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

[Pickman's model]

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

If Corbyn had won the general election there'd have been great obstruction of measures and policies he sought to introduce from the right of his party. And I think KS would have been involved with that.

 

[two sheds]

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

yes that was confusing me a bit, too.

 

[two sheds]

If Corbyn had won the general election there'd have been great obstruction of measures and policies he sought to introduce from the right of his party. And I think KS would have been involved with that.

true, with a small majority the riht wingers would have had him over a barrel, so to speak

 

[stavros]

If Corbyn was in people...

If Corbyn was in people (plural) that'd really get the epidemiologists scratching their heads.

 

[platinumsage]

Not sure about Labour but no illusions here about how May would have dealt with it:

 

[elbows]

Not sure about Labour but no illusions here about how May would have dealt with it:

Its so easy for fucks to come out with that sort of talk, that sort of simplistic posturing, when they arent the ones who have to make the decisions and have the modelling results thrust in front of them when things are heading in a bad direction. If she'd still been in charge I expect her position would have ended up quite similar to Johnsons.

It does amuse me that when it comes to restrictions on international travel most of the focus in politics and the media is about restrictions this country imposes, as opposed to all the countries that end up banning us because of our lax approach to keeping the number of infections and variants down. All part of the illusions of control that humans are so fond of and that this nation has long woven into its superman cape. Look the other way, dont focus on how the rest of the world sees us in this pandemic.

Rule Britannia, Britannia rules the pandemic waves!

 

[elbows]

The party or leader that might have stood a chance of performing better in this pandemic would be the one that was not afraid to repeat forever the rhetoric that explains the most basic pandemic lesson - that the longer and harder you resist restrictions early on, the more you are doomed to have to impose them harder and for longer in the end.

The professional liars, the strong-armers, the bluff and bluster crew, struggle to realise that the virus does not play by their rules, by their view of how to win. Rather those pathetic attempts which may have served these shits so well throughout their political lives are music to the ears of the virus, they give it a real boost, time and time again.

 

[elbows]

The invisible mugger will be with us forever she cried, so what we should do is arm the mugger to the teeth and hand it victims on a plate.

 

[Sasaferrato]

I don't think that Labour would have done better or worse.

Neither party was particularly alarmed at the very start, believing that the virus was no worse that previous epidemics, which didn't have anything like the same outcome.

My huge worry is that this sin't going to go away ever, and we will be living with sporadic outbreaks and restrictions for ever.

Curious thing, is there an opposite to 'survivor guilt'? Because if there is, I feel it. I am conscious that my generation, and the ones before it, have created an absolute clusterfuck that we won't have to live through. It was the slowing of the Gulf Stream that brought on the feeling.

 

[Steel Icarus]

I don't think that Labour would have done better or worse.

Neither party was particularly alarmed at the very start, believing that the virus was no worse that previous epidemics, which didn't have anything like the same outcome.

My huge worry is that this sin't going to go away ever, and we will be living with sporadic outbreaks and restrictions for ever.

Curious thing, is there an opposite to 'survivor guilt'? Because if there is, I feel it. I am conscious that my generation, and the ones before it, have created an absolute clusterfuck that we won't have to live through. It was the slowing of the Gulf Stream that brought on the feeling.

It's called a conscience

 

[Sasaferrato]

It's called a conscience

Yes, to an extent. Also a sense of 'There are a lot of things I wouldn't have done, if I had known what was going to happen forty years down the line'.

 

[glitch hiker]

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.

I think it goes back to Brexit since the current crop of right wing loons are in power now precisly because of Brexit.

While I don't think Labour are brilliant they are certainly preferrable. But then the bar for comparison is clearly in the toilet. It would be hard to think how any other party could be better, if even slightly.

 

[glitch hiker]

I don't think that Labour would have done better or worse.

Neither party was particularly alarmed at the very start, believing that the virus was no worse that previous epidemics, which didn't have anything like the same outcome.

My huge worry is that this sin't going to go away ever, and we will be living with sporadic outbreaks and restrictions for ever.

Curious thing, is there an opposite to 'survivor guilt'? Because if there is, I feel it. I am conscious that my generation, and the ones before it, have created an absolute clusterfuck that we won't have to live through. It was the slowing of the Gulf Stream that brought on the feeling.

Labour wouldn't have been quite so corrupt and wouldn't have ignored science for so long. Johnson and Hancock gave ££ to rat catchers for PPE. There's no comparison with that.

 

[Sasaferrato]

Labour wouldn't have been quite so corrupt and wouldn't have ignored science for so long. Johnson and Hancock gave ££ to rat catchers for PPE. There's no comparison with that.

PPE was a shambles, the world competing for limited stocks.

 

[glitch hiker]

PPE was a shambles, the world competing for limited stocks.

So all the more reason to give the job of procuring it to people other than unqualified inexperienced chancers and tory donors

 

[brogdale]

PPE was a shambles, the world competing for limited stocks.

The point of a well resourced and managed stockpile was to avoid the worst effects of that scramble; unfortunately the responsibility for oversight of the stockpiling process had fallen to the small-state, privatising Tories for the decade preceding the pandemic.

