I read about this a few months ago. One of the roads would have been a few hundred metres from our house. Complete madness, although I suppose one can applaud an era when governments tried to find solutions to the country's problems, even if they were the wrong ones!
Plenty of places where similar did happen, of course, as noted in the article.
As a student, I once lived on a street that abruptly ended as the Coventry ring road went overhead. The street was large grand old terraces, mostly converted to flats or student houses. Would have been absolutely magnificent before the ring road was built.
Yes and a North Italy style collapse for a few weeks would have been better than months or years of throwing away civil liberties, shutting down schools and so on.
Get through the collapse and get to the other side. The collapse didn't last forever now, did it? Has Northern Italy's healthcare system still collapsed? Has Sweden's?
Ours most definitely has.
Err, you do know that Italy's lockdowns were much stricter than ours, I suppose?
Yes I do, and I'm not proposing we should have copied Italy's lockdown.
But the point is that even if the healthcare system so-called 'collapses' like in Italy in Feb/Mar 2020, then that is so for a matter of days/weeks not years.
Whereas the NHS thanks to lockdown has collapsed for a matter of years/decades. People waiting years for an operation because we cancelled everything to deal with Covid, rather than let Covid take its course naturally and have the NHS there within its operating budget and capacities to help with the worst of it - and letting people act like rational beings and lock themselves down voluntarily if they so choose to do, like happened in Sweden.
There is a fate worse than Northern Italy style 'collapse'. We're there now. Yes a few patients may have been turned away and left to die in Italy during a pandemic. Oh well. Over 7 million patients have been turned away in the UK to be put on waiting lists - that's objectively worse than the amount of patients turned away in Italy despite the lockdown and shutting schools etc in a hubristic and failed attempt to "save the NHS".
This is delusional. Firstly you seem to assume that their was no-one waiting for treatment in Feb 2020 - this is wildly incorrect. Secondly you seem to imagine the NHS collapsing would be just one of those things, just some busy days and a few oldies not getting treated. That's utter rubbish. The point of NHS collapse would have been no treatment for people in the their 20's, 30's, 40's and 50's either. It could have been you.
I believe we unwound much too slowly after the third lockdown, and indeed railed against some of the nonsense on here (masks off at tables in the pub, but on to walk to the loo; not being allowed to have two outdoor tables joined up in the pub garden lest we have more than 6 people in close contact, even though they'd been playing cricket together for 7 hours and on and on). But the one in March 2020 was to prevent an existential threat to society. Yes it was tough, and it is now too with the covid recovery which will take decades. But there was never an option to just let it run through, and if you think their was, you weren't paying attention.
I was paying attention and I supported lockdown at the time. I was wrong to do so. Sweden didn't lockdown, they called this right. We should put our hands up and acknowledge when we make mistakes and I made a terrible mistake supporting lockdown as did the country.
Yes treatment may not have been available for me, or anyone else for a few weeks. So what? That does not justify what we did.
To answer a question you didn't, in March 2020 there were 4.6 million people on the waiting list. So its totally wrong to suggest that the lockdown has led to an extra 7 million on the lists. At worst its 3.4 million - many of whom may be down to covid itself.
"At worst it's 3.4million"
Listen to yourself.
1- I make that 2.4 million ! 1/3 of the problem solved.
2 - I think the issue is around backfilling lost work over time. Looking at the time profile of "treatments delivered" it looks like we lost something like 6-8 months of NHS work, and a lot of it is still crawling out of the woodwork (increased referrals etc).
However you slice it, that is not going to be recovered in a few months as productivity cannot double with a snap of the fingers.
There's a recovery plan, and a need to find ways to boost productivity - which is underway. There are things happening around questions like different management for admitted / non-admitted, around Covid risks.
One of the things I think may also be of benefit is increased outsourcing of diagnostics, as more than a million on the waiting list are in that category.
I think this is a good old ideological context missing hammer-and-tongs around the NHS (just like old times). But we need context eg whether the Italian service has recovered.
Bloke on the radio was saying there should be a 10-yr plan to sort out the NHS.
Whereas the sensible view would be to say we shouldn't have started from here. The NHS in any formation is far too often useless.
Perhaps the most obvious rebuttal is that rather being a source of funds the abolition of non dom status may well reduce the tax take in the UK. Labour always seem to assume that taxpayers are geese waiting quietly to be plucked and will not respond to changes in the tax code in any way other than writing larger cheques. These geese can and, in many cases, would, fly away taking their spending and tax payments with them. Would those that remained do more than make up the difference? Who knows? Certainly not Wes Streeting.
Plus the NHS already employs 1.3m people. At what point do we think that is enough?
I dunno, when people can get an operation in less than 3 years?
NHS spending is at a record high. NHS employment is at a record high. We locked down to "save the NHS".
And you can't get an operation in less than 3 years, with record employment and spending? 🤔
Is there a possibility perhaps that locking down the country to "save the NHS" in the long term didn't succeed in its objective?
Is it possible that you are disingenuously mixing up saving the NHS (from immediate collapse in 2020) with its long term decline?
No, its not, because one caused the other.
Had there been an immediate collapse in 2020 then some people would have died from natural causes during a pandemic, they would have been buried and mourned, but the NHS would have continued afterwards for those who survived. Schools as well as hospitals would have continued. And we wouldn't have borrowed hundreds of billions extra to be in this shit state of affairs.
Locking down to 'save the NHS' but then not having a functional NHS afterwards, was a dismal failure. We should have taken the harsh medicine of natural deaths occurring years ago instead of breaking the economy, education and yes the NHS for the long term.
Dunno. No lockdown: - More NHS worker deaths (and illness with time off, possible long term effects) - More NHS worker departures from the organisation (due to fear for health, burnout at the overwhelming shitness of turning people away and stacking up the bodies) - Likely even worse situation with backlogs due to complete overwhelming of services cutting what was done even more than actually happened - Possible increased long term disease burden from long Covid in people who would not die of Covid.
You talk about killing off the vulnerable oldies, but still a lot of healthcare is in the last year of life. I haven't seen strong evidence that Covid would have greatly preferentually killed those, as opposed to those with ~10 years left and reasonable health. Anecdotally (there probably are some good data on this, but I haven't looked) it seems the main risks was among those quite ill and needing to be in hospital, getting infected there, those in care homes*, those in for other ops (likely with reasonable life expectancy, you don't do a hip op on someone dying soon) and the apparently healthy retired who were still out and about doing things and so at greater exposure.
I'm not sure it's clear cut, even from a cold healthcare POV ignoring the other societal costs.
Backlogs wouldn't have been worse because services were cut to redirect everything to the frontline of Covid, dragged out over time.
Had there been a spike which surpassed capacity then more would have died, that is true, but then the peak would have come sooner, the fall in pressure on the NHS would have come sooner, and then there'd have been lower not higher demand afterwards for Covid-related pressures.
By 'flattening the sombrero' we deliberately dragged out Covid-related pressures for a longer period of time, which meant for a longer period of time NHS services were backlogged in order to free people up to deal with the pandemic.
Had we basically decided to just tell people with covid to bugger off home and quietly get on with dying (which may have gone down rather badly, both with healthcare workers and the general public), the death levels in the 55+ range would have been far higher. And that's what would have been needed to attempt to preserve everything else.
You seem to have this unshakeable belief that covid (pre-vaccines) merely affected the very elderly and those with precarious health.
And we wouldn't have preserved the rest of the healthcare services, anyway, due to the number of people in the healthcare services who would have been affected (or could we have had an exemption to the "Have you got covid? Then, no, we won't treat you," principle). Plus, of course, anyone being treated for anything else would have been exposed to covid from the healthcare professionals in the alternate reality where we tried to basically ignore it. And those being treated for, say, cancer, heart disease, kidney disease, etc, would have been sitting ducks for covid.
Which would, I suppose, have dramatically shortened waiting times. Killing off many of those going through the healthcare system would certainly achieve that.
In addition, with so many more exposed pre-vaccine, the long-term health conditions that covid can cause in the survivors (considerably increased rates of heart issues, kidney diseases, diabetes, lung damage, brain issues) would cause a far higher impact on the NHS going forwards, so we'd have brewed up a toxic level of extra damage, anyway.
This
The Northern Italian health service collapse wasn’t down to stupidity or bad management - it was the consequence of no lockdown and pre-vaccine COVID doing its thing.
The same could have happened anywhere - and it isn’t did, in a few places round the works.
How many examples do you need before you realise that repeating the experiment isn’t going to change the results?
Yes and a North Italy style collapse for a few weeks would have been better than months or years of throwing away civil liberties, shutting down schools and so on.
Get through the collapse and get to the other side. The collapse didn't last forever now, did it? Has Northern Italy's healthcare system still collapsed? Has Sweden's?
Ours most definitely has.
No it hasn't.
From the link I posted in my other comment, NHS hospital treatments per day currently run at ~96% of pre-Covid levels, compared to a fall at peak Covid of 85% in admitted cases, and 50% in non-admitted cases.
That sounds within a gnat's crochet of a complete recovery. Treatment activity
Prior to the pandemic there were typically an average of 45,000 hospital treatments from the waiting list each calendar day, including an average of 10,000 admitted treatments and 35,000 non-admitted treatments.
Activity fell substantially during the COVID-19 pandemic as NHS resources were diverted towards treating COVID-19. In April 2020, treatments involving admission to hospital (‘admitted’) were 85% lower than the previous year and treatments not involving admission (‘non-admitted’) were down 50%.
That's a bit like saying the forest did burn down but now the rate of tree-planting is back to what it was before the fire, so the position must be [insert a cutesy metaphor here to denote "almost a full recovery"].
It's not like if a person doesn't take a shower for a month and then they get back to having showers daily, when within a very short space of time they'll be as clean as they used to be.
I read about this a few months ago. One of the roads would have been a few hundred metres from our house. Complete madness, although I suppose one can applaud an era when governments tried to find solutions to the country's problems, even if they were the wrong ones!
I am very upset that the Westway, which previously was the only road in central London that you could hit 70+ on, now has an average 40mph - and occasionally 30mph - speed limit.
It used to be great whistling along past Portobello at 70mph.
I read about this a few months ago. One of the roads would have been a few hundred metres from our house. Complete madness, although I suppose one can applaud an era when governments tried to find solutions to the country's problems, even if they were the wrong ones!
Is this the infamous Motorway Box? It features in the excellent Secret Life Of The Motorway programmes which are shown on BBC4 every so often.
