Would a Labour government have dealt better with the Covid 19 pandemic than the Tories have?

[tim]

The Tory management of the crisis has left the UK with, after San Marino, the highest per capita death rate in the world, something that could have been partially avoided had they followed the lead of other European governments and brought in a lock-down a couple of weeks earlier. So would a led Labour government have dealt with the situation better?

Personally I'm not convinced. With regard for the need for a rapid lock-down, I don't remember a great sense of urgency from politicians from either side back in early March, although my memory may be selective, as I was worried that a lock-down might lead to me losing my job. I had no conception of what was to come and I don't know that many British politicians did, either

As far a support measures go, I think the Tories and the media would have opposed Furlough and similar programmes, portraying them as a Corbynite socialist plot. Elements on the Labour Right wouldhave been making similar noises, making implementation much harder than it has been. Corbyn of course wouldn't have had Cummings or Stanley Johnson fouling up the message. However, he would have had Piers. I assume that Jeremy knows the depth of his brother's nuttery and would not have let him influence his approach to policy but the fact that Piers is happy to march alongside unabashed Fascists would surely have proved problematic.

 

[kebabking]

I don't particularly think it's a labour-tory dynamic. It very much looks to me like a Johnson problem - he'd be no better if he was Labour - he's thin skinned, a bit lazy, simply can't hold focus for long, and is obsessed by headlines.

The rest flows from that.

This may be heretical, but there are a number of things the government got right, that required huge political will and in some cases an emotional ability to turn long and dearly held political doctrine on its head overnight. However, the bravery and grip that it showed in March has disappeared completely, and it's now just a complete gangfuck featuring a bunch of chimps flinging shit.

 

[elbows]

I could type far too much about this subject so I will try to do it in different chunks over a number of days instead of some huge indigestible lump of a post. Well lets face it this still isnt going to be a short post, but by my standards it still counts as restrained.

Today I will try to give a simplified sense of issues relating to the key timing in March. I've said more than once that in some parallel universe where I was in charge of the response, I couldnt promise people I could have done the strong measures any sooner than 2 weeks maximum before the date the UK actually did. Too many things in the way before that, and a lack of examples of european governments thinking the unthinkable before that date. And even if the political will was there, feeding the right stuff into the scientific groups rather than encouraging them to go in the wrong direction via Johnsons etcs dubious pandemic instincts (eg superman cape free trade hero boasting was Johnsons first instinct), there were loads of problems with our scientific and medical orthodoxy, capacity, prior plans etc that were always going to hamper the response.

And there were some eyewatering problems with our modelling, surveillance and data. We were already into the crucial period where action needed to be taken when it became clear that they were misjudging the timing of our first pandemic wave as a result of this, and phenomenon such as relying on an Imperial College model that needed death data as its main driving input, but deaths are a laggy indicator which adds additional weeks of delay to our understanding of the picture, and we didnt even start looking quickly enough for deaths in hospitals of people with pneumonia unless they had a certain narrow travel history.

We ended up in the key week of Monday 9th March with big problems with the understanding of the stage of pandemic we had reached, when measures should be brought in, and how far the measures should go.

A week later, they knew they had got the timing wrong but were not sure by quite how much. And they knew they were going to have to go much further than originally envisaged. So then it was just a question of exactly when to do it, and they were still slow in this brief phase, but not as slow as politics and bureaucracy normally moves.

So anyway, without going into too much detail on specifics, I tend to conclude when I look at the detail that a different government who got a grip at a slightly different time, or who had a different sense from much earlier on about how far to go with measures, could have brought various things in between 5-10 days earlier than this government actually managed. 14 days for some stuff at a push, maybe. Those sorts of timing differences would be expected to make an extremely large difference to the number of deaths we had in the first wave, if public adherence to the measures had also happened at the same improved pace.

In terms of political instincts and the possibility of approaching the entire pre-pandemic phase differently and thus changing the timing and response even further from the possibilities I described above, that would have required the right people in certain positions, having their eye on the ball way earlier than was typical. It would also have required a sensible public debate and discussion on some tricky themes that were not well understood going into the pandemic.

