Author Topic: Is Boris’s Lax Leadership Putting Us All in Danger ?  (Read 109533 times)

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Offline Mr Gray

Re: Is Boris’s Lax Leadership Putting Us All in Danger ?
« Reply #450 on: April 21, 2020, 12:08:12 PM »
But he hasn’t, has he ? 

Do you think it’s just coincidence that Britain is on track to have the highest death toll in Europe or the incompetence of this government?

I think to understand  why you would need to look at all the evidence....a proper scientific appraisal.. Not just rely on newspaper reports by journalists with no scientific background

Offline Mr Gray

Re: Is Boris’s Lax Leadership Putting Us All in Danger ?
« Reply #451 on: April 21, 2020, 12:11:12 PM »
But he hasn’t, has he ? 

Do you think it’s just coincidence that Britain is on track to have the highest death toll in Europe or the incompetence of this government?

I read about a month ago that the mean age for covid hospital admission in Germany was 44....Italy 63...UK 64..
Do you think that has any significance... I think it might

Offline Mr Gray

Re: Is Boris’s Lax Leadership Putting Us All in Danger ?
« Reply #452 on: April 21, 2020, 12:32:11 PM »
But he hasn’t, has he ? 

Do you think it’s just coincidence that Britain is on track to have the highest death toll in Europe or the incompetence of this government?

Looking at the figures it looks like spain is on track to ahve the highest death rate....but its early days yet

Offline faithlilly

Re: Is Boris’s Lax Leadership Putting Us All in Danger ?
« Reply #453 on: April 21, 2020, 12:53:35 PM »
I think to understand  why you would need to look at all the evidence....a proper scientific appraisal.. Not just rely on newspaper reports by journalists with no scientific background

Like this you mean from Professor John Ashton CBE.

https://youtu.be/PuoAst1CZDo
Brietta posted on 10/04/2022 “But whether or not that is the reason behind the delay I am certain that Brueckner's trial is going to take place.”

Let’s count the months, shall we?

Offline Mr Gray

Re: Is Boris’s Lax Leadership Putting Us All in Danger ?
« Reply #454 on: April 21, 2020, 01:08:49 PM »
Like this you mean from Professor John Ashton CBE.

https://youtu.be/PuoAst1CZDo

another attack on the govt by a raving left wing corbyn supporter...what a disgusting act to use this crisis as  a political point scorer




two years ago the Professor described himself as a:

“broad left , radical,non trot , baby boomer , green, gender inclusive , feminist labour .Party member for 53 years”

Ashton seems very angry with the Government for a whole host of reasons beyond Coronavirus, not least of all Brexit:

The day after the result of the referendum was announced, Ashton tweeted “What an embarrassing dirty little country we live in.”
He claimed that “after Brexit, the U.K. could disintegrate”.
Ashton is also a long-standing supporter of Labour’s radical four-day week policy, which would cripple the NHS.

Ashton is so partisan to his core that he even called his son “Fabian Che”, or Che for short, after the Fabian Society and Che Guevara. A little more context from the programme last night would have been illuminating…



« Last Edit: April 21, 2020, 01:11:29 PM by Davel »

Offline faithlilly

Re: Is Boris’s Lax Leadership Putting Us All in Danger ?
« Reply #455 on: April 21, 2020, 01:21:47 PM »
I read about a month ago that the mean age for covid hospital admission in Germany was 44....Italy 63...UK 64..
Do you think that has any significance... I think it might

I don’t think it’s quite that simple.

https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-why-is-germanys-fatality-rate-so-low-135496
Brietta posted on 10/04/2022 “But whether or not that is the reason behind the delay I am certain that Brueckner's trial is going to take place.”

Let’s count the months, shall we?

