No, the GBU have not in fact being following the “We Were Only Pretending To Be Exceptional” strategy. You don’t need to go into bat for your side here. They haven‘t done anything wrong, but they haven’t done what their internet stans are suggesting they have either.
You are a good guy and I have a lot of respect for you, but we need to be fucking real here. This administration’s undoubted skills in handling PR and message discipline over Brexit - a purely political issue - mean shit all when faced with a genuine public health crisis and potential public order emergency which they cannot control.
They have not been “nudging” with some kind of genius autistic Rain Man foresight. And that’s not a slam on them; they, like many other governments, simply failed to process the data being firehosed at them fast enough to be in front of events rather than responding to them. There is a point where the job of being in government stops being about delivering your political and ideological objectives and getting reelected, and about actually ensuring the defence of the nation from threats. We are at that point. The BJ administration is trying to ride a tiger here. It isn‘t doing badly, but it isn‘t doing exceptionally well either.
I have had sight of some of the material that was considered by the four governments today. (Hi GCHQ. Me and half the country too) The measures that were announced tonight were announced because the data from the medics and scientists who are absolutely correctly being allowed to take the lead on shaping policy in Covid response is way, way fucking worse than was previously believed. The figures that were presented today were approx 100k current undiagnosed infections in Scotland and 600k in England. That’s undiagnosed, today, that no hospital knows about, and that most of the infected don’t realise as yet. The UK figure for R-nought is 3, which is very significantly higher than the 2 we were already working to. That is seriously fucking worse than the current crisis planning was working on. We no longer need to double ICU and HDU capacity, but quadruple it. This is a last attempt to shut the stable door when the horse has got three feet out of it.
This is not a “propaganda triumph”. It’s something far more serious and admirable than that; it is the decision to tank the economy at a highly sensitive time in order to protect the elderly and vulnerable and literally to save lives, because once the bodies start hitting the floor and they start widespread triage for access to HDU and ventilators - I say widespread because I have first hand accounts that it is already being done in at least four major city hospitals in different UK cities - the only thing that will in any way slow the snowball of deaths is having kept the infection rate down somehow.
You and I are old enough to remember the ERM crash. Once the bodies have stopped hitting the floor, and the unemployment rate is up, and the holiday from mortgage payments is over and the UK is trying to piece back together it’s shit from the very serious economic dislocation that’s already begun, people will turn around to the guy who was in charge at the time and scream “You didn‘t magically prevent this from happening”. The UK voter base can‘t even spell gratitude. They will take out their feelings about the deaths and the economic upheaval and the panic they felt on BJ the same way hormonal and frightened twelve year olds blame their dad for everything.
He has to do what the best thing seems to be at the time, and that’s what he‘s doing. But he will be blamed for all the downsides and given no credit for anything he did do correctly in a few years’ time. Churchill won a war and lost the election because the UK public has always got a chronic case of the grass being greener on the other side.
I'm going to respectfully disagree, as the GBU's been fundamental at various things such as the hand washing campaign and social distancing. It's a behavioural unit that will set messaging or other things up in such a way as to get the desired result. The Government hasn't acted "exceptional" at any point during this crisis, it's been steady and measured regardless of the "data being hosed at it."
What's the result on the back of yesterdays lockdown announcement?
97% public support for it in a snap YouGov poll.
64% saying it'll be easy following the lockdown proceedure.
Compare that to the people flooding Skegness and Mount Snowdon just a few days ago, after the government had specifically closed off places most of those people would've gone to hang out.
Had we shut down in February like other states had hastily done and I heard the first screams of back then, I doubt we'd have such figures of support or people likely to comply with it.
The end result of the more measured approach, the daily briefings and everything else that has gone on is good, solid support for the measures undertaken.
I agree, it's likely the figures are higher than currently speculated, but from what I can see we've seen the timetable stepped up by weeks or a few days as opposed to rapidly changing. I've oft speculated in the thread we'd have tried to keep the schools open until the Easter Holiday, then closed after that.
It's very likely the big cities, London and Manchester are going to be very, very hard hit as a result of all of this and like you, I dread the coming weeks, with London accounting for around 1/3 of all the serious cases so far.
Churchill lost the election because his rhetoric during the 1945 campaign was to keep trying to go to war and even proposed Operation Unthinkable within
days of signing the peace agreement. He won the 1951 GE after toning down his rhetoric.
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