There is a fair bit there that requires comment. Let me start with the groups that need pleasing. That is just plain wrong. In a pandemic you have a commitment to save as many people as possible, keeping the entire country safe is a minimum requirement of government. It doesn't matter who voted for you and what their political persuasion. You choose the right policies to save as many as you can, the government clearly did not do this on multiple levels. They compromised lockdown, it was too late, they compromised frontline staff by enriching donors who has no experience of the contracts they were handed for PPE and a tracing app. They compromised keeping control of the spread by farming out testing to another party donor when the NHS were ideally placed to manage testing and tracking.
This had absolutely NOTHING to do with pleasing any section of the electorate.
Next lets look at they are all in it together comment. Well you know what they are, the government appointed scientific advisers are exactly that, government appointed. When the government ignored advice or compromised it, those same experts should have made it known the advice was ignored or watered down. Trotting the same experts out to frighten folks into accepting another partial lockdown with made up stats and charrs, equally doesn't sit well with most of us. When experts toe the party line, yup they are in on it.
Policy needs to change quickly to suite the R. Yes it does, and the way to do that is to announce legislation on a Sunday evening with no parliamentary announcement and no time for employers to make sure they comply with the legislation, or, and I am just thinking aloud here, perhaps that is a crappy mechanism. Add in to the mix Johnson doesn't even understand the rule of 6, how is anyone else expected to understand it.
To get them all to agree, to use your term, you put the right policies in place, you are consistent and you put lives before profit. What you do not do is take the opportunity of people dying to enrich your friends, feather your nest and abandon the most vulnerable in society.
You've completely misunderstood most of what I was getting at.
I didn't mean they
had to be pleased, I meant there was a lot of groups
to please. It's impossible to please everyone, which should have been extremely simple to understand from my post, although I could have worded it slightly better, I was in a rush. What I meant was there's going to be a lot of people with differing views and they're certainly not going to agree, this will cause problems, and it has.
The goal should be to save as many as possible (that's my aim, and seems like yours, so we seem to agree), but to do that we would have had to lock down in January/ February, and then temp scan everyone and give them a QR code like they were doing in Asia. This is too much for a lot of the UK doyles though.
Who people vote for shouldn't matter, that was my point. But another point was it does matter, as a lot of people are daft enough to put that over peoples lives.
Our government didn't appoint the WHO, or the independent doctors, the NHS staff, doctors and leaders of other nations etc, they're all pretty much saying the same thing, except we were either slow to listen to our advice or we ignored it, it seems to me like it was our government ignoring our advisors. They're on the same side, but that does not mean they want us to go in the same direction. Think of it like Fauci and Trump, meant to be on the same team, but want different tactics (or no tactics in the case of the fake tan man).
The stats were not made up, they showed doubling every day, and cases might have been (not necessarily recorded cases mind, but we ran out of tests) they were just shown in a way as to scare the idiots, but the idiots won't listen to anything, so it's completely pointless. Those same people don't like experts or facts either though.
Totally agree, when policy changes are required they should be instantaneous. We should have learnt that lesson in March when we let everyone out for one last big pi$$ up and to go to Cheltenham etc. The reason they don't do it is to give business notice, so they don't get backlash, but it's putting money ahead of lives.
You can't get them all to agree, it's impossible, there are no policies which suit all, as there's a boat load of idiots, a boat load of selfish people and a boat laod of people who care more about their party or money, than they do about sense (not called that common sense, on purpose). Ignoring that these people exist is equally stupid.