Most obviously in that category for me is how much death a society seems prepared to tolerate, especially deaths where the overarching perception is of the elderly falling victim rather than the death being spread more evenly amongst the age groups. Its a strange subject because I follow influenza epidemics and there have been moments in my 45 years of life where there could be 20,000 excess flu deaths in winter and the reaction was rather limited. More likely to generate some headlines about the NHS being under great strain than anything else. I dont think the government or indeed the scientific advisors and medical officers had a clue how that sort of thing was going to be thought of by the press and the public in this pandemic. Not until the time in March where Johnson started making noises about preparing for your loved ones to die, and actual details of what measures and the timing of them started to come out, and rhetoric about herd immunity was wheeled out to an exceedingly poor reception did it dawn on them. That a great big chunk of potentially preventable deaths being allowed to happen was not what the public was looking for from those assuming a leadership role was I believe a bit of a revelation to those planning the way through the pandemic. If Labour had been in power and found a way to stumble into discovering this reality earlier than the tories did, then the spectrum of possibilities grows quite a bit wider in my mind.

 

[chilango]

Assuming that it was a scenario where Labour had won in 2019 rather than Starmer being handed it by Bono the Butcher the yes, definitely.

Simply because they'd have tried to be a Government and do stuff rather experimenting with how the "hidden hand" might react to a Pandemic with occasional nudges to keep people "choosing".

I doubt we'd have seen anything remarkably "socialist" in the response, but it would I guess have been more in line with most other States.

 

[dessiato]

The only thing we know for sure is that the Tories have plumbed new depths of incompetence. If only BJ was competent at anything other than producing offspring.

 

[elbows]

As far a support measures go, I think the Tories and the media would have opposed Furlough and similar programmes, portraying them as a Corbynite socialist plot. Elements on the Labour Right wouldhave been making similar noises, making implementation much harder than it has been. Corbyn of course wouldn't have had Cummings or Stanley Johnson fouling up the message. However, he would have had Piers. I assume that Jeremy knows the depth of his brother's nuttery and would not have let him influence his approach to policy but the fact that Piers is happy to march alongside unabashed Fascists would surely have proved problematic.

I suspect the tories, media etc would have found a way to quickly go along with furlough and other economic life support measures because it was in their interests/in the interests of those they represented. It would have been in the phase after the actute lockdown emergency phase that the propaganda would have turned very nasty, that time around mid May when lockdown fatigue in various forms did show up, the press were ready to move on to the next phase, and where business and political factions that favoured a quick resumption of normal economic activity were quickly getting restless. A phase that even Johnson did not respond to with what those factions really wanted, but he threw them a few bones and made unrealistic appeals for people to go back to work. Corbyn in that scenario would likely to have been made a monster of once more.

I think the brother would have remained a largely irrelevant sideshow. Labour would have been operating in the pandemic with the same underfunded healthcare, same care home issues, same PPE stockpile issues, same problems with test capacity, etc. There would have been lots of big issue criticisms to hurl at them, leaving little need to scrape the bottom of the barrel with stories about the brother.

Speaking of care home issues, as well as lockdown etc timing issues and the obvious effect they could have had on the amount of death, if there was any way a government could have made a big difference to hospital infection rates, discharge policies and genuine shielding and infection control in care homes then this is the other obvious way that a presumably very large difference to the number of deaths could have been achieved. I dont consider it terribly likely that within the first months of taking office a government would have looked that the NHS's longstanding pandemic 'reverse triage' plans and what those might mean for care home deaths, esepcially in a situation with very limited access to testing. If they had, and they could have cobbled together an alternative approach or at least mitigated for the obvious side-effects of this policy, things could have panned out a fair bit differently.

 

[Bahnhof Strasse]

The furlough thing was/is astonishing from any government, that it came from the Tories even more so and had it come from Corbyn it would have been slated to fuck. Germany is running with it until the end of 2021, if we don't do similar here there's going to be a decimation of jobs out there and when the bug finally does fuck off or at least gets under control rebuilding the country is going to be so much harder with so many businesses no longer existing, theatres turned in to executive flats and so on...

 

[elbows]

The only thing we know for sure is that the Tories have plumbed new depths of incompetence. If only BJ was competent at anything other than producing offspring.

Is the following a fair rule of thumb?

UK establishment considered absurd and inept under most conditions since long before I was born.
Tories add an extra layer of crap on top when in power.
When we are lucky, Labour have slightly less shit priorities in a few areas at least, may be less detached from reality, but come with their own versions of ineptitude, corruption and inertia through self-interest.
Most official participants in the game prefer a rigged game and a series of well worn tricks and gimmicks.

 

[brogdale]

Assuming that it was a scenario where Labour had won in 2019 rather than Starmer being handed it by Bono the Butcher the yes, definitely.

