vote for them.
Not voting Conservative at this point is a moral obligation. If you walk into the polling booth at the next election and vote conservative you are endorsing everything they have done to lead to a death toll that probably going to be about 150,000 by the time we’re done.
If Labour caused the deaths of 100,000 people I’d leave the party and not vote for them until they removed the leader responsible.
That’s not a hypothetical scenario. It’s what happened and what I did.
And I don’t think ‘Well Labour would have done any better’ is a valid argument. Its a moot point. It cannot be proved or compared either way. Nor is ‘we did better than America’ particularly clever either. Last time I checked the UK was around 1,850 deaths per million, and the USA was around 1,580.
If you can’t stand to vote for one of the other parties, then don’t vote.
It’s very difficult to make any sort of assessment as to how different the outcomes would have been had Labour been in charge. Some very basic broad brush ‘feelings’ from me would be…
There wasn’t much to choose between the two at the beginning, Labour were largely supportive of what the government were doing (following the scientific advice). However, by the second wave differences started to become more pronounced.
Labour would have locked down areas of the country quicker at the beginning of the second wave.
Labour would have been less likely to have introduced tougher migration measures than the Conservatives, but would have been more likely to have introduced such measures earlier.
Labour would have joined the EU PPE procurement scheme.
Labour would have been more likely to have joined the EU vaccine procurement scheme.
Not sure what Labour would have done regarding test and trace. Testing has been good so I doubt Labour would have outperformed the Conservatives here. But tracing has been a shambles so you’d hope Labour would have done better here (does anyone know what Labour would have done differently re contact tracing?).
I’ve put in red what outcomes I think would have been worse, green what would have been better, and black is neutral or I don’t know what Labour would have done differently.
No you’re proving that there’s no credible opposition. You can’t see it, fair enough. The politics in this country are at crisis point because the current bunch of self-serving wankers in charge have nobody on the other side of the house with the whit or intelligence to stop them.
Last point as this is turning into tennis. If (after this government’s performance) the opposition is not leading the polls by double digits, that can only be the fault of the people who’s job it is to hold the incumbents to task. Blaming the electorate is casting about for any explanation but the blazingly obvious truth.
As for UKIP, I was offered the opportunity to stand for them. That conversation ended VERY quickly.
Labour probably wouldn’t have spunked piles of cash to their mates, I’ll give them that.
Not specifically. But I would assume they would have gone through the local NHS care teams that already exist, and I believe are supposed to fulfil this function, rather than try to create something from scratch using private contracting.
The USA death rate is far more my accident than design (Trump) and they do have a rather substantial geographical advantage over us. As for not voting, never. You can’t consider politics and democracy to be broken and tell somebody not to vote.
We’ll have to see what the various enquiries and court actions reveal about all of that. There were 1,000s of contracts awarded though - it’s inevitable that some of them are going to go to people who know people in government. That would have been equally true of Labour as well.
I agree that there are certainly concerns about cronyism though so hopefully we can get to the bottom of that.
It was the cronyism and scandal that ultimately did for Major’s government. They killed the golden goose rather than Labour rescuing it. Same will happen here I think eventually. Anybody fancy forming a party? We’d get on like a house on fire 
I think a fundamental difference between Labour and the Conservatives is that Labour would not have seen Covid as a get rich quick opportunity to funnel contracts for services and equipment to their mates. They would have worked with existing suppliers to scale up and this would have mitigated the PPE fiasco’s in the early part of the pandemic that saw nurses trying to improvise PPE out of bin bags and the like.
To me that’s the biggest fundamental difference that would have saved lives.
Labour would have also done more to secure schools and prevent them being being hubs for infections.
I don’t think Labour would have thrown care homes under the bus.
I also don’t think you can describe the test response from the government as being ‘good’. It was an absolute fucking shambles in the summer. Have we forgotten people being told to drive 300 miles to get a test, the double counting of completed tests, the continued missed targets from Matt Hancock.
Yes, some fair points here. It baffled me why working with existing suppliers to help them scale up wasn’t the way forward. Why did they think that middle men would have been any better or more efficient at securing additional supply than those who already work in public sector procurement? Of course…I know what your answer would be!
I agree also that Labour would probably have taken a different route with schools but actually that’s a double-edged sword and that may have had a worse outcome.
I agree with you on care homes. Another baffling decision and one that Labour would have been less likely to have taken.
I partly agree with your criticisms on the testing. It was a huge undertaking and there are going to be these logistical fuck ups along the way. On the whole it has been very good and I don’t think you can assume that under Labour there would be no inadvertent logistical fuck ups at all. That was hardly a policy decision from the Conservatives.