 

[Saul Goodman]

PPE was a shambles.

I'm pretty sure the Tory cronies wouldn't describe it that way.

 

[Sasaferrato]

The point of a well resourced and managed stockpile was to avoid the worst effects of that scramble; unfortunately the responsibility for oversight of the stockpiling process had fallen to the small-state, privatising Tories for the decade preceding the pandemic.

I don't know if you have been employed in a situation where things may been needed at some point, but have a run out date?

Foe a while I worked at DMED Ludgershall, which was the army central supply depot. We held the war stocks of things. We held over a million litres of IV fluids, which when they had a year left, were returned to the manufacturer for replacement with longer dated stock. We paid 10% for that, and it employed someone full time.

Dressings have a run out date, but can't be returned etc.

Keeping things on a 'may be needed basis' is expensive, write offs accounted for about a quarter of our spend.

 

[StoneRoad]

I don't know if you have been employed in a situation where things may been needed at some point, but have a run out date?

Foe a while I worked at DMED Ludgershall, which was the army central supply depot. We held the war stocks of things. We held over a million litres of IV fluids, which when they had a year left, were returned to the manufacturer for replacement with longer dated stock. We paid 10% for that, and it employed someone full time.

Dressings have a run out date, but can't be returned etc.

Keeping things on a 'maybe needed basis' is expensive, write offs accounted for about a quarter of our spend.

Last time I did a decent first aid course (several years ago now) towards the end of the last day, we had an impromptu session about field dressings - partly because most of the group I was doing the course with, for at least part of their time, worked in areas without any road access ... so sometimes dressing wounds might be a needed skill ... for that, we had the fun of ripping into out-of-date packaging to liberate bandages and improvise slings, splints and the like. We also managed to immobilise the senior instructor on an improvised stretcher ...

Oh, and we all passed !

 

[nosos]

What would the media reaction to a Corbyn government initiating a lockdown have been? What would the security state's reaction to this have been? Even allowing for massive resistance, implementing their stated social policies would have created a context which would have made the pandemic much easier to deal with. But the political fallout of state action in the early stages of the pandemic would have been fucking huge.

 

[Sasaferrato]

Last time I did a decent first aid course (several years ago now) towards the end of the last day, we had an impromptu session about field dressings - partly because most of the group I was doing the course with, for at least part of their time, worked in areas without any road access ... so sometimes dressing wounds might be a needed skill ... for that, we had the fun of ripping into out-of-date packaging to liberate bandages and improvise slings, splints and the like. We also managed to immobilise the senior instructor on an improvised stretcher ...

Oh, and we all passed !

Aye, we gave the dressings to the cas sim people. This is more than field dressings though, we held kit for 24 fixed and field hospitals.

The first time I saw the fluids store, I couldn't quite believe it, it was about half the size of a football field.

 

[Badgers]

Me and a few lads from the pub could have done a better job than these #ToryScum have done.

Fucking vermin at best

 

[elbows]

What would the media reaction to a Corbyn government initiating a lockdown have been? What would the security state's reaction to this have been? Even allowing for massive resistance, implementing their stated social policies would have created a context which would have made the pandemic much easier to deal with. But the political fallout of state action in the early stages of the pandemic would have been fucking huge.

My ability to imagine what that would have been like is limited by not getting to see what the first year of a Corbyn government would have been like before the pandemic. eg how various state elements, the media etc had come to terms with that victory, or not.

Its also unclear what the timing of the first measures & lockdown would have been like. Because there were modelling failures which caused the establishment to misjudge the timing/stage of wave we were at, resulting in a faulty timetable and claims that we were 4 weeks behind Italy when we were 2 weeks behind Italy. The same sort of modelling teams would have been available under a different government, making the same mistakes early on, and so its a question of what department or individuals might have noticed the error in timing and a few other key aspects (eg estimates for hospitalisations that were initially too optimistic). Impossible for me to guess what would have happened in that regard under Labour.

If the government had taken a totally different approach from the start then these errors wouldnt have mattered in the same way because the wave timing could have ended up different due to slower seeding via more pro-active border controls, earlier surveillance, different public messaging. But I dont have high expectations that Labour would actually have taken a totally different approach that would have unlocked those advantages, the orthodox pandemic approach runs deep across bits of the establishment far beyond the elected government bit. Labour could have done better with some specific things, but Im very far from convinced that they would have diverged too far from standard establishment thinking during the first months.

When it comes to what happened later, its even harder to say what their plan B would have looked like compared to the tories plan B. Again maybe not that different. And I cant find many clues about this because we've only been able to see what Starmers Labour did in opposition. And in that role they have gone for a mix of sometimes sensible policies in terms of public health, but also some unwise posturing and rhetoric at times when they were seeking to say something they thought would be popular with voters, instead of what actually needed to be done at this stage of the pandemic.

 

[StoneRoad]

The current Labour Party, imo, might have done only slightly better than the tories. Things like the limited resources available and the modelling fails would have hamstrung them just as much, they would probably have listened to the medical science harder and taken the advice of epidemiologists etc over commercial / business pressures.