Simply because they'd have tried to be a Government and do stuff rather experimenting with how the "hidden hand" might react to a Pandemic with occasional nudges to keep people "choosing".

I doubt we'd have seen anything remarkably "socialist" in the response, but it would I guess have been more in line with most other States.

This exactly.
At every stage of the vermin's mismanagement they have, in classic 80's management style, strived to cast every threat (to our public health) into an opportunity to outsource and privatise any 'state' response.
I'm presuming that a democratic socialist party along the lines of Corbyn would not have prioritised in that way.

 

[gentlegreen]

Surely we would need to speculate on a Labour government being in place since 2010, or 2017 etc ... with time to have avoided the continued ruination of the NHS etc ... and, dare I say it, without the diversion of brexshit ...
One coming into power in December with all the inherited baggage would have been hobbled ...

 

[SpookyFrank]

If it was a Corbyn government the press would have fucked any effort he made to bring in timely lockdown measures. Particularly as 'timely' would have meant serious restrictions even before we saw the worst of the peaks in Spain and Italy. That's assuming the same trajectory though, maybe labour would have sorted out community testing, local restrictions etc in time. Then the press would have run with why do we need any restrictions, hardly anyone has died in the UK etc.

A Starmer labour government would have matched Johnson's beat for beat, but with slightly tidier hair. The main difference would be that going into autumn, people still wouldn't have ever heard of Barnard Castle.

 

[Pickman's model]

I don't particularly think it's a labour-tory dynamic. It very much looks to me like a Johnson problem - he'd be no better if he was Labour - he's thin skinned, a bit lazy, simply can't hold focus for long, and is obsessed by headlines.

The rest flows from that.

This may be heretical, but there are a number of things the government got right, that required huge political will and in some cases an emotional ability to turn long and dearly held political doctrine on its head overnight. However, the bravery and grip that it showed in March has disappeared completely, and it's now just a complete gangfuck featuring a bunch of chimps flinging shit.

Er much of that is bollocks tbh

No one minister has sought or been given responsibility. So many ministers appeared at the daily briefings it was clear no one wanted to be in charge. And the delay in locking down cost many lives, not to mention the culling of the care homes. Where things have been got right to start with they've gone wrong subsequently, eg the impending end of the furlough scheme which will see millions more in the dole. Tons of money spaffed on Tory donors etc, British corruption at its best

 

[two sheds]

Hard to say but one thing would have been different - the extra money invested in testing, tracing and the like would have gone to the NHS rather than the tories private sector mates.

But yes tory press would be screaming about anything they could label Corbyn with: closing down too early closing down not early enough, just throwing money at the problem not throwing enough money at the problem, ...

 

[Pickman's model]

Anyway labour under Corbyn would have been hobbled by their right wing and would have doubtless have buggered it up in their own way

 

[Pickman's model]

Hard to say but one thing would have been different - the extra money invested in testing, tracing and the like would have gone to the NHS rather than the tories private sector mates.

But yes tory press would be screaming about anything they could label Corbyn with: closing down too early closing down not early enough, just throwing money at the problem not throwing enough money at the problem, ...

Cancelling Easter, passover, Eid, Cheltenham etc

 

[freakydave]

I think that too much was made of being late to lockdown, nobody knew what was happening in March and it was only a couple of days after France.
I do think that Johnson's lack of leadership and communication has been unforgivable though. It just baffles me that the party and the voters put up with him, I can understand him as a popular celebrity, but he has never demonstrated leadership.
I know that something like this would have been a disaster for anyone, but this government contradicts itself constantly so it would be better if they just muted him.

 

[elbows]

I think that too much was made of being late to lockdown, nobody knew what was happening in March and it was only a couple of days after France.

Its not even necessary to get into all the tedious detail of the period in order to demonstrate that despite all the cluelessness, its very easy to make the case that they could have managed it at least one week earlier.

All that is required is to review a couple of press conferences from the key period and observe the nature of the press questions. Stuff which was especially obvious when it came to school closures, since Ireland were about a week ahead of us and then Northern Ireland had to consider harmonising their own school closures with the schedule being set by the Irish government.

A week is not trivial at that moment and could have made a very large difference.

However when studies such as the one mentioned on the news today go on about just how many of the deaths involved people in care homes, I am certainly reminded that timing wasnt everything.

 

[elbows]

And there were loads of clues during the crucial period I go on about as key to the worst timing errors.

