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

[two sheds]

I also doubt they'd have given contracts without competition to incompetent mates of Gove and Cummings.

 

[Santino]

Can we all agree that the existence and behaviour of Piers Corbyn would have had literally fuck all influence on a Labour government's response to the virus?

 

[freakydave]

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.

I agree and appreciate such a detailed reply, but I do still give them a bit of slack because it was still a matter of days.
The way that it has unfolded and the government have failed to show leadership over months is far worse for me than them being slow to lockdown which is just a single mistake and not so systematic

 

[Artaxerxes]

The initial period it's a toss up but what would be very different is the ongoing strategy.

I feel Labour would try to adapt to the new post-covid world better and more fairly and it wouldn't try and patch things up with a fucking meal deal.

 

[two sheds]

They'd have listened to doctors and nurses more, for example getting ppe and testing for front line staff.

They could hardly have listened less.

 

[elbows]

I agree and appreciate such a detailed reply, but I do still give them a bit of slack because it was still a matter of days.
The way that it has unfolded and the government have failed to show leadership over months is far worse for me than them being slow to lockdown which is just a single mistake and not so systematic

Fear not, having got the early timing disasters and policy failures out of the way, I will soon move onto a period that involved numerous failures including more timing failures, but where some of the most serious ones were probably only reported on by the press using a couple of particular angles.

SAGE minutes tend to be mostly bland summaries, but even they occasionally give strong indications that exasperation has developed between two different parts of the establishment. For example, frustration with what testing regime PHE can actually deliver becomes apparent at some point.

But SAGE is not the only establishment game in town that we can look at minutes for. There is also NERVTAG (New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group) which is an official thing. I wont start quoting from their documents now because I should find a different thread to get into that level of detail. But by April and May their minutes, which tend to give a bit more away than SAGEs, demonstrate a fairly keen interest in areas which were providing to be responsible for plenty of death and prolonging the epidemic wave. Asymptomatic cases and potential transmission. Care Homes outbreaks. Hospital outbreaks.

With hospitals NERVTAG get their hands on various alarming data and then need to seek assurances that people such as hospital CEOs are being instructed that they need to learn from this pronto.

With care homes they see grim data and also they express alarm that they arent even being asked to comment on issues in that realm, and then later they feel the need to seek assurances from the CMO that their advice in this area is actually going to be used to improve the response.

I dont know what happens after that with NERVTAG because I have yet to read minutes more recent than those of the 7th May meeting, since I took some time off from this level of detail earlier in the summer and am still catching up.

 

[sleaterkinney]

If Corbyn was in people would have gotten used to state ownership of vast swathes of the economy and queuing for basic necessities before the pandemic even happened!

 

[two sheds]

Nationalizing railways and buses would have been quite cheap

 

[Supine]

I can see Corbyn saying that a decision will be made about locking down at the next party conference

 

[two sheds]

It would get through at a second vote though.

 

[Wilf]

Haven't read the thread, but... I think Labour could have been incompetent every bit as much as the Tories. They could have fucked up over PPE, could have fucked up over the slow rate of testing and all kinds of things. The one thing for me to highlight is the ideological nature of the missed two weeks at the start, which killed thousands (literally). It was ideological in that johnson came into this with a bullish 'get brexit done' victory in the gen election. I'm convinced there was continuity from there into his 'we won't panic like some other governments over this virus thing... Britain remains open for business' approach. That didn't last long and we were soon into panics and throwing billions at the problem, but the damage was done. I think Corbyn or any other Labour leader would have simply gone with the European consensus and locked down 1/2 weeks earlier. Suspect we'd have had more community testing early on under, well, any other government. Would have been really handy to know how the virus was spreading.

The thing about johnson's bullish bollocks mindset is in a clip I've reposted several times. Will dig it out:

 

[Wilf]

Was this one, originally posted by brogdale

Apols if posted elsewhere...but this clip of Johnson speaking just 73 days ago is quite instructive when attempting to understand the early, recent history of the government's response to Covid-19:

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Haven't read the thread, but... I think Labour could have been incompetent every bit as much as the Tories. They could have fucked up over PPE, could have fucked up over the slow rate of testing and all kinds of things. The one thing for me to highlight is the ideological nature of the missed two weeks at the start, which killed thousands (literally). It was ideological in that johnson came into this with a bullish 'get brexit done' victory in the gen election. I'm convinced there was continuity from there into his 'we won't panic like some other governments over this virus thing... Britain remains open for business' approach. That didn't last long and we were soon into panics and throwing billions at the problem, but the damage was done. I think Corbyn or any other Labour leader would have simply gone with the European consensus and locked down 1/2 weeks earlier. Suspect we'd have had more community testing early on under, well, any other government. Would have been really handy to know how the virus was spreading.

The thing about johnson's bullish bollocks mindset is in a clip I've reposted several times. Will dig it out:

Yep. Basically this. Would have avoided the problems of the delayed reaction cos of the different ideology and cos Corbyn wouldn't have chosen to take February off cos Brexit's dun. But would have had the same NHS to deal with, the same system that has been starved of funds for decades, the same lack of stockpiling, lack of spare capacity, etc.

Would Corbyn have done better than Johnson? No doubt, yes. But that is an awfully low bar. It would be hard to trip over it even if you didn't know it was there.

 

[two sheds]

Was this one, originally posted by brogdale

or the 'take it on the chin' speech which I think was same time or even earlier.

 

[elbows]

There is another revealing angle regarding March timing fuckups.

Its down to Brexit separation from EU institutions being in an in-between phase this year where the UK are still largely attached to all of those institutions.

Which means that despite the media almost completely ignoring our actual involvement with the responsible EU institution as usual, the UK was still within the realm of the European Centre for Disease Control for the 2020 portion of this pandemic.

