Maybe I’m tainted. I’m sat in Sweden. I’ve been to work today. I had lunch in the canteen. I could have gone to the pub tonight. They’re just not getting it here. Maybe Matt Hancock getting serious was just what I wanted to hear.
"Let's not play party politics now" TRANSLATION The Tories have ****** this up like we knew they would, but because I'm a Tory ****** I won't criticise them.
Just A regular Tory then! Apparently, it’s what we voted for! I’m sick of seeing them talk about “plans” to do things (things that should have been done already) Only toffee I’ll give him is that he’s the first to ask the journalists if they want to come back at him. Until this, they ignored the question & said what they wanted! A shambles by a shambolic government
Great country if your rich not a strong talent pool in any of the main political parties. Privatisation deregulation and a running down of public services while financiers bankers and bureaucrats extract any wealth created leave a country with no long term plan for Economic and Social development. Local transport abandoned in places with places only 3 miles from the town centre left isolated.
If only he could practice the social distancing we are being told to. The government couldn't last week when they call came down with Coronavirus and even now look at the crowd behind him close together it's ridiculous.
The Tories are nasty creatures make no mistake. They have a history of being 'nasty' and even May hinted at it. The current crisis is unimaginably scary and made worse by weakening of infrastructure to deal with it - Tories again. However, now we are actually in it lets see how things pan out and see what actually happens and how the events are managed from now on. I am extremely sceptical on many levels but we are still early on. Lets just see.....
Leopards don't change their spots and neither do Tories. Whatever they do during this crisis, when they come out the other side they'll be Tories.
They will and they'll be nasty again. However during the war we had a Tory PM and we came through and then elected a transformative Labour government which set up the NHS which is being undermined...Lets come out the other side and see how the public perception has changed (if at all)
The PPE is starting to filter through, I know because I had 5 pallets of disposables gloves commandeered last Monday from an importer and I’ve volunteered to help out and next week I’m scheduled to deliver 2000 visors to NHS centres around Lincolnshire. Yes it’s late and yes it should have been in place and yes it shouldn’t need volunteers to deliver but the good news is it is starting to filter through and hopefully in place for when/if it gets really bad.
I can see your point a little bit in the here and now (and I know we are in the here and now), but do you think a Labour government, in power for as long as the tories have been, would have a health service in such a poor state? A Labour government would have the tools to fight this virus due to proper funding of the NHS.
I don’t give a monkeys about the political point scoring. there’s nothing less useful than slagging off the followers of a political party. I’m genuinely embarrassed by mates who think it’s useful to slag off ‘cruel’ Tories. And it’s not just labour supporters obviously, you should know you’re an idiot if your response to a valid point about BoJo is ‘yeah but Corbyn’. back to Hancock: he’s full of that jingoistic ‘we’re all in this together’ and ‘we’re working on it’. But the bottom line is that we knew we needed PPE and more respirators months ago, and when we should have been ordering them we dithered. When we could have accepted help from the EU we chose a ridiculous isolationist approach. It’s no way to behave on a crisis, we needed leadership in February not excuses in April. Yes the NHS is underfunded, but even if it hadn’t been, we’d have been no better prepared for this, it’s not about what they did last year, it’s about what they didn’t do in January and February when we sleepwalked into this.
I've had a lot if time on my hands since January due to injuries sustained when I came off my bike. In that time I've listened to and watched a lot of news. The warnings coming from Wuhan were clear and obvious. The government did nothing to help the NHS prepare for it or to get the population ready for it until the last few weeks. In my opinion, they should be liable to a charge of gross negligence manslaughter.
I've absolutely no problem with them not doing anything in terms of social distancing etc at first. Even now it's only a guess that this is the best way to deal with it, a guess based on false information from a college with a history of false information and a guess that's at odds with some other countries. So I completely get why they held off. What is unforgivable is not only not having plans in place after the big warning shots they had with ebola, sars, mers, and even the Salisbury incident but also not bothering to put anything together just in case when it started in china
Best post on this thread by miles. I know you and I have political viewpoints and opinion that often diverge, but at least you debate and make yours without resorting to profanity and personal abuse (sadly I succumbed yesterday having lost patience with one particular poster and, as I have on a number of occasions, retaliated) . Far too much dogma on here, frankly, as you say, embarrassing, from a small but significant group of people who would criticise the Tories/Boris Johnson, whatever they did and also some who believe Corbyn's Labour is the devil incarnate. In truth both parties have major strengths and weaknesses. I 'gave up' on some posters arguing about the differing financial policies -austerity on the one hand and spending our way out of trouble -on here a while back ( notably those who didn't understand the difference between Debt and Deficit) . It did not matter who is right and who is wrong but dogma takes over and rational debate flies out of the window with some and it degenerates into a slanging match and personal abuse. Suffice to say, I have a growing list on 'ignore' now and hopefully, I am on their list too. Slightly O/T I wish the BB only 'ignored' posts from people on my list actually responding to my posts or OPs initiated by them. It gets very confusing reading threads when all their posts are invisible even when they're only responding to other posters as it takes some working out what the hell is going on.
Whereabouts in Sweden are you? I have fond memories of very frequent business trips to Stockholm and Gothenburg.