Anybody on here who voted Leave and then Tory...

Maybe. But both national lockdowns that we have had have come after a period of inevitability where it was a case of when and not if. Johnson's dithering on it has cost the country both in terms of health and economy. His resistance to a second lockdown was purely party political, and then he inexplicably waited until after half term. Then Christmas relaxations, everybody knew that the Christmas bubble rules would be tightened up. It had already happened in other devolved nations, but again, he waited. We will now have a week or so of being told that there won't be a third national lockdown. Then there'll be a third national lockdown.

Yes, you need to be reactive to some degree. But the Government need to start reacting faster.

 

Did they impose cuts under Austerity to run their Health Services to crisis point, to not follow up the recommendations of an exercise so their countries wouldn’t be as exposed to a Pandemic? Did they use Austerity To use an an excuse to reduce a working person’s terms and condition and to hand out Govt contracts to their friends? Did they deny that Austerity no longer existed? Oh, and it wasn’t just The EU that was in Austerity it was pretty much global. The Tories ran it longer to suit their political and personal goals.

 

Labour were within touching distance of going bankrupt before Corbyn took over. The rise in membership saved it from doing so.

It’s big money and a big issue for Labour. If you add this to the loss of unions political funds then Labour will be in no financial state to fight a GE.

Personally I don’t have a great deal of time for Corbyn but financially he saved the party with the ground roots funding. A better question will be how do you replace that funding and what do they want in exchange.

I can’t see Starmer lasting much longer if he keeps suspending people for what is basically disagreeing with him.

 

“ not likely to vote for extremes”. Have you seen who is PM and look at how the cabinet is constituted. It’s the far right of the far right. One step up from Oban.

 

This. Labour certainly don’t own my vote. If the go back to being a rerun of Blair we might as well just have the real tories in power rather than a tribute act.

 

If the choice is between the Tories and the Tory Lites, I know where my vote is going. It's a **** choice, but there's no point throwing your vote away as one is still significantly better than the other.

 

I am hoping that Labour agrees pre election pacts with LiBDems, Greens and possibly the SNP with a firm commitment to moving away from FPTP to an electoral system where we can all vote for parties that we actively support rather than being pushed into choosing the least worst.

In the absence of that if Labour veers back to being a political version of the bootleg Beatles I will happily vote Green. For me it depends on the policies they run on not what colour rosette they have.

Maybe at the end of the day they can take the gamble that even if they concentrate their efforts on chasing the racist xenophobe vote I will vote for them because I have nowhere else to go.

What they can’t gamble on us not mobilising younger people to vote. Otherwise we will go full circle to 2010 when Brown mainly as a result of a combination of left apathy and young voter apathy got less than 30 percent of the vote.

 

There was no great choice for the reasonable man to pick from, last time.

Many went for the perceived lesser evil.

 

then they get what they deserve as they knew who and what they were voting for.

 

I would say that a virus is completely predictable whereas humans less so. It was widely predicted that the virus would spread in pretty much exactly the way it has. Epidemiologists have been right on the button in predicting it's behaviour and have been talking about possible mutations since day one. None of what has happened would have come as a surprise to the experts. The problem is the people handling this are politicians with little or no understanding. In the particular case of the UK, the politicians in question are singularly inept and ignorant, led by the biggest ignoramus of the lot who couldn't even be arsed to go to the COBRA meetings at the start of the pandemic.

 

They got what they voted for, not what they deserve.

They deserved a better choice.

 

I would have thought that with the brains the government has at its disposal (clearly not their own) it wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility to speculate that the answer to the channel port dilemma would involve testing. Couldn’t they have gambled and started testing the drivers at the earliest opportunity, just in case testing was needed?

 

They could have voted Green. They could have voted for sone excellent policies put forward by Labour (regardless of where you stand on Corbyn). They could have voted LiBDem.

Instead they chose they chose to vote based to a large degree on racism hatred and xenophobia so they get exactly what they deserve. The voters need to take their share of the blame for plague island and thousands needlessly dead because unfortunately we also get what they deserve.

 

Well I don't agree with any of that.

The moderate middle are not racists hate filled nor xenophobic. They are not inclined to vote Green or Libdem or Corbyn because of the extra baggage you'd get with all of these.

They are not to blame for the death of any covid victim.

They might vote for Starmer though.

 

‘Did he tell everyone to fill the beaches in the Summer?’. Well - mmm, by shutting everything else and saying it was fine to go to the beach then he kind of did, didn’t he?

 

Whatever one thinks of the response to covid across the world and however one tries to dress things up to excuse or sympathize with MY government I'm afraid that any defence of Johnson and his circus act is pathetic. MY government has handled the pandemic in the most inept, casual, laughingly sad way imaginable. I dont care if the response is reactive or proactive or whether Johnson has had a tough time. The Government has been utterly shi.te and any pro-Tory sympathizers on here know that to be the case. And...just in case anyone wants to throw the 'but corbyn' towel at me I would indeed have said the same if we'd got a Labour government. It would have been a joke. However, we've not got a Corbyn Government have we? We've got a ****-show of incompetence which is Tory. Can certain people please stop making tenuous excuses for this calamity of a Government? I just think it would be decent of you if you did. Thank you

 

I don’t think there’ll be much room for excuses after the public inquiry.

 

Most of them will be long gone into the sunset by the time the inquiry is over.

 

Sun-lit uplands?