David Craig, on May 22nd, 2020(Friday blog)
At first I tried watching the daily Downing Street briefings. But with all the lies and cover-ups and denials of reality by establishment political and medical pygmies, the briefings became so farcical that I just can’t be bothered. In fact, the briefings are so painful to watch, I’m embarrassed to think that this might really be the best a once great country like Britain can offer.
Day after day after day, some schoolboy or other, pretending to be a politician, trots out the same old garbage – “we have a plan – we are following our plan – we are in control of the situation – we are guided by the science – etc etc”. And to support them, the schoolboys (plus Priti Patel) drag along some supposed scientists or medical professionals to back up the Government’s ludicrously dishonest claims that they haven’t made a complete cluster-f**k of the Chinese Covid-19 plague.
I admit that it’s easy to be wise in hindsight. But anyway, here are a few things which our out-of-its-depth Government seems to have got right and wrong over the last couple of months:
What the Government got right:
- Rapidly expanding the provision of critical care beds to handle the expected Covid-19 tsunami of patients
- Err, um, I think that’s about it.
What the Government got wrong:
- Throwing possibly 15,000 hospital patients out into care homes or their own homes to free up hospital beds without testing them for the Chinese plague. Some of those who went to care homes carried the infection to those care homes. Some of those going back to their own homes were visited by carers once or twice a day and thus passed the infection on to those carers who then passed it on to other vulnerable and elderly people. Result – a considerable reduction in our country’s pension bill
- Believing the shock/horror projections of death rates from Professor Penis, the bonking boffin from Imperial College without looking at his past record of monumental exaggeration and failure from his model written in Fortran – a computer coding language that went out about the same time as the dinosaurs
- Giving responsibility for organising testing to the useless over-paid, over-pensioned bureaucrats at Public Health England. Anyone who has ever worked with the British public sector will know that utter incompetence and avoidance of responsibility is widespread. In normal times, the uselessness of the British public sector isn’t a great problem. But in times of crisis, when you need to get things done, the only way is to draft in someone from the private sector
- Giving responsibility for procuring personal protective equipment (PPE) to the utterly useless, incompetent 421 NHS procurement managers whose salaries cost us taxpayers about £20m a year. To repeat the point above. In normal times, institutional incompetence just wastes tons of our money. But in a crisis, you cannot, repeat cannot, ever rely on public-sector bureaucrats to do anything other than sit on their arses passing paper around to fill out their days. I’ve had many meetings with public-sector procurement managers and………. I’ll leave my experiences for another day
- Not taking the Chinese Covid-19 plague seriously – we now all know that Boris Johnson didn’t even bother turning up to the first five COBRA meetings about the plague
- Filling the Government with lightweight nonentities. Desperate to get rid of any Europhiles, Johnson and Cummings relegated any possible ministers with any competence or gravitas to the backbenches and populated the Government with obedient but third-rate rubbish who were totally overwhelmed by the Chinese plague. For example, I suspect that Jeremy Hunt would have made a better job of the catastrophe than the flopping, floundering Hancock
- Arrogant dismissal of anything done by ‘Johnny Foreigner’. Taiwan, South Korea, Germany Thailand and other countries showed how to get the Chinese Covid-19 plague under control. Our Government ignored the lessons to be learnt from other countries and thus managed to achieve some of the highest Covid-19 deaths per million of population in the world.
- Allowing flights from plague hotspots to continue to arrive in the UK without any checks or quarantines
- And so on and so forth
But perhaps the Government’s greatest mistake was to continuously deny having ever made any mistakes. I think people might have forgiven our weak, arse-covering politicians and supposed ‘experts’ if they just once admitted that they got some things wrong because of limited knowledge of the Covid-19 virus. But the daily, increasingly incredulous claims of our politicians and their lapdog lackeys to have done everything right according some great plan makes them into a confederacy of dunces and I suspect that, at the next election, they will not be forgiven for their incompetence and lies and will reap what they have sowed.
Prepare for Prime Minister Starmer.
Category: 
You are so right David,a total embarrassment.This is what happens when you let university graduates proceed smoothly into the political arena with little or no life experience or exposure to the world of real work.It has even got worse because now many do not even gain any exposure through part time work whilst at school or in further education.Most of these people have never got their hands dirty and have no experience of delivering under pressure.They are good at writing essays and talking a good game though.Sound familiar? It will to all you out there who have had to work with “fast tracked” graduates who were totally useless at the job in hand because they lacked the basic experience needed to cope with circumstances that occur.Clever academically they undoubtedly are but there is no substitute for experience.The cult of youth plus all the other additional garbage we have been exposed to over the past forty years have brought us to this.Can it be rectified? I doubt it.These fools are in control of everything except events,it would take a revolution to prise them out of their very lucrative sinecures.Total financial collapse,a real possibility,is the only real solution.Then basic reality would quickly sweep away all the left wing,socialist nonsense that has dragged this once great country into the mire.