And it just so happens that on March 9th I posted to this forum a quote from a BBC news story of that day:

A European Union expert said the UK had only a "few days" to implement measures to prevent an outbreak like Italy's, which is the worst outside China with 7,375 confirmed cases and 366 deaths.

Sergio Brusin from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control told the BBC's Victoria Derbyshire programme: "The UK is in the same situation Italy was two weeks ago."

Now it also happens that the second part of that quote was removed from the BBC article at some point. Here is a link to the article but the bit about being in the same situation as Italy was 2 weeks ago doesnt seem to be there, at least I didnt see it when I skimmed the article again today. UK to remain in coronavirus 'containment' phase

Now thats a bit awkward because it was a few days later on March 12th when Vallance started going on in the press conference about how we were about 4 weeks behind Italy.

And various people on this forum and on twitter etc had already noticed the '2 weeks behind Italy' thing via certain data, well before that ECDC quote.

So when Vallance started going on about 4 weeks this actually turned out to be useful, but not in the way Vallance intended, because it signalled to loads of people that a massive timing fuckup was quite likely to be happening before our eyes.

When some of the relevant SAGE papers of the period in question were eventually published it turns out that they original timing estimate error was even worse, and at some stage the minutes mentioned the idea we were 5 or so weeks behind Italy. The wriggling on that started fairly quickly behind the scenes though, the week after these incorrect comments about 4 weeks involved the dawning realisation that their timing estimates were wrong.

Anyway aspects of this particular timing fuckup have technical explanations, some of the mistakes made were basic and embarrassing but thats quite normal. What it is not possible for me to determine at this stage is whether the malign influence of politics also had a hand in the estimate and the conveying of it to the public at the critical moment in question. Pertinent quotes disappearing from BBC articles does not exactly help calm my suspicions, but some rather dull alternative explanations for that phenomenon also exist.

 

[elbows]

People sometimes wondered at various moments where some new public health message seemed important to deliver, where the hard-hitting advertising campaigns were.

Well now here is part of the answer to what this government decided to do on that front:

Love Island stars and influencers paid to promote Test and Trace

Taxpayer money was used to pay influencers to promote Test and Trace.

www.bbc.co.uk

 

[elbows]

And even if I place to one side all the stuff relating to schools, the party in power now have to navigate all of this sort of stuff as the challenge of getting any sort of return to normality, and paying for the measures taken so far looms. These are all from Mondays newspaper front pages.

 

[maomao]

If Corbyn had won we would have been having a, presumably still rather unpopular, euro referendum around about February or March right? I think the country would have been in a chaotic state to start with and this could easily have delayed the initial reaction. A lockdown would have been even more unpopular than it actually was and may have become part of the political argument in the way that it has in the US.

I think most hypothetical alternative governments would find it hard to make worse decisions than this one has but I think the circumstances would have been a hell of a lot tougher.

 

[Yossarian]

Since almost every other Western nation dealt with the pandemic more effectively than the Johnson government managed to, I think it's a safe bet that a Corbyn government probably would have done as well.

Although Johnson may have saved a few lives by almost dying from the virus, which likely persuaded a few skeptics to take things more seriously - if he'd done the decent thing and succumbed to it, I would upgrade his mark from 1 out of 10 to 2.

 

[izz]

Since almost every other Western nation dealt with the pandemic more effectively than the Johnson government managed to, I think it's a safe bet that a Corbyn government probably would have done as well.

Although Johnson may have saved a few lives by almost dying from the virus, which likely persuaded a few skeptics to take things more seriously - if he'd done the decent thing and succumbed to it, I would upgrade his mark from 1 out of 10 to 2.

As an aside I can't believe how much political goodwill Johnson lost after he was ill. Surely the most politically astute approach would have been to come out of hospital praising the NHS to the skies and leveraging this when enforcing lockdown, track and trace, whatever, but he came out of hospital like he'd come back from a fortnight in Blackpool, almost unwilling to discuss it.

 

[two sheds]

Yep when reality impinged on ideology, ideology won

 

[Badgers]

Me Pickman's model and Spymaster could have done a better job from a pub garden.

 

[brogdale]

Me Pickman's model and Spymaster could have done a better job from a pub garden.

Big tent stuff!

 

[Pickman's model]

Me Pickman's model and Spymaster could have done a better job from a pub garden.

indeed we have done on many an occasion

 

[brogdale]

Seriously, you reckon you could have done better than this?

Look, Johnson's at the top...

 

[Pickman's model]

Seriously, you reckon you could have done better than this?

Look, Johnson's at the top...

View attachment 228559

Could hardly have done worse

 

[Pickman's model]

Seriously, you reckon you could have done better than this?

Look, Johnson's at the top...

View attachment 228559

World-beating

 

[brogdale]

World-beating

Literally.

 

[MickiQ]

I think Starmer would have probably dealt better with it than Johnson. I don't think policy would be different but we would probably have locked down a little sooner, come out a little later and he would handle the recovery a little better. The pandemic is not BoZo's fault but his dictatorial style combined with the fact that he isn't half as clever as he thinks he is made things worse.
Plus as other posters have pointed out Starmer has better hair and as someone who has lost most of his i totally get that.
Corbyn I have my doubts about, he always struck me as well meaning but indecisive. I have a feeling that the time Bozo wasted dithering, Corby would have wasted even more trying to build an impossible consensus.
On thing that narks me about BoZo is that he was able to unite the country behind him in a way that would have been impossible for Corbyn to do but then threw it all away to protect Cummings job.

 

[Steel Icarus]

If Corbyn had won the GE Starmer wouldn't figure in this discussion, would he.