It is utter crap and completely outdated and based on a 20% Labour lead when the latest poll gives just a 13% Labour lead
Maybe, young HY. But why do you always try to rubbish any good news that comes along to cheer us up? If Johnson, Truss and Sunak all lose their seats at the next election, that is very good news indeed, and well deserved, after all their incompetence and irresponsibility.
Tories definitely up off the floor now. They've gone from extinction to merely crap and it wil hopefully give us a good base to build from in opposition. Ideally all of the old selfish bastards leave the party and we can remake it for people who work hard and want to get on in life not just old graspers intent on bankrupting the nation so they can go on another cruise.
Without pensioners the Tories would go extinct like their French counterparts (even most over 65s voted Macron in May not Les Republicains).
The Tories also lost most workers earning under £100k a year even at the 2019 general election
Tories definitely up off the floor now. They've gone from extinction to merely crap and it wil hopefully give us a good base to build from in opposition. Ideally all of the old selfish bastards leave the party and we can remake it for people who work hard and want to get on in life not just old graspers intent on bankrupting the nation so they can go on another cruise.
Wrong.
The idea the Tories have already lost next election is so last month. The electorate like Sunak and his government, that’s what the recovery of the Tory share and collapse of the Labour share is screaming at us. In two years time the voters have the choice of throwing out the experienced Sunak government they like, and which has delivered for them through tough times, by taking a punt on inexperienced Labour and all the waffle, like priority to abolish hol they are coming out with.
My excited Dad is convinced this will be 92 all over again.
Very fortunate that we did not build too many the damn things, though we did worse than much of Europe. But much better than the USA. This is Salt Lake City I think:
Very fortunate that we did not build too many the damn things, though we did worse than much of Europe. But much better than the USA. This is Salt Lake City I think:
Telling quote from the article: The proposal was supported by Labour and the Conservatives, who between them held all the GLC seats.
There's a reason I'm sceptical whenever both main parties agree on something as the only policy...
Perhaps the most obvious rebuttal is that rather being a source of funds the abolition of non dom status may well reduce the tax take in the UK. Labour always seem to assume that taxpayers are geese waiting quietly to be plucked and will not respond to changes in the tax code in any way other than writing larger cheques. These geese can and, in many cases, would, fly away taking their spending and tax payments with them. Would those that remained do more than make up the difference? Who knows? Certainly not Wes Streeting.
Plus the NHS already employs 1.3m people. At what point do we think that is enough?
I dunno, when people can get an operation in less than 3 years?
NHS spending is at a record high. NHS employment is at a record high. We locked down to "save the NHS".
And you can't get an operation in less than 3 years, with record employment and spending? 🤔
Is there a possibility perhaps that locking down the country to "save the NHS" in the long term didn't succeed in its objective?
Is it possible that you are disingenuously mixing up saving the NHS (from immediate collapse in 2020) with its long term decline?
No, its not, because one caused the other.
Had there been an immediate collapse in 2020 then some people would have died from natural causes during a pandemic, they would have been buried and mourned, but the NHS would have continued afterwards for those who survived. Schools as well as hospitals would have continued. And we wouldn't have borrowed hundreds of billions extra to be in this shit state of affairs.
Locking down to 'save the NHS' but then not having a functional NHS afterwards, was a dismal failure. We should have taken the harsh medicine of natural deaths occurring years ago instead of breaking the economy, education and yes the NHS for the long term.
Dunno. No lockdown: - More NHS worker deaths (and illness with time off, possible long term effects) - More NHS worker departures from the organisation (due to fear for health, burnout at the overwhelming shitness of turning people away and stacking up the bodies) - Likely even worse situation with backlogs due to complete overwhelming of services cutting what was done even more than actually happened - Possible increased long term disease burden from long Covid in people who would not die of Covid.
You talk about killing off the vulnerable oldies, but still a lot of healthcare is in the last year of life. I haven't seen strong evidence that Covid would have greatly preferentually killed those, as opposed to those with ~10 years left and reasonable health. Anecdotally (there probably are some good data on this, but I haven't looked) it seems the main risks was among those quite ill and needing to be in hospital, getting infected there, those in care homes*, those in for other ops (likely with reasonable life expectancy, you don't do a hip op on someone dying soon) and the apparently healthy retired who were still out and about doing things and so at greater exposure.
I'm not sure it's clear cut, even from a cold healthcare POV ignoring the other societal costs.
Backlogs wouldn't have been worse because services were cut to redirect everything to the frontline of Covid, dragged out over time.
Had there been a spike which surpassed capacity then more would have died, that is true, but then the peak would have come sooner, the fall in pressure on the NHS would have come sooner, and then there'd have been lower not higher demand afterwards for Covid-related pressures.
By 'flattening the sombrero' we deliberately dragged out Covid-related pressures for a longer period of time, which meant for a longer period of time NHS services were backlogged in order to free people up to deal with the pandemic.
Had we basically decided to just tell people with covid to bugger off home and quietly get on with dying (which may have gone down rather badly, both with healthcare workers and the general public), the death levels in the 55+ range would have been far higher. And that's what would have been needed to attempt to preserve everything else.
You seem to have this unshakeable belief that covid (pre-vaccines) merely affected the very elderly and those with precarious health.
And we wouldn't have preserved the rest of the healthcare services, anyway, due to the number of people in the healthcare services who would have been affected (or could we have had an exemption to the "Have you got covid? Then, no, we won't treat you," principle). Plus, of course, anyone being treated for anything else would have been exposed to covid from the healthcare professionals in the alternate reality where we tried to basically ignore it. And those being treated for, say, cancer, heart disease, kidney disease, etc, would have been sitting ducks for covid.
Which would, I suppose, have dramatically shortened waiting times. Killing off many of those going through the healthcare system would certainly achieve that.
In addition, with so many more exposed pre-vaccine, the long-term health conditions that covid can cause in the survivors (considerably increased rates of heart issues, kidney diseases, diabetes, lung damage, brain issues) would cause a far higher impact on the NHS going forwards, so we'd have brewed up a toxic level of extra damage, anyway.
This
The Northern Italian health service collapse wasn’t down to stupidity or bad management - it was the consequence of no lockdown and pre-vaccine COVID doing its thing.
The same could have happened anywhere - and it isn’t did, in a few places round the works.
How many examples do you need before you realise that repeating the experiment isn’t going to change the results?
Yes and a North Italy style collapse for a few weeks would have been better than months or years of throwing away civil liberties, shutting down schools and so on.
Get through the collapse and get to the other side. The collapse didn't last forever now, did it? Has Northern Italy's healthcare system still collapsed? Has Sweden's?
Ours most definitely has.
No it hasn't.
From the link I posted in my other comment, NHS hospital treatments per day currently run at ~96% of pre-Covid levels, compared to a fall at peak Covid of 85% in admitted cases, and 50% in non-admitted cases.
That sounds within a gnat's crochet of a complete recovery. Treatment activity
Prior to the pandemic there were typically an average of 45,000 hospital treatments from the waiting list each calendar day, including an average of 10,000 admitted treatments and 35,000 non-admitted treatments.
Activity fell substantially during the COVID-19 pandemic as NHS resources were diverted towards treating COVID-19. In April 2020, treatments involving admission to hospital (‘admitted’) were 85% lower than the previous year and treatments not involving admission (‘non-admitted’) were down 50%.
That's a bit like saying the forest did burn down but now the rate of tree-planting is back to what it was before the fire, so the position must be [insert a cutesy metaphor here to denote "almost a full recovery"].
It's not like if a person doesn't take a shower for a month and then they get back to having showers daily, when within a very short space of time they'll be as clean as they used to be.
Bit of a red herring I'm afraid, there. I'm just refuting an untrue claim.
Perhaps the most obvious rebuttal is that rather being a source of funds the abolition of non dom status may well reduce the tax take in the UK. Labour always seem to assume that taxpayers are geese waiting quietly to be plucked and will not respond to changes in the tax code in any way other than writing larger cheques. These geese can and, in many cases, would, fly away taking their spending and tax payments with them. Would those that remained do more than make up the difference? Who knows? Certainly not Wes Streeting.
Plus the NHS already employs 1.3m people. At what point do we think that is enough?
I dunno, when people can get an operation in less than 3 years?
something far wrong if they have 1.3 million staff yet it takes years to get an appointment, ratio of doers to pen pushers must be astronomical
Lynch says it’s press and network rail propaganda to ask questions about the draining support for strikes from RMT.. but he should listen to this from Labour MP..
Labour MP Carolyn Harris says union leaders need to "listen closer" to the people on strike, who are telling her "they can't afford" to keep up strike action.
Gravity always wins. The union can't fund these strikes indefinitely and the workers need to, you know, work to get paid. At a time of high inflation they probably need to work overtime if they are able. In the end Network Rail mat realise that the workers will accept a low ball offer because they will not be able to afford further strikes.
This is true for all of the strikers, but most especially the Royal Mail ones. Business is draining away from them and they are driving the company into bankruptcy at which point none of them have any jobs. Unions and management in this country are the worst among the world.
The bottom line is that if you treat people crappily for long enough they quit, strike or stop caring about doing their jobs to an adequate standard. Everyone loses as a result.
Let them quit. They won't because they're sitting it out until they get nice five figure voluntary redundancy pay offs, but I'd absolutely let them quit.
So fewer doctors, nurses and other care providers; fewer teachers; more train cancellations; even worse public services. I am not sure that’s a great idea. But it does encapsulate how we have got to where we are today. Unless the thinking changes, our decline will only continue.
Decline is the word. This country is broken. When you have hospitals having to provide food banks for their own nurses who can't afford to pay the bills on their salary, thats when you know the system has broken down.
People look back on the 1970s and remember a lost decade where everyone was on strike, industry went to shit and the price of everything went mental. The damage done saw Labour out of office for almost two decades. Yet the Tories - overseeing another lost decade - think there is no problem and people should vote for them again. Once out of office it will be a while before they return.
It does feel rather like the 1970s
But Labour didn’t lose power for two decades just because of that decline, the Tories came along with a leader who had a plan, who stuck to that plan, and who saved the nation. In the eyes of many
There is no evidence Labour has a clue what to do about our decline, other than maybe manage it slightly less badly than the Tories - if we’re lucky
The solutions to the problems that we have are not ones that Labour can really implement. We need to stop being so generous in many areas and find major efficiency savings. Labour only know how to tax more (although they'd have to go some to tax more than the Tories) and spend more. No way with the unions let them do this.
Tories are too tired to do what needs to be done either. So unfortunately we will be set for 5 years of paralysed Labour government. Probably the best we can hope for is for the Tories to lose narrowly and hope that some new Tory leader comes in with a real plan and for Labour to fall apart. Think the chances of that are less than 5% though.