Offline faithlilly

Re: Is Boris’s Lax Leadership Putting Us All in Danger ?
« Reply #456 on: April 21, 2020, 01:24:20 PM »
another attack on the govt by a raving left wing corbyn supporter...what a disgusting act to use this crisis as  a political point scorer




two years ago the Professor described himself as a:

“broad left , radical,non trot , baby boomer , green, gender inclusive , feminist labour .Party member for 53 years”

Ashton seems very angry with the Government for a whole host of reasons beyond Coronavirus, not least of all Brexit:

The day after the result of the referendum was announced, Ashton tweeted “What an embarrassing dirty little country we live in.”
He claimed that “after Brexit, the U.K. could disintegrate”.
Ashton is also a long-standing supporter of Labour’s radical four-day week policy, which would cripple the NHS.

Ashton is so partisan to his core that he even called his son “Fabian Che”, or Che for short, after the Fabian Society and Che Guevara. A little more context from the programme last night would have been illuminating…


So does a professor need to be a right winger before his opinion is given the weight it deserves ?
Brietta posted on 10/04/2022 “But whether or not that is the reason behind the delay I am certain that Brueckner's trial is going to take place.”

Let’s count the months, shall we?

Offline Mr Gray

Re: Is Boris’s Lax Leadership Putting Us All in Danger ?
« Reply #457 on: April 21, 2020, 01:40:06 PM »
So does a professor need to be a right winger before his opinion is given the weight it deserves ?

No, but we should see it in the context of a man who will attack the govt on just about everything because of his political views. He says the UK will disintegrate after brexit...which is rubbish...so perhaps his opinion here is too.
what is needed is a response by the scientists he is critcising to give a balanced view.

i dont know what evidence he has taht the UK is on track to have the highest death rate when spain is clearly ahead...

Offline Venturi Swirl

Re: Is Boris’s Lax Leadership Putting Us All in Danger ?
« Reply #458 on: April 21, 2020, 04:04:20 PM »
another attack on the govt by a raving left wing corbyn supporter...what a disgusting act to use this crisis as  a political point scorer




two years ago the Professor described himself as a:

“broad left , radical,non trot , baby boomer , green, gender inclusive , feminist labour .Party member for 53 years”

Ashton seems very angry with the Government for a whole host of reasons beyond Coronavirus, not least of all Brexit:

The day after the result of the referendum was announced, Ashton tweeted “What an embarrassing dirty little country we live in.”
He claimed that “after Brexit, the U.K. could disintegrate”.
Ashton is also a long-standing supporter of Labour’s radical four-day week policy, which would cripple the NHS.

Ashton is so partisan to his core that he even called his son “Fabian Che”, or Che for short, after the Fabian Society and Che Guevara. A little more context from the programme last night would have been illuminating…

Has the professor given any advice on whether thr lockdown should continue or be eased off yet?  Or will he wait a few weeks and with t(e benefit of hindsight criticise the government for not doing what he would have recommended had he spoken up weeks previously.
"Surely the fact that their accounts were different reinforces their veracity rather than diminishes it? If they had colluded in protecting ........ surely all of their accounts would be the same?" - Faithlilly

Offline Venturi Swirl

Re: Is Boris’s Lax Leadership Putting Us All in Danger ?
« Reply #459 on: April 21, 2020, 05:15:42 PM »
Looking at the figures it looks like spain is on track to ahve the highest death rate....but its early days yet
Spain’s deaths per million of population is far higher than the UK’s.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
"Surely the fact that their accounts were different reinforces their veracity rather than diminishes it? If they had colluded in protecting ........ surely all of their accounts would be the same?" - Faithlilly

Offline faithlilly

Re: Is Boris’s Lax Leadership Putting Us All in Danger ?
« Reply #460 on: April 21, 2020, 05:50:07 PM »
No, but we should see it in the context of a man who will attack the govt on just about everything because of his political views. He says the UK will disintegrate after brexit...which is rubbish...so perhaps his opinion here is too.
what is needed is a response by the scientists he is critcising to give a balanced view.

i dont know what evidence he has taht the UK is on track to have the highest death rate when spain is clearly ahead...

