First time I've looked in for a while. Some of you are so obsessed with bringing the government into every little detail and petty point scoring off each other on this thread. It's been a far from perfect response and some mistakes made, but all unintentional to an unprecedented pandemic and I'm sure that's true of almost every country around the world, acting the way it was thought best at the time, acting on the data available.
Can't we just accept and appreciate the massive effort the whole country has made and in particular the NHS and volunteers in the incredible vaccination programme we have mobilised by people from all areas and a cross spectrum of society? Amazing at such speed to be where we are that we can now lift many of these restrictions from a standing start around 6 months back.
Afraid I can't agree with that. Some (arguably most) of the errors made were entirely intentional and went against data/professional advice.
We didn't lockdown early on despite prior warning of the situation in Europe completely intentionally cos Johnson in his *cough*wisdom*cough* thought it'd be far better to let everyone else worry about and we'd just stay open for business and it'd give him a massive win. The scientific advisors strongly told him not to. He ignored them. He couldn't even be bothered to attend the emergency COBRA meetings. Intentionally. Then he repeated this with the Delta variant because he didn't want to upset Modi. Again, intentionally not following the data for political reasons rather than making the correct call.
Then there's the PPE. Some of that was historic as they'd not taken heed of the planning report telling them they needed more PPE/ventilators etc but again that was intentionally ignored at the time. Then when the emergency procurement started the 'VIP' lane that resulted in hundreds of millions being wasted on defective or unsuitable equipment being bought and others that didn't materialise at all from companies that had no experience or had only just been set up while proper suppliers got ignored. Again intentional so they could give money to their mates and donors.
Similarly with the tracing app. Could have got one off the shelf but spent billions on one that failed to work for ages and run by the wife of a Tory with a history of failure in telecommunications. Again intentional so they could create more 'jobs for the boys (and girls)'.
Then there's the lack of clarity on the message of restrictions etc. Johnson is inherently a poor communicator who just waffles, but again this was also deliberate so he could gauge reaction and change/deny what was said purely for popularity, and even worse in some instances to enable his government to deflect blame onto the people for not following guidelines etc while those within his own family and inner circle freely flouted those same restrictions without recrimination or blame.