What we all really need right now is for some resolution to be found to Ukraine.
Tories are too tired to fix the problems they've had 12 years to fix/create (delete to tase)? It's, to use the hoary old PB cliché, a view.
The Tories created a lot of these problems via austerity but I have to ask the same question I did yesterday.
Given the amount of tax we are paying - where it is being spent - because it's not on wages or infrastructure or anything that people can physically see?
It is correct that the Tories are clapped out (especially the current dregs), but if Wes Streeting's Tweet is anything to go by, Labour are the opposite of the solution.
The cost of the NHS lies in the fact that (in England and Wales) we have a huge Department of Health, running a huge NHS England, running huge NHS Trusts, running teams of administrators within hospitals, before you even touch a patient. What is the point? In Scotland it's a similar story. Arms-length quangos are proving a massively wasteful and inefficient way of providing a service. Let the DOH run the NHS.
The issue is it is one organisation trying to do everything.
The “NHS” should effectively be a policy / supervisory function
Underneath you should have separate organisations focusing on primary care, acute care, chronic care and social care etc.
Had a really difficult night working in Paeds A&E. Massive waiting times but we worked as a great NHS team and got through it. I was actually feeling pretty good. Then I saw what @WesStreeting said in the Telegraph. Thanks. Didn't think our morale could sink any lower.
Mrs F tried to get a GP appointment this morning. Having constantly tried to get through to the surgery from the moment the lines opened, and having redialled 85 times before she eventually got through, she was told that all today’s appointments had been taken, and to try again tomorrow. If Labour can sort out GPs, they’ll be getting the votes from the Fairliered household.
I don’t think Westminster would have oversight of GPs in Scotland would they? Not to fall down the rabbit hole of anecdotage but I’ve never had a problem getting an appointment at my surgery (thankfully not often required so far) even during COVID. Mildly surprising since it’s in the East End of Glasgow and I’d expect demand to be high.
Same lottery for appointments for us, you call at 8:30 and it is engaged for about an hour and lottery if you get through
The big flaw in Labour's plan is that ending non-dom status would be a substantial hit to the economy, and the effect on tax revenues would be negative. Are they seriously suggesting that a US or French banker who comes to work in the City for a couple of years should be taxed on capital gains and income in the US and France? What the hell do they think the effect of that would be? And that's without even thinking about the super-mobile super-rich.
It's a completely bonkers policy, which is why successive Labour and Conservative governments since time immemorial haven't implemented it.
Of course, it will be a popular policy, like many policies which make things worse.
You are suggesting they are actually going to do it rather than creating a “temporarily located” status before “abolishing non dom status”
If a bankruptcy restriction order is made against an MP they are automatically disqualified and there's a by-election.
You can be made bankrupt without a restriction order - depends if the court thinks you have been dishonest / are to blame for your debts.
Jessica Elgot@jessicaelgot 7m NEW - A bankruptcy order has been made against Tory MP Adam Afriyie after a specialist court heard how he owed around 1.7 million. It's unclear if there will be a by-election - there isn't for every bankruptcy.
Only a tiny number of people who go bankrupt get a restriction order against them. It's not impossible that there is more to the story than meets the eye, but it simply looks as if he's gone bankrupt due to business errors (rather than dishonesty). The bank is obviously annoyed at him for not cracking on and selling his house, and are forcing his hand. But BROs are essentially for borderline criminality (they aren't criminal technically but aren't widely handed out as it's very serious).
Perhaps the most obvious rebuttal is that rather being a source of funds the abolition of non dom status may well reduce the tax take in the UK. Labour always seem to assume that taxpayers are geese waiting quietly to be plucked and will not respond to changes in the tax code in any way other than writing larger cheques. These geese can and, in many cases, would, fly away taking their spending and tax payments with them. Would those that remained do more than make up the difference? Who knows? Certainly not Wes Streeting.
Plus the NHS already employs 1.3m people. At what point do we think that is enough?
I dunno, when people can get an operation in less than 3 years?
NHS spending is at a record high. NHS employment is at a record high. We locked down to "save the NHS".
And you can't get an operation in less than 3 years, with record employment and spending? 🤔
Is there a possibility perhaps that locking down the country to "save the NHS" in the long term didn't succeed in its objective?
Is it possible that you are disingenuously mixing up saving the NHS (from immediate collapse in 2020) with its long term decline?
No, its not, because one caused the other.
Had there been an immediate collapse in 2020 then some people would have died from natural causes during a pandemic, they would have been buried and mourned, but the NHS would have continued afterwards for those who survived. Schools as well as hospitals would have continued. And we wouldn't have borrowed hundreds of billions extra to be in this shit state of affairs.
Locking down to 'save the NHS' but then not having a functional NHS afterwards, was a dismal failure. We should have taken the harsh medicine of natural deaths occurring years ago instead of breaking the economy, education and yes the NHS for the long term.
Dunno. No lockdown: - More NHS worker deaths (and illness with time off, possible long term effects) - More NHS worker departures from the organisation (due to fear for health, burnout at the overwhelming shitness of turning people away and stacking up the bodies) - Likely even worse situation with backlogs due to complete overwhelming of services cutting what was done even more than actually happened - Possible increased long term disease burden from long Covid in people who would not die of Covid.
You talk about killing off the vulnerable oldies, but still a lot of healthcare is in the last year of life. I haven't seen strong evidence that Covid would have greatly preferentually killed those, as opposed to those with ~10 years left and reasonable health. Anecdotally (there probably are some good data on this, but I haven't looked) it seems the main risks was among those quite ill and needing to be in hospital, getting infected there, those in care homes*, those in for other ops (likely with reasonable life expectancy, you don't do a hip op on someone dying soon) and the apparently healthy retired who were still out and about doing things and so at greater exposure.
I'm not sure it's clear cut, even from a cold healthcare POV ignoring the other societal costs.
Backlogs wouldn't have been worse because services were cut to redirect everything to the frontline of Covid, dragged out over time.
Had there been a spike which surpassed capacity then more would have died, that is true, but then the peak would have come sooner, the fall in pressure on the NHS would have come sooner, and then there'd have been lower not higher demand afterwards for Covid-related pressures.
By 'flattening the sombrero' we deliberately dragged out Covid-related pressures for a longer period of time, which meant for a longer period of time NHS services were backlogged in order to free people up to deal with the pandemic.
Had we basically decided to just tell people with covid to bugger off home and quietly get on with dying (which may have gone down rather badly, both with healthcare workers and the general public), the death levels in the 55+ range would have been far higher. And that's what would have been needed to attempt to preserve everything else.
You seem to have this unshakeable belief that covid (pre-vaccines) merely affected the very elderly and those with precarious health.
And we wouldn't have preserved the rest of the healthcare services, anyway, due to the number of people in the healthcare services who would have been affected (or could we have had an exemption to the "Have you got covid? Then, no, we won't treat you," principle). Plus, of course, anyone being treated for anything else would have been exposed to covid from the healthcare professionals in the alternate reality where we tried to basically ignore it. And those being treated for, say, cancer, heart disease, kidney disease, etc, would have been sitting ducks for covid.
Which would, I suppose, have dramatically shortened waiting times. Killing off many of those going through the healthcare system would certainly achieve that.
In addition, with so many more exposed pre-vaccine, the long-term health conditions that covid can cause in the survivors (considerably increased rates of heart issues, kidney diseases, diabetes, lung damage, brain issues) would cause a far higher impact on the NHS going forwards, so we'd have brewed up a toxic level of extra damage, anyway.
No fucking shit Sherlock that the death levels would have been higher. I said that. They would have been natural deaths, of natural causes.
The price of preventing those deaths, in throwing the baby away with the bathwater by breaking the NHS, shutting down schools, shutting down the economy, telling healthy people not to go into work and throwing away civil liberties was not worth preventing some people dying from perfectly natural causes.
You are an eccentric extremist who responds to everything with "yeah but deaths" . . . deaths are not the only measure of what matters. Sweden got through the pandemic with comparable death rates but without throwing away their civil liberties or crashing the economy as much as we did, or shutting down primary schools like we did, or telling elderly people they couldn't see their loved ones for months or even years like we did in order to "save them" so they could die alone instead of natural causes and so on.
All that matters much, much more than deaths during a pandemic.
-spends ages pointing out it's all about hospitalisations rather than deaths-
-Bart insists I'm an extremist just talking about deaths-
I don't know if you noticed, but the image was on hospitalisations and ICUs and their effect on the healthcare system.
As was the argument.
I get that it's a difficult thing to accept - that there were no good outcomes, and that yes, we all wanted things to be normal but that wasn't possible.
And will you please try to be coherent? It's only a few weeks since you insisted that any restrictions equated to "lockdown." Which is when I thought you'd finally quit going on about Sweden - who had restrictions from earlier than us to far later than us.
I now see that repeating the word "natural" is the current mantra. Well, we can sort it out now by cutting off heating to all homes with anyone ill or over 55. We will then achieve a natural death rate that could sort things out. Or if we just prohibit healthcare to anyone for the next, say, six months, and we'll get a natural death rate to sort things out there, as well.
The pretence that "Sweden was normal" and the linked pretence that "it was a balance between protecting the economy or protecting people" doesn't work. Because they're both pretend and not reflections of what actually was the situation.
I also don't think that anywhere did your implicit suggestion of refusing treatment to anyone with covid (and if that wasn't the idea you wanted to put forwards, then how on Earth would you have preserved treatment for anything else when all ICUs and all doctors had to be purposed for covid and we still overloaded the system even with lockdowns?).
Excuse me for responding to the words you wrote: Had we basically decided to just tell people with covid to bugger off home and quietly get on with dying (which may have gone down rather badly, both with healthcare workers and the general public), the death levels in the 55+ range would have been far higher. And that's what would have been needed to attempt to preserve everything else.
Yes people seek to go to hospital when they're sick, and if the hospital is full they may be turned away. There's over 7 million people on waiting lists right now that wouldn't be if that weren't true, let alone those who would have sought treatment but didn't due to the waiting list situation. So no, rationing healthcare based upon availability isn't an awful or novel idea, its what we have always done and must always do, but we threw it away to deal with Covid which was a catastrophic mistake. There is no reason why turning away Covid-positive patients who seek treatment due to the NHS being "full" for a few weeks is worse than turning away the 7 million on waiting lists as has happened.
Sweden didn't have many legal restrictions, not like the way we did, as far as I know they didn't prohibit primary school children from going to school, or legally forbid people from leaving their homes, or going to work, or going into their loved ones homes.
Sweden gave recommendations rather than implement lockdown. That is sensible. It should be up to rational people to be educated and informed then to decide if they want to listen to those recommendations or not.
