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Why I chose TMay as best PM to handle COVID – politicalbetting.com
Why I chose TMay as best PM to handle COVID – politicalbetting.com
I was part of the YouGov sample for this polling question and when it was up on the screen I found myself taking several minutes rather than the usual few seconds to answer it.
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Obviously all of the above would have done better than Johnson, but my guess is Maggie T. might have done best. Not worried about being unpopular, better understanding of science, and prepared to make u-turns when needed.
But I think if anything this government has been trying to resist short term political pressure for heavy handed measures - albeit unsuccessfully. Certainly all the pressure has been to do more, rather than less.
I wouldn't have chosen her because I think her instincts too authoritarian, and for me an excess of authoritarianism has been the greatest failure of the last 18 months. But I know Mike has a different view on this.
Who would I have chosen? Honestly - Boris. Not out of any faith in Boris - but I'm certain all the others would have been worse.
What we really needed was for @SandyRentool to be PM.
Did you mention May? Paralysed by indecision.
But it's such a hard question to answer. PMs are of their time and it's hard to imagine them in today's world and it's even harder to imagine COVID during their time. If it had happened during the 1980s, WFH was not an option.
The qualities I would look for are:
1. Willingness to face reality rather than try to bargain with it.
2. Ability to focus on the most important things, and not to be distracted by minor controversies.
3. Clear, consistent, convincing communication, so that the public are brought along.
Not sure any of our recent PMs score well on all three.
Strangely enough, even though I think Johnson has done very badly, he didn't mess up the vaccines (at first) and I can't say I'm confident of the hypothetical of whether the others would have managed the same.
That's true, but as a diabetic she's vulnerable.
Scientists haven't all covered themselves in glory this pandemic. But some have been right some of the time - whereas the politics, philosophy and economics lot have been consistently rubbish.
A huge ask for anyone. Thatcher, Blair stand out as having the ability to corral all of these disparate elements. But then of course they stand out as being exceptional PMs over the past 40 yrs.
Just look at her handling of the AIDS crisis.
She read every briefing paper, challenged and quizzed the scientists to understand things better, and crucially, she allowed her cabinet to overrule her as she and they understood how serious this was.
As Sir Norman Fowler put it, she wasn't going to let hundreds of thousands of young men die from this, and she sold the message even if she wanted it to be a moral campaign.
Just compare how badly France and America dealt with AIDS.
I took the view she would have, she would have seen this like WWII, sometimes you have to get into debt for the greater good.
Maybe Tony as well.
I have the feeling that May and Brown would both have suffered paralysis by analysis.
It's actually TMay who I'd see as being too dogmatic, or better, rigid, by comparison.
Blair - exhibit A - foot and mouth
Brown would have been fairly decent.
Major - really not sure how he'd have dealt
Cameron would share many of Johnson's faults on this one.
I had given this thought and the funny thing is how it turns a lot of your biases about b their politics on its head and gives a different perspective on leadership.
*sobs*
- After two months of steady decline, worldwide infections and deaths are ticking up again.
- I think this is driven by Europe - which is the most significant location in terms of recorded infections and deaths, due to size of population, age structure, and ability to test. There are upticks across Europe.
- Some places looking particularly black - Romania, for example, which is recording what would be for a UK population 1000-1500 deaths a day. How is this possible in a country which has had even a perfunctory roll-out of vaccines?
- Increases in Poland look striking - same point really: how is this happening when vaccines have been rolled out?
- Russia also continuing to tick up, though I trust Russian data almost not at all - could be a genuine increase, could simply be more accurate recording.
- The third world still seems relatively little-scathed. Why is this? Demographics, or different habits of the population, or simply less ability to accurately record?
As a mostly outdoor event, and with the original covid variant there could well have been hardly any genuine transmission there. But we won't really ever know.
Thatcher would have been reluctant to spend and would have allowed, even encouraged businesses to go bankrupt while their customers disappeared. I don't think she would have locked down, just let market forces work. This required central state action which would have been anathema to her.
Johnson would have been the bottom of my list because of his failure to understand science and incompetent buffoonery.
Surely if you're to go off past PMs Thatcher is the obvious choice? Willing to listen to science, but also willing to question it too. Most importantly able to understand it. Handled both AIDS and Climate (Ozone).
I think the great Greta Thunberg may already be trying to work out the implications of this very obvious truth.
My sense is that this is obvious to almost everyone but almost no-one is prepared to say so. Is that how it seems generally?
The Daily TelegraphNew StatesmanWhy Germany has less to teach the UK than most think
Germany is afflicted by endemic corruption, antiquated infrastructure and geopolitical weakness.
https://www.newstatesman.com/world/europe/2021/10/why-germany-has-less-to-teach-the-uk-than-most-think
(This could be a random brain-fart, in which case sos.)
If memory serves... it was a while since I read of it so I reserve the right to be completely wrong.
For this I would go for Blair. He would be best at coordinating international response, which is the key issue, and also he is the best communicator. Matched with his pragmatism and unideological approach he would be the clear winner.
However bad it is already unavoidably going to be we will still make it worse by burning more fossil fuels. Every bit of fossil fuel we avoid burning reduces the extent to which it gets worse.
I also think that some of the transition away from fossil fuels might happen surprisingly quickly once technological tipping points are reached. Coal pretty much disappeared from the UK electricity grid surprisingly quickly. The transition to electric cars may also happen more quickly than expected.