Rolls Royce Aerospace has just announced that it is shedding 9000 staff mostly in the UK.
Well done Boris!
I’ve been thinking about our two main political parties – Tories, dominated by bankers, and Labour, dominated by lawyers.
Both the banking and legal institutions date back hundreds of years. They are both cartels, disliking any outside competition, and suspicious and resentful of other institutions trying to muscle in on their respective rackets, and they instinctively ‘circle the wagons’ in the face of any outside criticism of their own methods and outcomes.
They both dislike innovation, unless it can be conclusively demonstrated that it will increase their profits. They much prefer to fall back on hundreds of years of historical precedent.
And crucially, as we’re all aware to our cost, both professions absolutely insist on working to timetables and deadlines entirely designed to suit themselves, rather than the interests of their clients.
It’s therefore hardly a surprise when, elected to government, such very limited and deeply conservative (with a small ‘c’) people act according to type when faced with a crisis. An absence of urgency and initiative; an inability to organise from scratch; a lack of awareness of vitally useful skills possessed by people outside their own professional circles; an inability to ‘think outside the box’; an instinctive reluctance to seek advice and help from people outside the charmed circle of the legal, financial, and medical professions.
Somehow, as a nation we have allowed the leadership of our country to fall into the hands of two professions that are essentially unsuited to the actual task of leadership in the face of a national crisis.
Margaret Thatcher, the only British Prime Minister with a science degree, would have had all of these idiots for breakfast.
I have difficulty working out when England was a great country, or even how to define what it means. Increasingly it seems to me that our wealth came from the slave trade and robbing the empire of its assets. Since the last war there is little indication in the trade and current account balance that we have been paying our way. We have been selling the family silver and we were warned.
As for our politicians, we have to recognise that we vote for them and we are can join their ranks if we want to try to change them. You are probably right about Boris and his cabinet, but he was elected to sort out the EU mess and he had to have a cabinet that would support Brexit.
Did the government really get expansion of critical care beds right? I thought the Nightingale hospitals have been basically empty. The same applies to the extra beds created in the USA. I am astonished at the high level of support there seems to be for the government policies. Hence the puppets are out clapping with Boris pulling their strings.
The state of western governments is entirely due to the march of socialism. It has not come about by revolution but by the continued expansion of the welfare state. Obama was a master at this and whilst Trump has done his best to reverse the policies, he really is a hopeless President. If he does not get re-elected, the decline will start again. Welfare takes away individual responsibility and makes people more and more reliant on the state to solve every problem. When the state gets it wrong we all suffer. There is little difference now between Tory and Labour. The one who offers more state help will get elected and that is what Boris did. The future is a race to the bottom.
We did have great scientists and engineers, and that might have been a time of our greatness but it applied everywhere. There were not that many scientists in the past and they understood that science is never settled and they challenged every view to eliminate poor science. The universities have failed us. Instead of challenging ideas, they have adopted consensus as a way to advance science. They keep the taxpayers money flowing by promising our weak politicians that they can find specific solutions but with no idea how they are going to find the solution. The IPCC was established to prove that humans are causing climate change and so pseudo science was created and the problem made ever worse to keep the money flowing. It is of course a political project not a scientific project. I suspect the coronavirus activity is driven by big pharma making money, rather than anything to do with our health.
I notice while writing that Jeffrey has mentioned Margaret Thatcher. Whilst true about her science background she fell for the global warming scam and promoted it very heavily. Some say it was revenge for the miners but I am not so sure. She was however a PM with a clear vision and we cannot say that about many of the others.
I’m sure I heard on the news a couple of days ago that the CE of Public health England STATING THAT TESTING HAD NOT BEEN THEIR RESPONSIBILITY.
He clearly forgot that the PHE was formed from the HPA (Health Protection Agency) which had in it’s turn been formed from the PHLS (Public Health Laboratory Service) which was set up to provide microbiological testing capabilities, mainly at hospitals (path labs!) but also at a number of regional and national reference laboratories. PHLS wasn’t perfect but it did have world renowned expertise in testing and developing testing for emerging pathogens (mainly at Colindale and CAMR Porton).
Obviously concentrating on the nations consumption of sugary drinks was infinitely more important!!
I’m hardly the world’s biggest fan of Margaret Thatcher – the hatchet job she did on British manufacturing industry has quite justly come back to bite this Tory government on the arse.
But it’s hard not to acknowledge just how much Thatcher’s own particular style of decisive and ruthless leadership would have been to the nation’s advantage during the present crisis.