And, in effect, we tried the "recommend rather than mandate" option in autumn and winter of 2020 before lockdowns and it didn't work - because too many people decided not to bother complying, unlike in Sweden.
Or democracy as we call it.
The first lockdown trained people that it wasn't that serious unless there was lockdown, so of course they didn't bother with voluntary measures.
It really was instructive. The state determining how many people you were allowed in to your own house and when you could see your family.
And the polls showed that people loved it all. Look at the posters on here and, I might add, well after the first lockdown. No way could we have been trusted to do the right thing without laws dictating to us.
That is why we have laws. Because people, in general, can't be trusted to do the right thing.
Almost comical to see Sunak twisting himself in knots trying to claim that "illegal" asylum seekers had legal routes to get here. For so many countries there is no legal way to claim asylum here at all.
Tories want to fix the asylum problems yet can't do so as living on denial about basic facts. What's more I think the client vote of "sink the scroungers" people is largely a figment of their deranged imaginations.
This is where I struggle with the Tory establishments view on asylum and migration.
For some reason they are incapable of verbalising and legislating to match their views. If they believe asylum should only automatically be available into neighbouring countries with some additional capacity on an invitational basis, just say so. Don't gaslight with bullshit or blame the asylum seekers and migrants or indeed the French.
Legislatively it means leaving some international treaties where we have committed to the opposite. Again if that is what they want, just do it. Don't blame judges, lawyers, lefties or asylum seekers and migrants for reacting to laws that you have chosen to keep.
The fundamental issue is that there are a large number of economic migrants abusing the asylum system. As ever it is the genuine asylum seekers who suffer.
Plenty of places where similar did happen, of course, as noted in the article.
As a student, I once lived on a street that abruptly ended as the Coventry ring road went overhead. The street was large grand old terraces, mostly converted to flats or student houses. Would have been absolutely magnificent before the ring road was built.
For years Oxford and Cambridge Gardens offered some of the best value property in west London as they were the wrong side of the west way
I read about this a few months ago. One of the roads would have been a few hundred metres from our house. Complete madness, although I suppose one can applaud an era when governments tried to find solutions to the country's problems, even if they were the wrong ones!
I am very upset that the Westway, which previously was the only road in central London that you could hit 70+ on, now has an average 40mph - and occasionally 30mph - speed limit.
It used to be great whistling along past Portobello at 70mph.
Tories definitely up off the floor now. They've gone from extinction to merely crap and it wil hopefully give us a good base to build from in opposition. Ideally all of the old selfish bastards leave the party and we can remake it for people who work hard and want to get on in life not just old graspers intent on bankrupting the nation so they can go on another cruise.
Wrong.
The idea the Tories have already lost next election is so last month. The electorate like Sunak and his government, that’s what the recovery of the Tory share and collapse of the Labour share is screaming at us. In two years time the voters have the choice of throwing out the experienced Sunak government they like, and which has delivered for them through tough times, by taking a punt on inexperienced Labour and all the waffle, like priority to abolish hol they are coming out with.
My excited Dad is convinced this will be 92 all over again.
Hmm . Not sure which of you I agree with. Most of my family and friends vote Tory and I'm not picking up vibes from them that this will change next GE. This would not have been the case for some had Johnson survived.
However, I don't think I have a good radar on this as I'm in the Midlands which has become something of a Tory stronghold.
Perhaps the most obvious rebuttal is that rather being a source of funds the abolition of non dom status may well reduce the tax take in the UK. Labour always seem to assume that taxpayers are geese waiting quietly to be plucked and will not respond to changes in the tax code in any way other than writing larger cheques. These geese can and, in many cases, would, fly away taking their spending and tax payments with them. Would those that remained do more than make up the difference? Who knows? Certainly not Wes Streeting.
Plus the NHS already employs 1.3m people. At what point do we think that is enough?
I dunno, when people can get an operation in less than 3 years?
NHS spending is at a record high. NHS employment is at a record high. We locked down to "save the NHS".
And you can't get an operation in less than 3 years, with record employment and spending? 🤔
Is there a possibility perhaps that locking down the country to "save the NHS" in the long term didn't succeed in its objective?
Is it possible that you are disingenuously mixing up saving the NHS (from immediate collapse in 2020) with its long term decline?
No, its not, because one caused the other.
Had there been an immediate collapse in 2020 then some people would have died from natural causes during a pandemic, they would have been buried and mourned, but the NHS would have continued afterwards for those who survived. Schools as well as hospitals would have continued. And we wouldn't have borrowed hundreds of billions extra to be in this shit state of affairs.
Locking down to 'save the NHS' but then not having a functional NHS afterwards, was a dismal failure. We should have taken the harsh medicine of natural deaths occurring years ago instead of breaking the economy, education and yes the NHS for the long term.
Dunno. No lockdown: - More NHS worker deaths (and illness with time off, possible long term effects) - More NHS worker departures from the organisation (due to fear for health, burnout at the overwhelming shitness of turning people away and stacking up the bodies) - Likely even worse situation with backlogs due to complete overwhelming of services cutting what was done even more than actually happened - Possible increased long term disease burden from long Covid in people who would not die of Covid.
You talk about killing off the vulnerable oldies, but still a lot of healthcare is in the last year of life. I haven't seen strong evidence that Covid would have greatly preferentually killed those, as opposed to those with ~10 years left and reasonable health. Anecdotally (there probably are some good data on this, but I haven't looked) it seems the main risks was among those quite ill and needing to be in hospital, getting infected there, those in care homes*, those in for other ops (likely with reasonable life expectancy, you don't do a hip op on someone dying soon) and the apparently healthy retired who were still out and about doing things and so at greater exposure.
I'm not sure it's clear cut, even from a cold healthcare POV ignoring the other societal costs.
Backlogs wouldn't have been worse because services were cut to redirect everything to the frontline of Covid, dragged out over time.
Had there been a spike which surpassed capacity then more would have died, that is true, but then the peak would have come sooner, the fall in pressure on the NHS would have come sooner, and then there'd have been lower not higher demand afterwards for Covid-related pressures.
By 'flattening the sombrero' we deliberately dragged out Covid-related pressures for a longer period of time, which meant for a longer period of time NHS services were backlogged in order to free people up to deal with the pandemic.
Had we basically decided to just tell people with covid to bugger off home and quietly get on with dying (which may have gone down rather badly, both with healthcare workers and the general public), the death levels in the 55+ range would have been far higher. And that's what would have been needed to attempt to preserve everything else.
You seem to have this unshakeable belief that covid (pre-vaccines) merely affected the very elderly and those with precarious health.
And we wouldn't have preserved the rest of the healthcare services, anyway, due to the number of people in the healthcare services who would have been affected (or could we have had an exemption to the "Have you got covid? Then, no, we won't treat you," principle). Plus, of course, anyone being treated for anything else would have been exposed to covid from the healthcare professionals in the alternate reality where we tried to basically ignore it. And those being treated for, say, cancer, heart disease, kidney disease, etc, would have been sitting ducks for covid.
Which would, I suppose, have dramatically shortened waiting times. Killing off many of those going through the healthcare system would certainly achieve that.
In addition, with so many more exposed pre-vaccine, the long-term health conditions that covid can cause in the survivors (considerably increased rates of heart issues, kidney diseases, diabetes, lung damage, brain issues) would cause a far higher impact on the NHS going forwards, so we'd have brewed up a toxic level of extra damage, anyway.
No fucking shit Sherlock that the death levels would have been higher. I said that. They would have been natural deaths, of natural causes.
The price of preventing those deaths, in throwing the baby away with the bathwater by breaking the NHS, shutting down schools, shutting down the economy, telling healthy people not to go into work and throwing away civil liberties was not worth preventing some people dying from perfectly natural causes.
You are an eccentric extremist who responds to everything with "yeah but deaths" . . . deaths are not the only measure of what matters. Sweden got through the pandemic with comparable death rates but without throwing away their civil liberties or crashing the economy as much as we did, or shutting down primary schools like we did, or telling elderly people they couldn't see their loved ones for months or even years like we did in order to "save them" so they could die alone instead of natural causes and so on.
All that matters much, much more than deaths during a pandemic.
-spends ages pointing out it's all about hospitalisations rather than deaths-
-Bart insists I'm an extremist just talking about deaths-
I don't know if you noticed, but the image was on hospitalisations and ICUs and their effect on the healthcare system.
As was the argument.
I get that it's a difficult thing to accept - that there were no good outcomes, and that yes, we all wanted things to be normal but that wasn't possible.
And will you please try to be coherent? It's only a few weeks since you insisted that any restrictions equated to "lockdown." Which is when I thought you'd finally quit going on about Sweden - who had restrictions from earlier than us to far later than us.
I now see that repeating the word "natural" is the current mantra. Well, we can sort it out now by cutting off heating to all homes with anyone ill or over 55. We will then achieve a natural death rate that could sort things out. Or if we just prohibit healthcare to anyone for the next, say, six months, and we'll get a natural death rate to sort things out there, as well.
The pretence that "Sweden was normal" and the linked pretence that "it was a balance between protecting the economy or protecting people" doesn't work. Because they're both pretend and not reflections of what actually was the situation.
I also don't think that anywhere did your implicit suggestion of refusing treatment to anyone with covid (and if that wasn't the idea you wanted to put forwards, then how on Earth would you have preserved treatment for anything else when all ICUs and all doctors had to be purposed for covid and we still overloaded the system even with lockdowns?).
Excuse me for responding to the words you wrote: Had we basically decided to just tell people with covid to bugger off home and quietly get on with dying (which may have gone down rather badly, both with healthcare workers and the general public), the death levels in the 55+ range would have been far higher. And that's what would have been needed to attempt to preserve everything else.
Yes people seek to go to hospital when they're sick, and if the hospital is full they may be turned away. There's over 7 million people on waiting lists right now that wouldn't be if that weren't true, let alone those who would have sought treatment but didn't due to the waiting list situation. So no, rationing healthcare based upon availability isn't an awful or novel idea, its what we have always done and must always do, but we threw it away to deal with Covid which was a catastrophic mistake. There is no reason why turning away Covid-positive patients who seek treatment due to the NHS being "full" for a few weeks is worse than turning away the 7 million on waiting lists as has happened.
Sweden didn't have many legal restrictions, not like the way we did, as far as I know they didn't prohibit primary school children from going to school, or legally forbid people from leaving their homes, or going to work, or going into their loved ones homes.
Sweden gave recommendations rather than implement lockdown. That is sensible. It should be up to rational people to be educated and informed then to decide if they want to listen to those recommendations or not.