Hip pocket response was Thatcher or Major, both of whom would have put the public welfare ahead of political considerations. On reflection, TM definitely a plausible choice.
But the way the weather and lack of mod cons affects human behaviour, plus being further away from intensive seed infection seems to have helped. I'm sure it's been noted before that Africa doesn't seem overly vulnerable to flu either.
To me the dog that really didn't bark was DRC, especially when compared to Amazon Brazil. Has knowledge around infectious diseases, a less advanced lifestyle (e.g. less air con) and further distance from international travel helped them?
And again, comparing France's case rates to Mayotte's, where France should be doing the measuring pretty well, seemed to suggest Mayotte was a place that had far less infection a few months ago.
Mass tree planting seems the best way to manage the next decades alongside reductions in fossil fuels.
One tricky thing is that severe covid is a complicated multi-system disorder that calls on a multiplicity of skills.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co-emissions?tab=chart&country=CHN~IND~EU-28~GBR~USA~FRA~DEU
https://bylinetimes.com/2021/10/20/oil-system-collapsing-so-fast-it-may-derail-renewables-warn-french-government-scientists/
I think there has been massive under recording too. My Nigerian colleagues have nearly all lost family members, albeit mostly cousins.
Major is a tricky one. He might have been quite good, alone, but with his government he would have been a disaster. He didn't have the ability/the Tory party of his time didn't have the ability to be coherent on this, I think. It was dysfunctional.
Thatcher - I tend to agree with most others. Good on the health response. Like you, not sure about the big-state action, which I think has been a good thing overall.
Blair, I really can't decide. He'd have taken the country with him in whatever direction, but I can't work out how good that direction would have been.
May, I don't see it. Also - like Major - for the inability to carry her party/parliament with her.
I agree with the point you are making but I am not talking about ideal situations but when all hell has broken loose, eg like a MASH unit and someone with some skills is better than nothing. My wife is very negative about her ability now having been out of patient care for so long, however I saw her in operation at a motorway pile up and I suspect people were considerably better off with her than not being treated at all. I was in fact very impressed, but then I wouldn't know if she was killing them off or not
The other thing I would add is that there is a lot of uncertainty (or at least, there was a decade back when I was on the edge of this field). How the earth responds to heating still has a lot of unknowns, there are complicated feedbacks and it may be that X amount of carbon emissions lead to scenarios much worse or much better than we think. At that time there were regular discoveries of new oceanic problems and feedbacks, mostly on the negative side, but also a few positives.
Mitigation planning should be a big part of what we're doing though.
The line that if we are all going to hit a catastrophe we may as well enjoy the time we have got is a a very old one. It is hard to sell the line that though we are heading for catastrophe we need to change almost everything. Who is the leader for that? Greta?
As to the rapidity of coal use decline? China building 40+ coal fired power plants to add to the 1000 in use. India saying it's all decades away. If the science is right that's no use at all. Yes, it will change, but too late.
Consequently, he is an advocate of a high-fibre diet. I mean proper high. All-bran cookies and stuff, MUCH less meat and processed foods. (I guess this is where the paleo diet advocates are coming from.)
Did you know BTW there's a lot more foliage planet wide than there was 30 years ago, anyway? Ironically because CO2 is so good for plants. Or so Matt Ridley said in the Spectator the other day.
*perhaps possible if pretty much everyone, including children vaccinated and boosted as required - depends on the exact R0 and average vaccine efficacy across the population at any given time.
Interesting position from labour
Despite knowing that the planet was warmed than it is now in the past, a lot of people have fallen for the notion that warming will become self-reinforcing as ice melts releasing trapped CO2 etc but the opposite is probably more likely. As CO2 levels rise, the planet becomes more habitable for greenery that processes that CO2.
And they are not wearing masks !!!!!
But your point illustrates the problem with tree planting. What is it for, long term? Trees mostly take ages to grow, too long to help. They then fail to do what they obligingly did in the Carbonaceous and turn into coal, because that depended on the fungi which cause them to decay not being in business at the time. They unproductive occupy land needed for other stuff.
There is/will be further chaos as families twig (perhaps only at the airport) that the one dose limitation for under 17 3/4 year olds in the UK means that for international travel purposes that only-one-jabbed child is classified as unvaccinated.
Going to France? - the vaccinated adults no probs, child needs negative test within 24 hours of boarding! And when in France the child has to get tested every 48 hours or else cannot enter restaurants or other indoor spaces. Ridiculous.
https://twitter.com/ThePlanetaryGuy/status/1450710008363110402
Did you make that up about greenery saving the day? That redundant "probably" is a bit quixotic.
I told you people haven't twigged.
Life does indeed adapt and self-correct, but that doesn't mean there aren't short term (on geological timescales) catastrophes and extinctions. Human civilisation is the blink of an eye in those terms.
https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20210716-as-france-extends-use-of-covid-health-pass-what-are-its-eu-neighbours-doing
"Starting July 21, the "health pass" (pass sanitaire) will be compulsory for access to leisure and cultural venues with more than 50 people, including cinemas and museums. From the beginning of August, it will be necessary to show your health pass to have coffee or eat lunch at a restaurant – even on an outdoor terrace – or to shop at a mall.
Customers will have to provide either a QR code proving they are fully vaccinated, a negative PCR or antigen test that is less than 48 hours old, or proof that they have recovered from Covid-19 in the last six months. According to the government's draft bill, restaurants could be fined up to €45,000 and proprietors face up to a year in prison if they fail to comply."