Her background in science would have equipped her to searchingly question the SAGE committee about the advice they were giving the Government, and make her own decisions rather than slavishly follow a consensus line.
And she would have had little time for such airheads as Hancock, Raab, and Patel, replacing them with people who would be required to act with initiative, speed and efficiency – or else!
As we saw during the Falklands crisis, Thatcher would have tolerated no BoJo-style waffle, no excuses, no buck-passing, no absence without leave, for anyone – either politician or bureaucrat – until the situation was finally under control. Above all, we would have seen real leadership, rather than the embarrassing spectacle of inadequates desperately trying to look and act like leaders.
Oh, well…..
It seems unlikely Boris will survive this but who will replace him? Would the tories, like labour, safe with the Boris majority appoint a remainer who would proceed to fulfil the establishment wishes before leading the party to electoral oblivion.
Maybe Sajid Javid who stepped away in the nick of time, luckily or rather conveniently protected, stroll back after the resignation of Boris and resume the Maybot destruction of country and tory party. The only flaw in this plan, with no opposition, is if a new party evolves but poor old Sir Nigel probably cannot be bothered any more.
Wonderful blog today and excellent responses from all. Can’t say more really – except thank you everyone! Reassuring to know that some common sense – and ability to see the wider picture – still pertains in the UK, albeit limited to possibly a small proportion of the population.
Jeffrey, I don’t agree with you views of Thatcher. Out manufacturing started to decline after the war. This was because the Labour government prioritised establishing a welfare state and neglected modernising manufacturing for peacetime. Germany in contrast put manufacturing in order and then looked at welfare when they were generating money to pay for it.
The decline of the northern cotton mills and car manufacturing started long before Thatcher. I imagine the mills closed because of the price of imported cotton and our production costs. This made the import of manufactured goods the cheapest option. Our car industry collapsed because of bad management, bad designs and the unions refusal to modernise. Our cars were expensive, unreliable and too expensive.
The nationalised electricity industry was used to support coal mining and boiler and turbine manufacturing, because our coal was too expensive to export and our boiler and turbine manufacturers faced foreign competition. Drax B and Littlebrook were both built to fill order books, all paid for by electricity consumers and taxpayers. The nuclear industry was also a complete failure with only one power station because the designs were too complex. This is because the industry was obsessed with on-load refuelling. sold abroad. Again all paid for by consumers and taxpayers. Thatcher privatised the industry and we did eventually get lower prices and competition. This changed with the climate change policies started by Labour and continued by the Tories. The regulation is worse than nationalisation since it effectively means the government controls the prices and that is why we have seen energy prices increase dramatically and be unaffordable for many. Boris has made it worse by passing into law a requirement to make all new developments comply with carbon emission requirements.
Thatcher rightly challenged Scargill who was using the NUM to bring down a government. She understood that we had to pay for our imports and we were not going to do that with overpriced poor quality products. The rest of the world was not going to pay for us to have high salaries to give us a higher standard of living than they had. Our present position is not helped by poor education and being a member of the protectionist EU.
I agree that it is difficult to know what Thatcher would have done. We live in very different times. My worry is not so much about Boris, but the rest of the world’s leaders seem to be just as useless. Where is there one leader compared to the time when Thatcher and Reagan dominated the world?
I hope I’m wrong but looking at Boris’ willingness to fall ‘hook line and sinker’ for the (so called) advice of SAGE, I worry that some ‘health’ pretext will be used to prolong the Brexit implementation period. Remember May’s tactic was to pretend to be implementing Brexit (to quell opposition). All along she was working against it. Boris’ decisions have been pro globalist, Huawei, HS2, climate change, XR kid glove treatment (compared to anti lockdown protesters). I have not heard much from him but he doesn’t seem to want to prioritise our economy. In my view the furlough scheme was designed simply to quell opposition while the country’s economy is vandalised.
“When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic.”
~ Dresden James
So we have seen how the government has handled the
life saving side of the coronavirus to date.
Incompetently.
But this autumn we are heading into the biggest unemployment
crisis in our lifetimes.
The ‘pound in your pocket’ will struggle.
Will gold or bitcoin save us?
Or should we just leave these shores?
Yes Biĺl,but where to go? I suspect the World migration pact is a one way system.Anyone is entitled to come here but it will be difficult for us to get out ,even with money.Financial restrictions on their way,even possible for them to outlaw the personal possession of gold,its been done before. Have no trust of government when money is involved.Too many people seem to think they have our interests at heart.Their actions over the past few years at least should have opened their eyes to that fallacy.Yes,Autumn will see an awakening of the reality of our situation.The present situation is like the summer of the beginning of the last war,the weather was beautiful and war seemed a million miles away,and then all broke hell broke loose.Too negative an outlook,no,I am just a realist in a world of fantasist.