And, in effect, we tried the "recommend rather than mandate" option in autumn and winter of 2020 before lockdowns and it didn't work - because too many people decided not to bother complying, unlike in Sweden.
Or democracy as we call it.
The first lockdown trained people that it wasn't that serious unless there was lockdown, so of course they didn't bother with voluntary measures.
It really was instructive. The state determining how many people you were allowed in to your own house and when you could see your family.
And the polls showed that people loved it all. Look at the posters on here and, I might add, well after the first lockdown. No way could we have been trusted to do the right thing without laws dictating to us.
That is why we have laws. Because people, in general, can't be trusted to do the right thing.
But people were doing the right thing in March 2020.
Yes and a North Italy style collapse for a few weeks would have been better than months or years of throwing away civil liberties, shutting down schools and so on.
Get through the collapse and get to the other side. The collapse didn't last forever now, did it? Has Northern Italy's healthcare system still collapsed? Has Sweden's?
Ours most definitely has.
Err, you do know that Italy's lockdowns were much stricter than ours, I suppose?
Yes I do, and I'm not proposing we should have copied Italy's lockdown.
But the point is that even if the healthcare system so-called 'collapses' like in Italy in Feb/Mar 2020, then that is so for a matter of days/weeks not years.
Whereas the NHS thanks to lockdown has collapsed for a matter of years/decades. People waiting years for an operation because we cancelled everything to deal with Covid, rather than let Covid take its course naturally and have the NHS there within its operating budget and capacities to help with the worst of it - and letting people act like rational beings and lock themselves down voluntarily if they so choose to do, like happened in Sweden.
There is a fate worse than Northern Italy style 'collapse'. We're there now. Yes a few patients may have been turned away and left to die in Italy during a pandemic. Oh well. Over 7 million patients have been turned away in the UK to be put on waiting lists - that's objectively worse than the amount of patients turned away in Italy despite the lockdown and shutting schools etc in a hubristic and failed attempt to "save the NHS".
This is delusional. Firstly you seem to assume that their was no-one waiting for treatment in Feb 2020 - this is wildly incorrect. Secondly you seem to imagine the NHS collapsing would be just one of those things, just some busy days and a few oldies not getting treated. That's utter rubbish. The point of NHS collapse would have been no treatment for people in the their 20's, 30's, 40's and 50's either. It could have been you.
I believe we unwound much too slowly after the third lockdown, and indeed railed against some of the nonsense on here (masks off at tables in the pub, but on to walk to the loo; not being allowed to have two outdoor tables joined up in the pub garden lest we have more than 6 people in close contact, even though they'd been playing cricket together for 7 hours and on and on). But the one in March 2020 was to prevent an existential threat to society. Yes it was tough, and it is now too with the covid recovery which will take decades. But there was never an option to just let it run through, and if you think their was, you weren't paying attention.
I was paying attention and I supported lockdown at the time. I was wrong to do so. Sweden didn't lockdown, they called this right. We should put our hands up and acknowledge when we make mistakes and I made a terrible mistake supporting lockdown as did the country.
Yes treatment may not have been available for me, or anyone else for a few weeks. So what? That does not justify what we did.
To answer a question you didn't, in March 2020 there were 4.6 million people on the waiting list. So its totally wrong to suggest that the lockdown has led to an extra 7 million on the lists. At worst its 3.4 million - many of whom may be down to covid itself.
"At worst it's 3.4million"
Listen to yourself.
I'm not claiming its a good thing, I'm trying to counter Bart claiming its 7 million because we locked down.
Perhaps the most obvious rebuttal is that rather being a source of funds the abolition of non dom status may well reduce the tax take in the UK. Labour always seem to assume that taxpayers are geese waiting quietly to be plucked and will not respond to changes in the tax code in any way other than writing larger cheques. These geese can and, in many cases, would, fly away taking their spending and tax payments with them. Would those that remained do more than make up the difference? Who knows? Certainly not Wes Streeting.
Plus the NHS already employs 1.3m people. At what point do we think that is enough?
I dunno, when people can get an operation in less than 3 years?
NHS spending is at a record high. NHS employment is at a record high. We locked down to "save the NHS".
And you can't get an operation in less than 3 years, with record employment and spending? 🤔
Is there a possibility perhaps that locking down the country to "save the NHS" in the long term didn't succeed in its objective?
Is it possible that you are disingenuously mixing up saving the NHS (from immediate collapse in 2020) with its long term decline?
No, its not, because one caused the other.
Had there been an immediate collapse in 2020 then some people would have died from natural causes during a pandemic, they would have been buried and mourned, but the NHS would have continued afterwards for those who survived. Schools as well as hospitals would have continued. And we wouldn't have borrowed hundreds of billions extra to be in this shit state of affairs.
Locking down to 'save the NHS' but then not having a functional NHS afterwards, was a dismal failure. We should have taken the harsh medicine of natural deaths occurring years ago instead of breaking the economy, education and yes the NHS for the long term.
Dunno. No lockdown: - More NHS worker deaths (and illness with time off, possible long term effects) - More NHS worker departures from the organisation (due to fear for health, burnout at the overwhelming shitness of turning people away and stacking up the bodies) - Likely even worse situation with backlogs due to complete overwhelming of services cutting what was done even more than actually happened - Possible increased long term disease burden from long Covid in people who would not die of Covid.
You talk about killing off the vulnerable oldies, but still a lot of healthcare is in the last year of life. I haven't seen strong evidence that Covid would have greatly preferentually killed those, as opposed to those with ~10 years left and reasonable health. Anecdotally (there probably are some good data on this, but I haven't looked) it seems the main risks was among those quite ill and needing to be in hospital, getting infected there, those in care homes*, those in for other ops (likely with reasonable life expectancy, you don't do a hip op on someone dying soon) and the apparently healthy retired who were still out and about doing things and so at greater exposure.
I'm not sure it's clear cut, even from a cold healthcare POV ignoring the other societal costs.
Backlogs wouldn't have been worse because services were cut to redirect everything to the frontline of Covid, dragged out over time.
Had there been a spike which surpassed capacity then more would have died, that is true, but then the peak would have come sooner, the fall in pressure on the NHS would have come sooner, and then there'd have been lower not higher demand afterwards for Covid-related pressures.
By 'flattening the sombrero' we deliberately dragged out Covid-related pressures for a longer period of time, which meant for a longer period of time NHS services were backlogged in order to free people up to deal with the pandemic.
Had we basically decided to just tell people with covid to bugger off home and quietly get on with dying (which may have gone down rather badly, both with healthcare workers and the general public), the death levels in the 55+ range would have been far higher. And that's what would have been needed to attempt to preserve everything else.
You seem to have this unshakeable belief that covid (pre-vaccines) merely affected the very elderly and those with precarious health.
And we wouldn't have preserved the rest of the healthcare services, anyway, due to the number of people in the healthcare services who would have been affected (or could we have had an exemption to the "Have you got covid? Then, no, we won't treat you," principle). Plus, of course, anyone being treated for anything else would have been exposed to covid from the healthcare professionals in the alternate reality where we tried to basically ignore it. And those being treated for, say, cancer, heart disease, kidney disease, etc, would have been sitting ducks for covid.
Which would, I suppose, have dramatically shortened waiting times. Killing off many of those going through the healthcare system would certainly achieve that.
In addition, with so many more exposed pre-vaccine, the long-term health conditions that covid can cause in the survivors (considerably increased rates of heart issues, kidney diseases, diabetes, lung damage, brain issues) would cause a far higher impact on the NHS going forwards, so we'd have brewed up a toxic level of extra damage, anyway.
No fucking shit Sherlock that the death levels would have been higher. I said that. They would have been natural deaths, of natural causes.
The price of preventing those deaths, in throwing the baby away with the bathwater by breaking the NHS, shutting down schools, shutting down the economy, telling healthy people not to go into work and throwing away civil liberties was not worth preventing some people dying from perfectly natural causes.
You are an eccentric extremist who responds to everything with "yeah but deaths" . . . deaths are not the only measure of what matters. Sweden got through the pandemic with comparable death rates but without throwing away their civil liberties or crashing the economy as much as we did, or shutting down primary schools like we did, or telling elderly people they couldn't see their loved ones for months or even years like we did in order to "save them" so they could die alone instead of natural causes and so on.
All that matters much, much more than deaths during a pandemic.
-spends ages pointing out it's all about hospitalisations rather than deaths-
-Bart insists I'm an extremist just talking about deaths-
I don't know if you noticed, but the image was on hospitalisations and ICUs and their effect on the healthcare system.
As was the argument.
I get that it's a difficult thing to accept - that there were no good outcomes, and that yes, we all wanted things to be normal but that wasn't possible.
And will you please try to be coherent? It's only a few weeks since you insisted that any restrictions equated to "lockdown." Which is when I thought you'd finally quit going on about Sweden - who had restrictions from earlier than us to far later than us.
I now see that repeating the word "natural" is the current mantra. Well, we can sort it out now by cutting off heating to all homes with anyone ill or over 55. We will then achieve a natural death rate that could sort things out. Or if we just prohibit healthcare to anyone for the next, say, six months, and we'll get a natural death rate to sort things out there, as well.
The pretence that "Sweden was normal" and the linked pretence that "it was a balance between protecting the economy or protecting people" doesn't work. Because they're both pretend and not reflections of what actually was the situation.
I also don't think that anywhere did your implicit suggestion of refusing treatment to anyone with covid (and if that wasn't the idea you wanted to put forwards, then how on Earth would you have preserved treatment for anything else when all ICUs and all doctors had to be purposed for covid and we still overloaded the system even with lockdowns?).
Excuse me for responding to the words you wrote: Had we basically decided to just tell people with covid to bugger off home and quietly get on with dying (which may have gone down rather badly, both with healthcare workers and the general public), the death levels in the 55+ range would have been far higher. And that's what would have been needed to attempt to preserve everything else.
Yes people seek to go to hospital when they're sick, and if the hospital is full they may be turned away. There's over 7 million people on waiting lists right now that wouldn't be if that weren't true, let alone those who would have sought treatment but didn't due to the waiting list situation. So no, rationing healthcare based upon availability isn't an awful or novel idea, its what we have always done and must always do, but we threw it away to deal with Covid which was a catastrophic mistake. There is no reason why turning away Covid-positive patients who seek treatment due to the NHS being "full" for a few weeks is worse than turning away the 7 million on waiting lists as has happened.
Sweden didn't have many legal restrictions, not like the way we did, as far as I know they didn't prohibit primary school children from going to school, or legally forbid people from leaving their homes, or going to work, or going into their loved ones homes.