Firstly Professor Ashton is a CBE and a professional scientist. That he would jeopardise his reputation simply to, incorrectly, criticise the government is a ridiculous suggestion in the extreme and, quite possibly, libellous.

Secondly we are in the transition period of Brexit and it has yet to be seen whether the U.K. will be destroyed when it eventually goes it alone.

Thirdly the death rate we are seeing in the UK does not include deaths in care homes, hospices and at home. The ONS has said that those figures could be as high as 7,500, taking us well beyond Spain’s toll.
Brietta posted on 10/04/2022 “But whether or not that is the reason behind the delay I am certain that Brueckner's trial is going to take place.”

Let’s count the months, shall we?

Offline Mr Gray

Re: Is Boris’s Lax Leadership Putting Us All in Danger ?
« Reply #461 on: April 21, 2020, 06:14:02 PM »
Firstly Professor Ashton is a CBE and a professional scientist. That he would jeopardise his reputation simply to, incorrectly, criticise the government is a ridiculous suggestion in the extreme and, quite possibly, libellous.

Secondly we are in the transition period of Brexit and it has yet to be seen whether the U.K. will be destroyed when it eventually goes it alone.

Thirdly the death rate we are seeing in the UK does not include deaths in care homes, hospices and at home. The ONS has said that those figures could be as high as 7,500, taking us well beyond Spain’s toll.

I think he's already damaged his reputation as has Richard, Horton... Another govt critic who is a corbyn supporter.  He's been caught out by the tweet he made on 23 Jan... Something I'd already pointed out. 
It's not really possible to simply compare countries figures as they are collected in different ways... It's wrong to start drawing conclusions at such an early stage and I think like you... These two are just bad loser Tory [ censored word ]s

Offline Venturi Swirl

Re: Is Boris’s Lax Leadership Putting Us All in Danger ?
« Reply #462 on: April 21, 2020, 06:31:41 PM »
Another great article from Danny Finkelstein in today’s Times
PS: it’s quite depressing.


author-image
Truth about the virus is better for us than hope
new
We naturally cling to the idea of light at the end of the tunnel but in fact there are no easy ways ways out of lockdown

Daniel Finkelstein
Tuesday April 21 2020, 5.00pm, The Times
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You recall what Churchill said after El Alamein? “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” Well, where we are now is not the end of the beginning. It’s just the beginning.

Yesterday, like every day for the last fortnight or so, there were calls for the government to show “the light at the end of the tunnel”. But what if we aren’t far enough through the tunnel to see any light? The government can’t tweet light into existence. It can’t announce light. “And Boris Johnson said let there be light” won’t work.

The most popular phrase at the moment is “we need an exit strategy”. It’s one of those political statements that always gets people nodding, whatever the crisis. No one ever goes on Newsnight during a war and says: “I’ll tell you what we don’t need, Emily. We really don’t want to be bothering with one of those exit strategies.”

Yet perhaps you have noticed that people only start calling for exit strategies when they realise that it is impossible to create one, or at least one that doesn’t involve horrible choices and huge gambles. Which is pretty much the situation we are in now.

And it’s not that unusual.


A commonplace when discussing military intervention is for people to say that we mustn’t go in until we know how to get out. Yet the truth is that you almost never know what your exit is going to be when you enter. You do what you have to do at the beginning, and then cope with the consequences. America didn’t appreciate, when it was pulled in to the European conflict after Pearl Harbor, that it would still have troops in a superpower stand-off in Berlin fifty years later.

So we went into lockdown to tackle Covid-19 because, at the time, we felt we had to. It didn’t mean we knew how to get out. It didn’t mean there was a way out. Indeed, there is every sign that the government realised this problem from the beginning and that’s why it hesitated.

One of the ironies of this crisis is that the pat historical judgment about governments making big decisions without an exit strategy may be reversed and ministers could end up being criticised for worrying too long about an exit strategy instead of locking down earlier.