Go back to the Labour Party of my youth (when my late father was an activist) and the wider socialist / political climate of those years would, I think, have made a far better job ... [less of "what's in it for me" and more "what can I do to help?"]
and the NHS would not have been eviscerated before-hand !

 

[nosos]

Well that constraint goes without saying, right? My point was about the pre-conditions for the pandemic, not the knowledge available to a government responding to the pandemic. If a fraction of the 2017 manifesto had been implemented this would presumably have had implications for pre-pandemic social conditions (viz in relation to health and social care) regardless of the extent to which you think those policies were desirable in their own terms. So the interesting question, as far as I can see, is what those implications would have been. Imagining a substitution at the point of impact (so to speak) isn't a particularly interesting exercise. In fact I suspect they probably would have done worse in some respects if leadership was substituted at the final stage given the hysterical reaction that even a PM widely regarded within the establishment as a 'libertarian' (ffs) has provoked through unavoidable public health measures.

 

[nosos]

I mean the concept of 'modelling fails' is doing a lot of work in the previous two posts.

 

[brogdale]

I don't know if you have been employed in a situation where things may been needed at some point, but have a run out date?

Foe a while I worked at DMED Ludgershall, which was the army central supply depot. We held the war stocks of things. We held over a million litres of IV fluids, which when they had a year left, were returned to the manufacturer for replacement with longer dated stock. We paid 10% for that, and it employed someone full time.

Dressings have a run out date, but can't be returned etc.

Keeping things on a 'may be needed basis' is expensive, write offs accounted for about a quarter of our spend.

No, you don't know that, do you?
But what that might or might not have to do with what's being discussed is another matter.
The minister(s) ultimately responsible for maintaining an adequate, safe and effective PPE pandemic stockpile failed in that role.
For the last decade those ministers had been tory scum.
What else is there to say?

 

[elbows]

Well that constraint goes without saying, right? My point was about the pre-conditions for the pandemic, not the knowledge available to a government responding to the pandemic. If a fraction of the 2017 manifesto had been implemented this would presumably have had implications for pre-pandemic social conditions (viz in relation to health and social care) regardless of the extent to which you think those policies were desirable in their own terms. So the interesting question, as far as I can see, is what those implications would have been. Imagining a substitution at the point of impact (so to speak) isn't a particularly interesting exercise. In fact I suspect they probably would have done worse in some respects if leadership was substituted at the final stage given the hysterical reaction that even a PM widely regarded within the establishment as a 'libertarian' (ffs) has provoked through unavoidable public health measures.

I dont imagine health and social care would have been in sufficiently good shape after that amount of time to make an immense difference, almost regardless of how good the policies were on paper.

I consider it incredibly unlikely that they would have invested in mass testing system infrastructure in the years running up to this pandemic, for example. I'm not convinced getting better PPE supplies in warehouses would have been the priority either, unless they took special interest in previous pandemic exercises when they took office. Nor do I imagine a revolution would have happened in the care sector. Nor would NHS capacity, especially hospital capacity, have been changed radically in a few short years, even with investment it takes time to make a difference where its needed most - staff.

What would have been possible is that these larger, medium-long term agendas would have been a much better fit for some parts of the pandemic short-long terms response. Emphasis on spending a greater proportion of GDP on health can fit well with the effects of a virus like this. Financial support for people to self-isolate would also fit well, etc etc.

Its a big stretch to think of these things because Labour didnt win. If they had actually managed to get in on an impressive reform ticket then they would have had momentum and presumably aspects of the establishment would have begrudgingly climbed on board to at least the extent of accepting that there was popular support for such a programme, that there was some legitimacy to at least some of the agenda. And then yes, when the pandemic came along some things could have been tied in quite neatly, we could have some cohesive policies with a long shelf life and somewhat consistent rhetoric. Your point included mention of how the media would have reacted, and to guess at that I would need to have seen the media in an era where Corbyn was actually capable of winning and did so, and then we'd have needed to see to what extent they were actually prepared to stick to the manifesto.

Why stop there if we are going to investigate hypotheticals though? We could go back further and get rid of the weaknesses that were made worse by the austerity years. Or go back further still and prevent decades of declining hospital bed etc resources. I'm not sure how interesting an exercise that really is either, because without the pandemic ever happeneing we could have reached much the same conclusions about the merits of having those policies all along instead of the shit we got for decades.

 

[nosos]

Fair enough. If two years of social policy isn't seen as a viable time window to make a difference then I agree this conversation would descend into meaningless hypotheticals! Let's end the thread in that case!

 

[elbows]

You can start to make a difference in that timeframe but it takes so long to filter through to key services. If people in healthcare etc had felt more valued before the pandemic then this could have helped with morale at least.

Once the pandemic had actually got going then a government with a very different agenda would have resulted in a very different sense of how to spend the vast amount of pandemic funding that inevitably followed. And that would have been able to make quite the difference over time. It could have been a real catalyst for the sorts of bigger changes the government would otherwise probably only have aimed for at a much slower pace, and we'd have felt like we got more of lasting value in return for all the pandemic debt thats been created and will take decades to pay off.