Sweden gave recommendations rather than implement lockdown. That is sensible. It should be up to rational people to be educated and informed then to decide if they want to listen to those recommendations or not.
And, in effect, we tried the "recommend rather than mandate" option in autumn and winter of 2020 before lockdowns and it didn't work - because too many people decided not to bother complying, unlike in Sweden.
Or democracy as we call it.
The first lockdown trained people that it wasn't that serious unless there was lockdown, so of course they didn't bother with voluntary measures.
It really was instructive. The state determining how many people you were allowed in to your own house and when you could see your family.
And the polls showed that people loved it all. Look at the posters on here and, I might add, well after the first lockdown. No way could we have been trusted to do the right thing without laws dictating to us.
Most people thought locking down was the right thing to do in the circumstances.
That doesn't translate to 'people love the state determining how many people you were allowed in to your own house and when you could see your family'
Lockdown was horrible. I hope it never happens again - but I'm not a well-placed person to say whether it was the right or wrong decision. On balance I think it was probably right (albeit with some internally wrong/mad decisions, like arresting people for sitting on a bench etc.), but like most folk I'm not really qualified to make that judgement.
Tories definitely up off the floor now. They've gone from extinction to merely crap and it wil hopefully give us a good base to build from in opposition. Ideally all of the old selfish bastards leave the party and we can remake it for people who work hard and want to get on in life not just old graspers intent on bankrupting the nation so they can go on another cruise.
Wrong.
The idea the Tories have already lost next election is so last month. The electorate like Sunak and his government, that’s what the recovery of the Tory share and collapse of the Labour share is screaming at us. In two years time the voters have the choice of throwing out the experienced Sunak government they like, and which has delivered for them through tough times, by taking a punt on inexperienced Labour and all the waffle, like priority to abolish hol they are coming out with.
My excited Dad is convinced this will be 92 all over again.
Hmm . Not sure which of you I agree with. Most of my family and friends vote Tory and I'm not picking up vibes from them that this will change next GE. This would not have been the case for some had Johnson survived.
However, I don't think I have a good radar on this as I'm in the Midlands which has become something of a Tory stronghold.
It seems to me entirely logical that the polls will move in steps not gradually.
You could say that the 4/5pp Sunak has added to date are the “always vote Tory but can’t vote for Truss” group. Low hanging fruit.
Next there could be a group of “need vaguely competent government and don’t trust Starmer” (I’d probably be in this category).
Etc etc.
So saying they are “x% behind they are doomed” is pretty meaningless. It depends how many of those groups Sunak can convince
Perhaps the most obvious rebuttal is that rather being a source of funds the abolition of non dom status may well reduce the tax take in the UK. Labour always seem to assume that taxpayers are geese waiting quietly to be plucked and will not respond to changes in the tax code in any way other than writing larger cheques. These geese can and, in many cases, would, fly away taking their spending and tax payments with them. Would those that remained do more than make up the difference? Who knows? Certainly not Wes Streeting.
Plus the NHS already employs 1.3m people. At what point do we think that is enough?
I dunno, when people can get an operation in less than 3 years?
NHS spending is at a record high. NHS employment is at a record high. We locked down to "save the NHS".
And you can't get an operation in less than 3 years, with record employment and spending? 🤔
Is there a possibility perhaps that locking down the country to "save the NHS" in the long term didn't succeed in its objective?
Is it possible that you are disingenuously mixing up saving the NHS (from immediate collapse in 2020) with its long term decline?
No, its not, because one caused the other.
Had there been an immediate collapse in 2020 then some people would have died from natural causes during a pandemic, they would have been buried and mourned, but the NHS would have continued afterwards for those who survived. Schools as well as hospitals would have continued. And we wouldn't have borrowed hundreds of billions extra to be in this shit state of affairs.
Locking down to 'save the NHS' but then not having a functional NHS afterwards, was a dismal failure. We should have taken the harsh medicine of natural deaths occurring years ago instead of breaking the economy, education and yes the NHS for the long term.
Dunno. No lockdown: - More NHS worker deaths (and illness with time off, possible long term effects) - More NHS worker departures from the organisation (due to fear for health, burnout at the overwhelming shitness of turning people away and stacking up the bodies) - Likely even worse situation with backlogs due to complete overwhelming of services cutting what was done even more than actually happened - Possible increased long term disease burden from long Covid in people who would not die of Covid.
You talk about killing off the vulnerable oldies, but still a lot of healthcare is in the last year of life. I haven't seen strong evidence that Covid would have greatly preferentually killed those, as opposed to those with ~10 years left and reasonable health. Anecdotally (there probably are some good data on this, but I haven't looked) it seems the main risks was among those quite ill and needing to be in hospital, getting infected there, those in care homes*, those in for other ops (likely with reasonable life expectancy, you don't do a hip op on someone dying soon) and the apparently healthy retired who were still out and about doing things and so at greater exposure.
I'm not sure it's clear cut, even from a cold healthcare POV ignoring the other societal costs.
Backlogs wouldn't have been worse because services were cut to redirect everything to the frontline of Covid, dragged out over time.
Had there been a spike which surpassed capacity then more would have died, that is true, but then the peak would have come sooner, the fall in pressure on the NHS would have come sooner, and then there'd have been lower not higher demand afterwards for Covid-related pressures.
By 'flattening the sombrero' we deliberately dragged out Covid-related pressures for a longer period of time, which meant for a longer period of time NHS services were backlogged in order to free people up to deal with the pandemic.
Had we basically decided to just tell people with covid to bugger off home and quietly get on with dying (which may have gone down rather badly, both with healthcare workers and the general public), the death levels in the 55+ range would have been far higher. And that's what would have been needed to attempt to preserve everything else.
You seem to have this unshakeable belief that covid (pre-vaccines) merely affected the very elderly and those with precarious health.
And we wouldn't have preserved the rest of the healthcare services, anyway, due to the number of people in the healthcare services who would have been affected (or could we have had an exemption to the "Have you got covid? Then, no, we won't treat you," principle). Plus, of course, anyone being treated for anything else would have been exposed to covid from the healthcare professionals in the alternate reality where we tried to basically ignore it. And those being treated for, say, cancer, heart disease, kidney disease, etc, would have been sitting ducks for covid.
Which would, I suppose, have dramatically shortened waiting times. Killing off many of those going through the healthcare system would certainly achieve that.
In addition, with so many more exposed pre-vaccine, the long-term health conditions that covid can cause in the survivors (considerably increased rates of heart issues, kidney diseases, diabetes, lung damage, brain issues) would cause a far higher impact on the NHS going forwards, so we'd have brewed up a toxic level of extra damage, anyway.
No fucking shit Sherlock that the death levels would have been higher. I said that. They would have been natural deaths, of natural causes.
The price of preventing those deaths, in throwing the baby away with the bathwater by breaking the NHS, shutting down schools, shutting down the economy, telling healthy people not to go into work and throwing away civil liberties was not worth preventing some people dying from perfectly natural causes.
You are an eccentric extremist who responds to everything with "yeah but deaths" . . . deaths are not the only measure of what matters. Sweden got through the pandemic with comparable death rates but without throwing away their civil liberties or crashing the economy as much as we did, or shutting down primary schools like we did, or telling elderly people they couldn't see their loved ones for months or even years like we did in order to "save them" so they could die alone instead of natural causes and so on.
All that matters much, much more than deaths during a pandemic.
-spends ages pointing out it's all about hospitalisations rather than deaths-
-Bart insists I'm an extremist just talking about deaths-
I don't know if you noticed, but the image was on hospitalisations and ICUs and their effect on the healthcare system.
As was the argument.
I get that it's a difficult thing to accept - that there were no good outcomes, and that yes, we all wanted things to be normal but that wasn't possible.
And will you please try to be coherent? It's only a few weeks since you insisted that any restrictions equated to "lockdown." Which is when I thought you'd finally quit going on about Sweden - who had restrictions from earlier than us to far later than us.
I now see that repeating the word "natural" is the current mantra. Well, we can sort it out now by cutting off heating to all homes with anyone ill or over 55. We will then achieve a natural death rate that could sort things out. Or if we just prohibit healthcare to anyone for the next, say, six months, and we'll get a natural death rate to sort things out there, as well.
The pretence that "Sweden was normal" and the linked pretence that "it was a balance between protecting the economy or protecting people" doesn't work. Because they're both pretend and not reflections of what actually was the situation.
I also don't think that anywhere did your implicit suggestion of refusing treatment to anyone with covid (and if that wasn't the idea you wanted to put forwards, then how on Earth would you have preserved treatment for anything else when all ICUs and all doctors had to be purposed for covid and we still overloaded the system even with lockdowns?).
Excuse me for responding to the words you wrote: Had we basically decided to just tell people with covid to bugger off home and quietly get on with dying (which may have gone down rather badly, both with healthcare workers and the general public), the death levels in the 55+ range would have been far higher. And that's what would have been needed to attempt to preserve everything else.
Yes people seek to go to hospital when they're sick, and if the hospital is full they may be turned away. There's over 7 million people on waiting lists right now that wouldn't be if that weren't true, let alone those who would have sought treatment but didn't due to the waiting list situation. So no, rationing healthcare based upon availability isn't an awful or novel idea, its what we have always done and must always do, but we threw it away to deal with Covid which was a catastrophic mistake. There is no reason why turning away Covid-positive patients who seek treatment due to the NHS being "full" for a few weeks is worse than turning away the 7 million on waiting lists as has happened.
Sweden didn't have many legal restrictions, not like the way we did, as far as I know they didn't prohibit primary school children from going to school, or legally forbid people from leaving their homes, or going to work, or going into their loved ones homes.
Sweden gave recommendations rather than implement lockdown. That is sensible. It should be up to rational people to be educated and informed then to decide if they want to listen to those recommendations or not.
And, in effect, we tried the "recommend rather than mandate" option in autumn and winter of 2020 before lockdowns and it didn't work - because too many people decided not to bother complying, unlike in Sweden.
Or democracy as we call it.
The first lockdown trained people that it wasn't that serious unless there was lockdown, so of course they didn't bother with voluntary measures.
It really was instructive. The state determining how many people you were allowed in to your own house and when you could see your family.
And the polls showed that people loved it all. Look at the posters on here and, I might add, well after the first lockdown. No way could we have been trusted to do the right thing without laws dictating to us.
That is why we have laws. Because people, in general, can't be trusted to do the right thing.
Completely wrong. "In general" people can absolutely be trusted to do the right thing. We engage in exception management which is how our society works.