At the beginning of the pandemic, this country faced an awful choice. If there wasn’t a vaccine and it wasn’t possible to track and isolate every person who got it (and to do that forever), then most of us would eventually get it until we reached the point there weren’t enough people left to spread it to.

In the absence of more effective treatment, ministers concluded (rightly, in my view) that the surge in the number of deaths — perhaps as many as 260,000 — would be intolerable. So they decided on a policy of strict social distancing. Until …well, until what?

Because, in truth, the choice we face now is no different to the one we faced at the beginning of the lockdown. The more we relax restrictions, the more people will mix. The more people mix, the more people will get it. And the more people get it, the more people will die.

We can hardly say to people, “you won’t die if you get it now because we’ve passed the peak so it’s too late for you to start dying”. Or “your mixing isn’t lethal now because we’ve already had a lockdown”. Viruses don’t work like that. It will carry on until it’s been stopped by a vaccine or ameliorated by treatment or until it has been caught by all the people who are going to catch it and killed all the people it’s going to kill.

And this is true for every country, whatever stage of the contagion they are in. It’s one of the reasons why it’s pointless to start making judgments about how well or how badly Britain has done compared to other countries. We don’t know because we are all only at the beginning. We will only know when it’s over.

So what everyone euphemistically calls an open debate about an exit strategy is really just the same discussion we’ve been having since March. How long can we socially, economically and politically sustain a lockdown before we decide that the cure is worse than the disease?

Right now, we are at the Steve Jobs stage. The leading authority on strategy, Richard Rumelt, interviewed the Apple founder in 1998 after Jobs had returned to his troubled company and cut back all of its peripheral activities. He’d staunched the bleeding and stablised the company but it was still vulnerable and tiny. What was he going to do now, asked Rumelt. Jobs smiled and replied: “I am going to wait for the next big thing”.

We can still wait for the next big thing and hope. Maybe a vaccine will come quicker than we expect. Maybe some of the treatment trials will be more successful than we think. But this period of waiting and hoping can’t last long. We are going to run out of money to support the economy, apart from anything else. The chances of the scientific cavalry riding to the rescue just in time are relatively small.

What we face is less the need to find an “exit strategy” than the need to make a vast, difficult moral choice. It’s possible that the proposed new app and the sort of contact tracing and testing that Jeremy Hunt proposed in The Times yesterday might enable us to achieve some sort of control. And shielding the vulnerable might help. We must do absolutely everything we can. But if we relax, some people, and maybe many people, will die as a result. And we can’t be confident about how many.

We may decide that this is unacceptable or that we won’t be able to revive the economy anyway in such circumstances. But if so, we would be saying that we have to keep restrictions almost indefinitely.

This is a decision we all need to make together, and one we all have to live with. The prime minister should not only share all he knows with the leader of the opposition, he should directly involve Sir Keir Starmer and his shadow cabinet in the decisions, seeking their assent. And he should level with the British people about the nature of the choice we face.

People need hope, but they need the truth more
« Last Edit: April 21, 2020, 06:36:27 PM by Vertigo Swirl »
"Surely the fact that their accounts were different reinforces their veracity rather than diminishes it? If they had colluded in protecting ........ surely all of their accounts would be the same?" - Faithlilly

Offline Venturi Swirl

"Surely the fact that their accounts were different reinforces their veracity rather than diminishes it? If they had colluded in protecting ........ surely all of their accounts would be the same?" - Faithlilly

Offline Venturi Swirl

Re: Is Boris’s Lax Leadership Putting Us All in Danger ?
« Reply #464 on: April 21, 2020, 06:35:32 PM »
When are we going to have the carping about the “unnecessary” Nightingale hospitals that were built in just days and which are full of costly equipment but completely devoid of patients?
"Surely the fact that their accounts were different reinforces their veracity rather than diminishes it? If they had colluded in protecting ........ surely all of their accounts would be the same?" - Faithlilly