Herd Immunity

I'd have charged the owner!

 

Rashford isn't going to be hampered by a tory majority, because he's a footballer and not an MP.

 

The problem is that in this day and age anything that anybody affiliated with labour says is dismissed by the Tories and their supporters as just partisan politics in the middle of a pandemic. It works when it's somebody like Rashford purely because he's an outsider and in the eyes of the public he has nothing to gain from it, so he must be right.

 

Absolutely. Unfortunately many people care more about either "the economy" or their social lives that other peoples actual lives.

 

So it’s possible to change a Govts policies regardless of a Govts majority. Imagine what he could achieve with a political party behind him.

 

From the evidence given today, the PM was warned on two occasions not to go against Rashford in public - and especially not to go back on his word if he did. On both occasions he backed down and lost face. That little exchange told me a lot about Johnson as PM - he thinks he knows better than his advisors (who are experts in their fields), but he really, really doesn't.

Cummings is another who isn't suitable for the role he held, but he did actually admit that today.

Whether we like it or not, the Covid response was shaped by Brexit and that fateful day in 2016. With a different result, Johnson would almost certainly not have been in charge *now* and the government wouldn't have wasted the initial time concentrating on that instead of Covid.

 

There is something to that certainly. But of course Biden offered an alternative during a pandemic and opposed successfully. He realised that to do so he needed to firm a broad based coalition that offered real difference. With his constant support of Johnson and alienation of vast swathes of prospective Starmer has achieved the opposite.

 

I think the platform and the reach that a high profile footballer has, along with a background that proves his feeling on the subject is genuinely strong is a more powerful campaign tool than a political party.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...months-before-election?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Here’s what a political party can achieve during a pandemic by offering real change.

Can’t say I agree there. Rashford got a lot of negative publicity for the right wing press. But nothing stuck because he was clear and articulated an issue and changed the narrative.

 

That's part of it, but the main reason nothing stuck was because he's a young public figure with nothing to gain out of what he's doing. If he was Starmer it would be very easy to dismiss what he was saying as partisan and just him trying to get ahead politically. And it would have worked.

 

the problem for Starmer is that he offered no opposition so is equally tied to Johnson. He had the opportunity to offer an alternative as Biden did. As the Greens in Germany did but other than wanting teachers lives out at even more risk he missed the opportunity.

 

I still can’t believe after 18 months of us arguing you think we wanted to ‘do nothing’.

Lockdowns don’t work. They simply delay and in the process kill people. It’s just simple pigheadedness and pure confirmation bias to believe, after all the empirical evidence you now have across the whole of Europe, that they do.

The fact that you’ve now aligned yourself with Dominic f-cking Cummins, of all people, says it all.

 

Lockdowns do work, they stop hospitals being over run.

 

Couldn’t agree more. That’s why that set of people you’re describing - like you and Churton - happily supported lockdown and carried on doing their middle class jobs unharmed while poor people went without, had their cancer undiagnosed, died alone in nursing homes excluded from their loved ones, lost their homes or scurried about fetching nice things to those selfish people’s front doors.

 

From a purely personal standpoint no lockdown would have been far more financially beneficial to me. And I wouldn't have done anything different without a lockdown, I was already working from home and I already did the vast majority of my supermarket shopping online.

If that makes me selfish for wanting something that is personally negative or neutral at best but in my opinion better for the country as a whole, then I guess I'm selfish.

 

Still talking absolute balderdash I see.
By the way I didn't work during lockdown, don't have a middle class job, went to see the doctor when required and received treatment. Nobody had to scurry about to my door, my father in law received emergency hospital treatment (which would have been problematic had the health system been overrun) and my immediate family who both have asthma are both fine.
So, to summarise, you're wrong on just about every count regarding me and continuing to champion your crackpot ideas that would have seen literally millions more dead around the world. But hey, you crack on, thankfully nobody paid any attention to your ideas.

 

Ah OK. So to précis - you and your family were ok, so everyone must have been. Kind of proved my point on the selfishness, no?

Haha, and you have the nerve in the same breath to call me a crackpot. I give up, you win, it’s impossible to make any headway in an argument with someone who makes up patently ludicrous numbers, utterly disproven by every single piece of empirical scientific date we have and uses them as a basis for an argument. It’s like trying to to have a conversation with an evangelical religious person, or Neil Ferguson.

You win, you’re right. The 16 months and counting of lockdowns were amazing, we’d all be dead without them and if they’d just started two weeks earlier there wouldn’t have been a single death. That two weeks is the only reason 130k are dead. By the way, whatever you do don’t look at the stats in Texas or Florida as they are blasphemy.

 

it seems to me that you are describing a poorly managed lockdown. The problem is the government in charge failed to administer it properly. A universal basic income and better management of the NHS could have solved many of your perceived ills quite easily

 

Every country in Europe had broadly the same result, regardless of how stringent their measures were or the timings, to a greater or lesser extent. Remember loads of people on here wànking over Spain’s hardcore lockdown measures and saying we should do the same? How did that work out for them? Those Asian countries that the lockdown perverts point to as getting it right instigated most of the policies of a totalitarian state. If that’s how people want to live because they’re so terrified, then OK, but let’s not pretend it’s anything other than a frightened population cowering for a fundamentalist hardline regime. That always ends well for the population!

By the way, how’s Taiwan getting on? That’s the example folk normally point to when they say ‘lockdowns can work’, right?

I do agree with your point about giving the poorest more support though. I’m not keen on UBI as the mechanism as I think it sets a precedent for the longer term but I get that there’s potentially a case on needs must.