For example Jeremy Hunt popped up on telly looking like he had seen a ghost and wanted to cry. And people noticed. The enormity of the situation had been noticed by then.

 

[two sheds]

perhaps he realized that not so many people would have died if he hadn't fucked over the NHS when he had the chance. Enormity of his responsibility, but that would need him to have a conscience

 

[freakydave]

Its not even necessary to get into all the tedious detail of the period in order to demonstrate that despite all the cluelessness, its very easy to make the case that they could have managed it at least one week earlier.

All that is required is to review a couple of press conferences from the key period and observe the nature of the press questions. Stuff which was especially obvious when it came to school closures, since Ireland were about a week ahead of us and then Northern Ireland had to consider harmonising their own school closures with the schedule being set by the Irish government.

A week is not trivial at that moment and could have made a very large difference.

However when studies such as the one mentioned on the news today go on about just how many of the deaths involved people in care homes, I am certainly reminded that timing wasnt everything.

I completely agree that the lockdown should have happened earlier, I just don't know if a different government would have acted differently. It's was a blunder, but pretty much no government got it right.
The u-turning is not the same for me, that is inexcusable

 

[elbows]

I completely agree that the lockdown should have happened earlier, I just don't know if a different government would have acted differently. It's was a blunder, but pretty much no government got it right.
The u-turning is not the same for me, that is inexcusable

The funny thing about the u-turning is that some of the only times this government have ever given me cause to feel briefly relieved, is on all the occasions they have been relatively quick to u-turn.

I dont know if my memory of 1980s tories is faulty, but one of the things I tend to associate with that era was an absurd degree of stubbornness and attempts to save face, avoid the appearance of u-turns etc.

It would be much better if plans were got right the first time in a pandemic, but on the numerous occasions where this does not happen it is actually helpful to have a load of flip-flops at the ready during pandemics.

I might go on about timing too much because I followed it all so closely, and people on this forum developed their own sense of how seriously they took the pandemic, and indeed when it was appropriate to call it a pandemic. I will go and check for when a couple of milestones on this front actually happened, in case it helps with our sense of where everyone was at with the timing and sense of threat.

 

[BCBlues]

The Cummings fiasco was a big error of judgement that still to this day hasn't been properly resolved. I couldn't see Corbyn allowing anyone to disrespect a whole nation so pompous as the freaky one did.
The knock on effect of Johnsons inability to deal with this incident, along with his other list of massive failures, could have huge ramifications come the winter. Cummings undid a lot of sensible compliance from people across the uk.
I think under Corbyn or Starmer there would be a bit more honesty, let's face it, how could anyone be less honest than this gang of crooks and liars.

 

[freakydave]

The funny thing about the u-turning is that some of the only times this government have ever given me cause to feel briefly relieved, is on all the occasions they have been relatively quick to u-turn.

I dont know if my memory of 1980s tories is faulty, but one of the things I tend to associate with that era was an absurd degree of stubbornness and attempts to save face, avoid the appearance of u-turns etc.

It would be much better if plans were got right the first time in a pandemic, but on the numerous occasions where this does not happen it is actually helpful to have a load of flip-flops at the ready during pandemics.

I might go on about timing too much because I followed it all so closely, and people on this forum developed their own sense of how seriously they took the pandemic, and indeed when it was appropriate to call it a pandemic. I will go and check for when a couple of milestones on this front actually happened, in case it helps with our sense of where everyone was at with the timing and sense of threat.

I haven't followed it that closely but I do remember in March nobody understood. It was terrible scenes in China which is not that shocking.
I can see your point how they are prepared to adapt being a good thing, but it often seems like something not thought out and then they retract because of a problem they should have seen

 

[elbows]

I haven't followed it that closely but I do remember in March nobody understood. It was terrible scenes in China which is not that shocking.
I can see your point how they are prepared to adapt being a good thing, but it often seems like something not thought out and then they retract because of a problem they should have seen

Your sense of the timing is a bit off, thats all. Its not surprising, there were many giddy moments in March and various senses of time and stuff tended to get compressed or otherwise lumped together in peoples minds.

The 'its a far away nightmare in China' sense of things was a January end early February phenomenon. February was the month where various questions were answered and people watched the international spread with an increasing sense that this was going to be a pandemic that would be notable in various ways.

Anyway I just skimmed some board history for a couple of timing markers.

By February 3rd I was able to delicately touch on the word pandemic and quote some experts who were prepared to mention that as the most likely future scenario as a result of this virus.

