What did Margaret say?

U turn if you want to! Well by my calculations Johnson has U turned 3 times now in only 3 weeks. The horrible one must be so proud as she looks up from her hellish home

 

It.s brilliant!! Whichever party is in power be it Labour or Cons, whenever a Government digs it's heels in they are accused by their opponents of being inflexible and 'failing to listen to the will of the people' and when they DO, they are accused of making U-turns and being indecisive.

As I said that seems to happen whichever Party is in Government.

 

It’s the British way

 

3 times in 3 weeks no less on issues anyone with a modicum of self awareness or a moral compass would know were terrible ideas in the 1st place.
There's u-turning and then there's failing to read the mood of the country during a crisis after you've been one of the architect's of social discourse for past 18 months. Staggering even for this PM and his cabinet.

Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron, May even the bitch in modern times wouldn't have got into this position.
When you've got nodding dogs and those who've sold their souls for positions of power you get this shitshow.

 

Even Ruth Davidson said she couldn’t believe he’d chosen this hill to die on.
They’ll be many more this PMs a Sheep in Sheep’s clothing as a famous Tory once said .

 

But his memoirs will be hilarious and his 750k a time after dinner speaking a riot, just don't mention the 65k dead and all those untruths.....Oh and how many children he'd actually fathered. The Brexit bus now is distant lie from another time and another era.

 

Have to disagree inasmuch as Thatcher did get into that position ...Remember (who can forget) the Poll tax where it was clear that she had made a huge miscalculation and it, in fact, brought here career to an end. By then though she had 'lost the plot' and thought she was omnipotent. I even recall her starting to use the pronoun 'we' in an attempt to imply inclusivity i.e. 'we' were all in it together!! Yeah right!!

I would like to say I would never wish ill on anyone or celebrate when they dies but along with a couple of other people, in her case, I make an exception. IMO Her policies and ideology have left a legacy and played a major part in the way our society cohesion has deteriorated in the past couple of decades.

 

Matt Hancock has done more than any other government ever on his own. Just watched the GMB programme. You couldn’t make it up.

 

I would suggest that (like Reagan) Thatcher was already starting to show signs of dementia while still in office - it was probably becoming clear to those around her which lead to the internal coup.

 

It seems the electorate has memory problems too, they’ve forgotten what the tories have done to the working class over the years

 

Behave yourself!

All you need to know is this....... who funds the Tory party - is it (a) the working man or (b) big businesses ?

 

Nothing wrong with changing your mind if you are obviously wrong. A decent govt should, of course, choose the right path the majority of the time. Unfortunately...

 

But when a Govt is making a U-turn every week, you have to start questioning it's judgement in making decisions initially. Like a manager being forced to make first half substitutions every week, because they can never get the team selection right

 

To be fair, there’s a difference between making complex policy decisions and changing them in light of new evidence, or because of a major political change and what’s happened here.

Here we have a populist prime minister making rushed decisions that prove unpopular forcing a U turn. Therese Coffey’s petty response to Marcus Rashford yesterday shows the Tories to be the nasty party, it wont be repaired by Boris’ U turn which just looks pathetic following what she did.

 

c) Russian and other overseas interests

 

In fairness though, big-business, Governments and the Civil Service, have all the manoeuvrability of a super tanker when confronted with new ever changing situations ( and let us be clear, Covid and the Pandemic is about as 'new and changing' as it gets.

Also, the UK Govt is not unique in being slated for its handling of the pandemic. In France, Macron and the Govt are being pilloried and threatened with legal action as is Conte in Italy, to name but two (the latter by a group in Piedmont - the hardest hit -which is actually controlled by Salvini and the Northern League).

The current UK Govt has, undoubtedly, made some very puzzling decisions together with bizarre and seemingly illogical policy reversals. Nevertheless, I still believe the phenomenon of 'hindsight bias', particularly from columnists and the media in general, not just in the UK but Worldwide, has exacerbated the discontent amongst the population regarding the handling of the situation.
It is obvious there is no right way or wrong way given there are still many conflicting views from experts, scientists and Health organisations on how to deal with it e.g. WHO changing advice more than once over the benefits or otherwise of wearing face masks.

 

Would that be the UK civil service who managed to process a 10x increase in UC claims in house on an in house built computer system.
Or the one that created a system to pay furloughed payments and self employed payments at pace.

unlike the test and trace system being managed by the private sector and ????

 

Maybe, but my experience of working for a major Telecoms company on major IT projects for Govt departments over a decade (with requirements creep during and after requirements capture stage being a common factor) paints a different picture . Slippage was commonplace and unlike projects for private sector where all those I worked on or encountered were delivered on time and within budget, invariably there were delays and increased costs.

 

Which is exactly why outsourcing massive IT contracts is a stupid thing to do.
Of course there’s mission creep, and where contractors become intransigent the taxpayer loses out massively.

Government departments are still stuck with outsourced systems that they can’t amend either because it’s not in the contract, it’s too expensive or even it’s not possible. Compare that to in sourced projects which are constantly updated.

I’m not blaming contractors, the issues were caused by a myriad of reasons, but you and I both know that fewer and fewer organisations are outsourcing IT because it just doesn’t work.

 

In the case of Telecoms and when the change from CTI (computer telephony integration) to VoIP occurred in a relatively short time, I don't think the expertise or infrastructure existed 'in house' and still doesn't. Huge enterprises rely on carrier grade switches for example. Companies like Avaya, Siemens and Genesys rule the roost (or did when I was still working) and probably still do. Not saying in house support do not have sufficient knowledge but design, build and configuration is highly specialised and in-house is usually not the best solution or even viable and cost effective.

On the point of "intransigent contractors" it does happen but in many instances Pubuic Sector contracts were often hard fought and Sales promise the Earth and leave the actual delivery bods with an uphill battle to deliver on-time in budget. Add to that the customer massively changing the requirements after sign-off which happens (ed) and you end up with slippage and budgets busting changes (even after the suppliers absorbed some of the additional development costs). I can recall one project where an off the shelf solution matching the original requirements had to be scratched after the original sign-off and a new innovative solution had to be developed simply because the customer had changed the scale of the requirement by a factor of 10.