We subverted that and employed the principle that people, as you say, couldn't be trusted. Which is quite sad, really.
Yes and a North Italy style collapse for a few weeks would have been better than months or years of throwing away civil liberties, shutting down schools and so on.
Get through the collapse and get to the other side. The collapse didn't last forever now, did it? Has Northern Italy's healthcare system still collapsed? Has Sweden's?
Ours most definitely has.
Err, you do know that Italy's lockdowns were much stricter than ours, I suppose?
Yes I do, and I'm not proposing we should have copied Italy's lockdown.
But the point is that even if the healthcare system so-called 'collapses' like in Italy in Feb/Mar 2020, then that is so for a matter of days/weeks not years.
Whereas the NHS thanks to lockdown has collapsed for a matter of years/decades. People waiting years for an operation because we cancelled everything to deal with Covid, rather than let Covid take its course naturally and have the NHS there within its operating budget and capacities to help with the worst of it - and letting people act like rational beings and lock themselves down voluntarily if they so choose to do, like happened in Sweden.
There is a fate worse than Northern Italy style 'collapse'. We're there now. Yes a few patients may have been turned away and left to die in Italy during a pandemic. Oh well. Over 7 million patients have been turned away in the UK to be put on waiting lists - that's objectively worse than the amount of patients turned away in Italy despite the lockdown and shutting schools etc in a hubristic and failed attempt to "save the NHS".
This is delusional. Firstly you seem to assume that their was no-one waiting for treatment in Feb 2020 - this is wildly incorrect. Secondly you seem to imagine the NHS collapsing would be just one of those things, just some busy days and a few oldies not getting treated. That's utter rubbish. The point of NHS collapse would have been no treatment for people in the their 20's, 30's, 40's and 50's either. It could have been you.
I believe we unwound much too slowly after the third lockdown, and indeed railed against some of the nonsense on here (masks off at tables in the pub, but on to walk to the loo; not being allowed to have two outdoor tables joined up in the pub garden lest we have more than 6 people in close contact, even though they'd been playing cricket together for 7 hours and on and on). But the one in March 2020 was to prevent an existential threat to society. Yes it was tough, and it is now too with the covid recovery which will take decades. But there was never an option to just let it run through, and if you think their was, you weren't paying attention.
I was paying attention and I supported lockdown at the time. I was wrong to do so. Sweden didn't lockdown, they called this right. We should put our hands up and acknowledge when we make mistakes and I made a terrible mistake supporting lockdown as did the country.
Yes treatment may not have been available for me, or anyone else for a few weeks. So what? That does not justify what we did.
To answer a question you didn't, in March 2020 there were 4.6 million people on the waiting list. So its totally wrong to suggest that the lockdown has led to an extra 7 million on the lists. At worst its 3.4 million - many of whom may be down to covid itself.
"At worst it's 3.4million"
Listen to yourself.
I'm not claiming its a good thing, I'm trying to counter Bart claiming its 7 million because we locked down.
A million people here extra on the waiting list, a million people there extra on the waiting list...
Very fortunate that we did not build too many the damn things, though we did worse than much of Europe. But much better than the USA. This is Salt Lake City I think:
Roads in cities in Europe are very narrow because they originally had to be wide enough for one cart.
Roads in Western US cities originally had to be wide enough for a team of horses pulling a carriage to turn easily.
My favourite bonkers urban road scheme was lowly Halifax. We already have the pub with the dual carriageway overhead (https://tinyurl.com/2tb3ryuz), and the very tall Burdock Way viaducts (https://tinyurl.com/ksk6s32e) over the town. But the lunatic final phase would have added a top deck viaduct onto Burdock Way, with its supports running up the gap between the existing two viaducts...
It really was instructive. The state determining how many people you were allowed in to your own house and when you could see your family.
And the polls showed that people loved it all. Look at the posters on here and, I might add, well after the first lockdown. No way could we have been trusted to do the right thing without laws dictating to us.
Wait until you hear about the state determining how many people you can have in your car, and the atrocious assault on freedom, the seatbelt.
Diesel cracks still at historically sky high levels. Loss of diesel coming from russian refineries, as well as some substitution effects from using nat gas for power. Meanwhile petrol is gonna be down at £1.40-something soon enough looks like.
It really was instructive. The state determining how many people you were allowed in to your own house and when you could see your family.
And the polls showed that people loved it all. Look at the posters on here and, I might add, well after the first lockdown. No way could we have been trusted to do the right thing without laws dictating to us.
Wait until you hear about the state determining how many people you can have in your car, and the atrocious assault on freedom, the seatbelt.
Bingo! The seatbelt fallacy. I wondered how long it would take for someone to mention that. Just disappointed it was you of all people.
It is your choice whether or not to drive a car (note: do you wear a seatbelt in a black cab, I wonder). It is not a necessary element of a normal life whereas it could be argued that choosing to see your aged mother, for example, is a part of human life why isn't there a human right to free assembly? Is there a human right to drive a Porsche Boxster?
Very fortunate that we did not build too many the damn things, though we did worse than much of Europe. But much better than the USA. This is Salt Lake City I think:
Roads in cities in Europe are very narrow because they originally had to be wide enough for one cart.
Roads in Western US cities originally had to be wide enough for a team of horses pulling a carriage to turn easily.
A lot of it is far more recent than that, though.
For example, historic city centres in North America have been demolished wholesale to create car parks, required because eg when you limit your housing areas to single family homes and no businesses, pubs, shops, hairdressers etc then there is no option but to drive miles from your home to whatever - and you require motor vehicles and car parks. If you can't build businesses near tube stations because of such zoning and all the suburbs are so spread out, then tube systems are not viable ==> auto-culture etc.
Zoning laws did not exist in the USA until post-WW1, and there were funded political campaigns to drive such legal innovations.
Over here, planning law / land use is far more flexible.
Perhaps the most obvious rebuttal is that rather being a source of funds the abolition of non dom status may well reduce the tax take in the UK. Labour always seem to assume that taxpayers are geese waiting quietly to be plucked and will not respond to changes in the tax code in any way other than writing larger cheques. These geese can and, in many cases, would, fly away taking their spending and tax payments with them. Would those that remained do more than make up the difference? Who knows? Certainly not Wes Streeting.
Plus the NHS already employs 1.3m people. At what point do we think that is enough?
I dunno, when people can get an operation in less than 3 years?
NHS spending is at a record high. NHS employment is at a record high. We locked down to "save the NHS".
And you can't get an operation in less than 3 years, with record employment and spending? 🤔
Is there a possibility perhaps that locking down the country to "save the NHS" in the long term didn't succeed in its objective?
Is it possible that you are disingenuously mixing up saving the NHS (from immediate collapse in 2020) with its long term decline?
No, its not, because one caused the other.
Had there been an immediate collapse in 2020 then some people would have died from natural causes during a pandemic, they would have been buried and mourned, but the NHS would have continued afterwards for those who survived. Schools as well as hospitals would have continued. And we wouldn't have borrowed hundreds of billions extra to be in this shit state of affairs.
Locking down to 'save the NHS' but then not having a functional NHS afterwards, was a dismal failure. We should have taken the harsh medicine of natural deaths occurring years ago instead of breaking the economy, education and yes the NHS for the long term.
Dunno. No lockdown: - More NHS worker deaths (and illness with time off, possible long term effects) - More NHS worker departures from the organisation (due to fear for health, burnout at the overwhelming shitness of turning people away and stacking up the bodies) - Likely even worse situation with backlogs due to complete overwhelming of services cutting what was done even more than actually happened - Possible increased long term disease burden from long Covid in people who would not die of Covid.
You talk about killing off the vulnerable oldies, but still a lot of healthcare is in the last year of life. I haven't seen strong evidence that Covid would have greatly preferentually killed those, as opposed to those with ~10 years left and reasonable health. Anecdotally (there probably are some good data on this, but I haven't looked) it seems the main risks was among those quite ill and needing to be in hospital, getting infected there, those in care homes*, those in for other ops (likely with reasonable life expectancy, you don't do a hip op on someone dying soon) and the apparently healthy retired who were still out and about doing things and so at greater exposure.
I'm not sure it's clear cut, even from a cold healthcare POV ignoring the other societal costs.
Backlogs wouldn't have been worse because services were cut to redirect everything to the frontline of Covid, dragged out over time.
Had there been a spike which surpassed capacity then more would have died, that is true, but then the peak would have come sooner, the fall in pressure on the NHS would have come sooner, and then there'd have been lower not higher demand afterwards for Covid-related pressures.
By 'flattening the sombrero' we deliberately dragged out Covid-related pressures for a longer period of time, which meant for a longer period of time NHS services were backlogged in order to free people up to deal with the pandemic.
Had we basically decided to just tell people with covid to bugger off home and quietly get on with dying (which may have gone down rather badly, both with healthcare workers and the general public), the death levels in the 55+ range would have been far higher. And that's what would have been needed to attempt to preserve everything else.
You seem to have this unshakeable belief that covid (pre-vaccines) merely affected the very elderly and those with precarious health.
And we wouldn't have preserved the rest of the healthcare services, anyway, due to the number of people in the healthcare services who would have been affected (or could we have had an exemption to the "Have you got covid? Then, no, we won't treat you," principle). Plus, of course, anyone being treated for anything else would have been exposed to covid from the healthcare professionals in the alternate reality where we tried to basically ignore it. And those being treated for, say, cancer, heart disease, kidney disease, etc, would have been sitting ducks for covid.
Which would, I suppose, have dramatically shortened waiting times. Killing off many of those going through the healthcare system would certainly achieve that.
In addition, with so many more exposed pre-vaccine, the long-term health conditions that covid can cause in the survivors (considerably increased rates of heart issues, kidney diseases, diabetes, lung damage, brain issues) would cause a far higher impact on the NHS going forwards, so we'd have brewed up a toxic level of extra damage, anyway.
No fucking shit Sherlock that the death levels would have been higher. I said that. They would have been natural deaths, of natural causes.
The price of preventing those deaths, in throwing the baby away with the bathwater by breaking the NHS, shutting down schools, shutting down the economy, telling healthy people not to go into work and throwing away civil liberties was not worth preventing some people dying from perfectly natural causes.
You are an eccentric extremist who responds to everything with "yeah but deaths" . . . deaths are not the only measure of what matters. Sweden got through the pandemic with comparable death rates but without throwing away their civil liberties or crashing the economy as much as we did, or shutting down primary schools like we did, or telling elderly people they couldn't see their loved ones for months or even years like we did in order to "save them" so they could die alone instead of natural causes and so on.
All that matters much, much more than deaths during a pandemic.