By February 21st I was able to start using the word pandemic more regularly without too much danger of having gone off prematurely, or of attracting too many responses that were unhappy with me for describing the situation as a pandemic (although there were still one or two along those lines for a time). This became even easier within a few days since the word pandemic and all that went with it started to routinely show up in the media. This is also when the first very localised lockdowns happened in several locations in Italy, affecting maybe 50,000 people.

By February 29th someone started the 'Pandemic personal consequences' thread, further indicating that the pandemic reality had not failed to dawn on people.

By 8th March Italy announced that its lockdown was going to extend to much of the north, involving over 16 million people. Then by the 9th it was announced that as of the 10th it would extend to the whole country.

On March 10th and 11th we were joking that a poll about how seriously people took this situation was about to flip over so that the 'yes, this is serious' option had the most votes, and whether the WHO would finally call this thing a pandemic when that happened. And then of course on March 11th the WHO did declare it a pandemic. And that didnt exactly cause shockwaves because it came several weeks after lots of people had already begun coming to terms with the fact this was a pandemic, so the declaration was more likely to be considered to be late than controversial by that point.

I believe March 11th was also when we heard that Nadine Dorries tested positive. And Italys lockdown measures were extended to include non-essential shops closing.

So yeah, I have trouble believing that unthinkable things were still unthinkable by then. The penny had dropped and the orthodox approach mostly evaporated in EU countries by March 11th-12th. And sure enough the UK governments original plan A then proceeded to die from March 12th->March 15th, with the first signs of plan B emerging on Sunday 15th and Monday 16th March. Large changes in behaviour visible via things like traffic data started to show up at this point, maybe around the 17th onwards. And then another week to get to the stage of announcing something resembling a full lockdown.

 

[elbows]

Cancelling Easter, passover, Eid, Cheltenham etc

And the half-term holiday seeding and spreading events, which subsequent genomic data which can trace the pandemic spread here and in other parts of the world seems to indicate played a very major role in how our first pandemic wave really began to get going.

Its certainly not hard to imagine that if by some miracle a Corbyn government had actually tried to do something to thwart half term holiday imports, all sorts of 'monster Corbyn banned little Tristans skiing holiday' coverage may have been a feature of the time.

 

[elbows]

I'd like to give some sense of how far behind the curve SAGE were as well, without spoiling the thread with far too many quotes that cover quite a time period.

So all I will do for now is pick one document that was used at their February 27th meeting. They were just getting round to figuring out their priorities, and some of the things on this list should have been done earlier or cover areas where numerous failings were made before and after that meeting, involving detail that I am dodging quoting for now.

SAGE’s priorities
Patrick Vallance and Chris Whitty have formulated seven key SAGE priorities to be discussed at SAGE 11. These are:

1. Detect & monitor any outbreak as effectively as possible
2. Understand effective actions to help contain a cluster
3. Understand measures to alter the shape of a UK epidemic
4. Model UK epidemic & identify key numbers for NHS planning
5. Generate Behavioural Science insights for policymakers
6. Ensure NHS trials key interventions
7. Consider emerging therapeutic, diagnostic & other opportunities

Thats from the finally document listed on this page: SAGE meetings, February 2020

 

[stavros]

Hard to say but one thing would have been different - the extra money invested in testing, tracing and the like would have gone to the NHS rather than the tories private sector mates.

Can we be sure of that? Is Starmer that far removed from the Blair-Brown school of thought in terms of bringing in consultants? I suspect that ten years of the Tories, plus thirteen years of New Labour and more of the previous Conservatives, would've inbuilt too much outsourcing into the various public sectors to be reversed with the click of Starmzy's fingers.

 

[two sheds]

Starmer now perhaps but I can't see the membership standing for Corbyn doing a reverse turn and funding private sector over NHS. It wouldn't make any sense either, would have been much more efficient doing it with NHS and local authorities.

 

[nogojones]

They would have really struggled to do worse. It's not high bar.

 

[mauvais]

Labour even in its current hapless form could have done much better but this is by circumstance rather than some innate quality or particular competence.

The success of the Covid response was primarily in willingness to spend and this is traditionally easier for Labour. A Labour (but any) government would be relatively fresh and not bogged down in corruption, partly by not being so complacent but also it takes time to arrive at these relationships, as we've seen so often with the Tories. Equally this would produce a higher expectation for a while and so individual failure would be harder to style out.