This tweet from BBC Question Time last night was telling:
“We all made mistakes, but we made catastrophic errors.”
Scientist @ProfRWinston says the UK's approach to handling the pandemic was worse than other countries. #bbcqt pic.twitter.com/OIqpc43ctB— BBC Question Time (@bbcquestiontime) October 14, 2021
The trouble is that we are still making mistakes. This data shows how exceptional the UK experience of Covid currently is, yet again:
Exceptional policies predictably lead to exceptional outcomes. https://t.co/mmzhKm3XwI
— Dr. Deepti Gurdasani (@dgurdasani1) October 14, 2021
This is not without consequences, as another tweet notes:
UK austerity since 2010 linked to tens of thousands more deaths than expected https://t.co/G4LTANaw8Q
— Shaun Lintern (@ShaunLintern) October 15, 2021
Research has shown excess deaths as a result of austerity of more than 50,000 a year since 2010. Include most of the supposed flu deaths in that, which are actually from pneumonia (the two are reported together). Scandinavian countries do not see those pneumonia deaths. They are the consequence of deaths from cold houses in the UK. We have fuel poverty and they don't.
The question is a simple one. Why do we have to live in a society that does not care about people dying due to government indifference?
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A Government that kills people because it’s out of touch is a murderous Government.
It took decisions that have caused these deaths and continues to do so, despite advice from the U.N. as well as national bodies here.
This government deserves to be in the Hague for crimes against humanity as far as I am concerned. As does New Labour for taking us into Iraq – just to balance things out.
Absolutely agreed PSR. I think if we put every MP in parliament on trial for their support of avoidable wars or policies that have inflicted harm or even contributed toward the deaths of people we’d have about two or three dozen left to take their seats in the HoC. Perhaps fewer.
On the individual level also, the successive indifference, inaction or sometimes intentional malfeasence of successive UK governments has permeated through to the population in so many different ways. There remains large numbers of kind, generous and reflective people but there are also so many that have adopted crass, uncaring and cavalier attitudes and views. This lack of care for others also stems from sources beyond central government: our mass media has played a significant role in the demonisation of various social groups and have contributed to the current levels of xenophobia and derranged jingoistic nonesense. I’m well aware that these sorts of societal issues aren’t unique to the UK or something new but I don’t ever recall this magnitude of selfishness and aggression being quite so pronounced. The Tories, New Labour and the Lib Dems have all participated in the erosion of hope among the people of the UK and left them to replace it with such things as despair and even hatred; of suffering mental health issues or adopting a ruthless dog-eat-dog world view. Its an old adage but if people are occupied with their own personal survival they will have little time or willingness to concern themselves with the wellbeing of others.
How will this period (say from 2010) be viewed in 50-60 years’ time? As the disaster it was, is and will continue to be? Or whitewashed and viewed through rose-tinted glasses?
Will the likes of Cameron, Osborne, Cummings, May, Johnson along with all the in the current and recent cabinet be thought of? Rightly castigated as the evil wotsits they are, I hope.
Craig
Well, if we get a thousand year Tory Reich the history books will whitewashed.
The problem for that vision is however is that the ideas promulgated by such objectives are riven with the seeds of their own destruction – like all extremist views are.
That is the only hope that I can offer now. Thin gruel maybe but there you go.
This society does not care about people dying because so many of its members do not care. The Government has facilitators: the millions who consistently vote against social justice and equality.
The Government can afford to be indifferent because it’s generally the poor who are dying – and we’re used to that. A virus that somehow tipped the scales the other way and generally only killed the better off would remedy any indifference overnight.
Govt indifference? Seems more deliberate than mere indifference. Sept 2020 was a decision to let tens of thousands die, having been told by their own science advisors that’s what would happen unless they had an immediate circuit breaker lockdown. Thats a govt decision to allow its own citizens to be killed.
Feels like we are just another authoritarian state with blanket control of messaging – BBC having an apparent ban on any comparison or mention of our covid cases running ten times the rest of Europe . No queryig of why we are letting cases run amock in schools, while vaccinations plummeting.
As Will Hutton points out : https://twitter.com/williamnhutton/status/1448722470626865155 we are the epicentre of covid in Europe.
France: 1,120
Spain: 1,277
Italy: 1,561
Germany: 4,872
UK: 40,224
Incidentally, Covid deaths since the 19th June (so-called “Freedom Day”) are at a level equivalent to an annual death rate of over 50,000 – which was supposedly the level Boris Johnson would consider “acceptable” before reintroducing lockdown measures (based, of course, on the cost to the economy, because god forbid a human life should be considered to have any value beyond the financial contribution it can make). No sign of new lockdown measures, so I guess he’s decided more deaths are “acceptable” than he previously thought.
Classic example of the boiling frog syndrome. The public are largely unaware of the carnage around them as death is happening increasingly at home, quietly away from the glare of publicity. It is only the boring and pedantic that bother to benchmark performance against best practice elsewhere, and find (as of this morning) that the UK has the second highest Covid infection rate (absolute rather than relative) in the WORLD. Yes, truly worldbeating.
Andrew Broadbent and others quite rightly points out BBC as an agent of this Government. Just imagine if Labour had been in power and the Covid death figures were just slightly above the rest of Europe’s. In particular, consider the reaction of all UK media had Jeremy Corbyn been the Prime Minister. How can you really expect a population to be objective if the truth is hidden? This is about who owns the media and who decides what to publish.
The BBC is state owned
And I do not share all your pessimism about it