-spends ages pointing out it's all about hospitalisations rather than deaths-
-Bart insists I'm an extremist just talking about deaths-
I don't know if you noticed, but the image was on hospitalisations and ICUs and their effect on the healthcare system.
As was the argument.
I get that it's a difficult thing to accept - that there were no good outcomes, and that yes, we all wanted things to be normal but that wasn't possible.
And will you please try to be coherent? It's only a few weeks since you insisted that any restrictions equated to "lockdown." Which is when I thought you'd finally quit going on about Sweden - who had restrictions from earlier than us to far later than us.
I now see that repeating the word "natural" is the current mantra. Well, we can sort it out now by cutting off heating to all homes with anyone ill or over 55. We will then achieve a natural death rate that could sort things out. Or if we just prohibit healthcare to anyone for the next, say, six months, and we'll get a natural death rate to sort things out there, as well.
The pretence that "Sweden was normal" and the linked pretence that "it was a balance between protecting the economy or protecting people" doesn't work. Because they're both pretend and not reflections of what actually was the situation.
I also don't think that anywhere did your implicit suggestion of refusing treatment to anyone with covid (and if that wasn't the idea you wanted to put forwards, then how on Earth would you have preserved treatment for anything else when all ICUs and all doctors had to be purposed for covid and we still overloaded the system even with lockdowns?).
Excuse me for responding to the words you wrote: Had we basically decided to just tell people with covid to bugger off home and quietly get on with dying (which may have gone down rather badly, both with healthcare workers and the general public), the death levels in the 55+ range would have been far higher. And that's what would have been needed to attempt to preserve everything else.
Yes people seek to go to hospital when they're sick, and if the hospital is full they may be turned away. There's over 7 million people on waiting lists right now that wouldn't be if that weren't true, let alone those who would have sought treatment but didn't due to the waiting list situation. So no, rationing healthcare based upon availability isn't an awful or novel idea, its what we have always done and must always do, but we threw it away to deal with Covid which was a catastrophic mistake. There is no reason why turning away Covid-positive patients who seek treatment due to the NHS being "full" for a few weeks is worse than turning away the 7 million on waiting lists as has happened.
Sweden didn't have many legal restrictions, not like the way we did, as far as I know they didn't prohibit primary school children from going to school, or legally forbid people from leaving their homes, or going to work, or going into their loved ones homes.
Sweden gave recommendations rather than implement lockdown. That is sensible. It should be up to rational people to be educated and informed then to decide if they want to listen to those recommendations or not.
And, in effect, we tried the "recommend rather than mandate" option in autumn and winter of 2020 before lockdowns and it didn't work - because too many people decided not to bother complying, unlike in Sweden.
Or democracy as we call it.
The first lockdown trained people that it wasn't that serious unless there was lockdown, so of course they didn't bother with voluntary measures.
It really was instructive. The state determining how many people you were allowed in to your own house and when you could see your family.
And the polls showed that people loved it all. Look at the posters on here and, I might add, well after the first lockdown. No way could we have been trusted to do the right thing without laws dictating to us.
Most people thought locking down was the right thing to do in the circumstances.
Sure, because they only ever heard one side of the argument.
Tories definitely up off the floor now. They've gone from extinction to merely crap and it wil hopefully give us a good base to build from in opposition. Ideally all of the old selfish bastards leave the party and we can remake it for people who work hard and want to get on in life not just old graspers intent on bankrupting the nation so they can go on another cruise.
Wrong.
The idea the Tories have already lost next election is so last month. The electorate like Sunak and his government, that’s what the recovery of the Tory share and collapse of the Labour share is screaming at us. In two years time the voters have the choice of throwing out the experienced Sunak government they like, and which has delivered for them through tough times, by taking a punt on inexperienced Labour and all the waffle, like priority to abolish hol they are coming out with.
My excited Dad is convinced this will be 92 all over again.
Hmm . Not sure which of you I agree with. Most of my family and friends vote Tory and I'm not picking up vibes from them that this will change next GE. This would not have been the case for some had Johnson survived.
However, I don't think I have a good radar on this as I'm in the Midlands which has become something of a Tory stronghold.
It seems to me entirely logical that the polls will move in steps not gradually.
You could say that the 4/5pp Sunak has added to date are the “always vote Tory but can’t vote for Truss” group. Low hanging fruit.
Next there could be a group of “need vaguely competent government and don’t trust Starmer” (I’d probably be in this category).
Etc etc.
So saying they are “x% behind they are doomed” is pretty meaningless. It depends how many of those groups Sunak can convince
Exactly, and this is why I don't trust "momentum"/"the trend" arguments - each extra group you need to win (or could lose) are different.
A judge has thrown out a challenge to ScotGov's definition of woman in its gender balance on boards law - Lady Haldane says 'sex' is "not limited to biological or birth sex", but can include people with a gender recognition certificate. Full judgement:
Listening to the Radio Five Live phone-in on the strikes, it's mindboggling how many people don't seem to understand the concept of inflation. That if you just pay everyone more money without productivity gains, it won't achieve anything, it'll just mean money won't be worth as much as it was before.
Productivity is our big challenge. So many people are stuck in gruelling jobs where they either have no way to advance or seek better pay / conditions, or they are so poorly paid that they are stuck in overpriced rotten housing without the ability to heat it or feed themselves, never mind consume by buying stuff or having little luxuries and holidays.
On paper we have a huge economy, one of the largest in the world. And yet millions are the working poor, and so many of these are the people the rest of society relies upon. The money is generated - a huge economy - yet is so sparsely available for most of things that most people need.
Why is that?
It does warrant a giggle when frequent flyer PBers complain about poor productivity. I'm guilty as charged too.
My job intrinsically has poor productivity. There are only two of us who do what I do, but we can't go down to one because that one does have to take four weeks of holiday a year. And if the workload ever again gets too high for one person to be able to cope with it (as used to be the case) we'd have to add a third.
Are you in Bros?
Yes, he is Craig Logan
Just got me thinking of how you can split pop duo acts into 2 types - where both are approx equal as opposed to where it's really a 'one plus'. Wham is an obvious example of the 2nd. I happen to like Ridgeley's contribution but you have to say it's cameo. A good example of 'equals' is Sony & Cher imo. She was the bigger star by far as it turned out but in the duet he was in no way a passenger. Then you have the interesting case of Simon & Garfunkel. Paul thinks they're a plus one, Art thinks they're equals. I'm in the middle on this one. They're not equals, Art is wrong there, but to class them as a 'plus one' like Wham is a nonsense, so Paul is wrong too. Art Garfunkel is not like Andrew Ridgeley.
Paul wrote all the S&G songs and played all the instruments. He also sang lead vocal on all the songs except one. Bit of trivia: which one was it?
Tories definitely up off the floor now. They've gone from extinction to merely crap and it wil hopefully give us a good base to build from in opposition. Ideally all of the old selfish bastards leave the party and we can remake it for people who work hard and want to get on in life not just old graspers intent on bankrupting the nation so they can go on another cruise.
Going on a cruise wouldn't bankrupt the nation - cruise ships provide a good living for a lot of people. Sorry to see such an economically illiterate statement from you, even in jest.
Comments
As a student, I once lived on a street that abruptly ended as the Coventry ring road went overhead. The street was large grand old terraces, mostly converted to flats or student houses. Would have been absolutely magnificent before the ring road was built.
Whereas the sensible view would be to say we shouldn't have started from here. The NHS in any formation is far too often useless.
It's not like if a person doesn't take a shower for a month and then they get back to having showers daily, when within a very short space of time they'll be as clean as they used to be.
It used to be great whistling along past Portobello at 70mph.
https://twitter.com/LeftieStats/status/1602628285883715584
The Tories also lost most workers earning under £100k a year even at the 2019 general election
The idea the Tories have already lost next election is so last month. The electorate like Sunak and his government, that’s what the recovery of the Tory share and collapse of the Labour share is screaming at us. In two years time the voters have the choice of throwing out the experienced Sunak government they like, and which has delivered for them through tough times, by taking a punt on inexperienced Labour and all the waffle, like priority to abolish hol they are coming out with.
My excited Dad is convinced this will be 92 all over again.
In the real world, UNS breaks down with big swings. If Labour get mid-40s, they're getting a majority.
There's a reason I'm sceptical whenever both main parties agree on something as the only policy...
The claim was "our service has collapsed".
100% to 96% is not "collapse".
Next?
The “NHS” should effectively be a policy / supervisory function
Underneath you should have separate organisations focusing on primary care, acute care, chronic care and social care etc.
So I very much doubt there will be a by-election.
However, I don't think I have a good radar on this as I'm in the Midlands which has become something of a Tory stronghold.
That doesn't translate to 'people love the state determining how many people you were allowed in to your own house and when you could see your family'
Lockdown was horrible. I hope it never happens again - but I'm not a well-placed person to say whether it was the right or wrong decision. On balance I think it was probably right (albeit with some internally wrong/mad decisions, like arresting people for sitting on a bench etc.), but like most folk I'm not really qualified to make that judgement.
You could say that the 4/5pp Sunak has added to date are the “always vote Tory but can’t vote for Truss” group. Low hanging fruit.
Next there could be a group of “need vaguely competent government and don’t trust Starmer” (I’d probably be in this category).
Etc etc.
So saying they are “x% behind they are doomed” is pretty meaningless. It depends how many of those groups Sunak can convince
We subverted that and employed the principle that people, as you say, couldn't be trusted. Which is quite sad, really.
Roads in Western US cities originally had to be wide enough for a team of horses pulling a carriage to turn easily.
I wouldn't be betting on the ruling party in the general election (in 2024)
Ruling party politicians speak ill of Itaewon tragedy victims, enraging bereaved family members
https://m.koreatimes.co.kr/pages/article.asp?newsIdx=341574
Guess who drives a diesel?
NEW THREAD
It is your choice whether or not to drive a car (note: do you wear a seatbelt in a black cab, I wonder). It is not a necessary element of a normal life whereas it could be argued that choosing to see your aged mother, for example, is a part of human life why isn't there a human right to free assembly? Is there a human right to drive a Porsche Boxster?
For example, historic city centres in North America have been demolished wholesale to create car parks, required because eg when you limit your housing areas to single family homes and no businesses, pubs, shops, hairdressers etc then there is no option but to drive miles from your home to whatever - and you require motor vehicles and car parks. If you can't build businesses near tube stations because of such zoning and all the suburbs are so spread out, then tube systems are not viable ==> auto-culture etc.
Zoning laws did not exist in the USA until post-WW1, and there were funded political campaigns to drive such legal innovations.
Over here, planning law / land use is far more flexible.