Westministenders: A Year of Johnson

[RedToothBrush]

So having given the benefit of the doubt...

... whats your reflections?

Good (and yes do have some thoughts on the positive - challenge yourself on this one as its important) and the bad (and yes this is the easy bit but keep it within reason)?

Ooooh decoupage?
Nice.
I'm not very arty sadly but do like pleasant light airy surroundings. I'd love to use really dark edwardian type greens and blues but dh would have an episode 🙃

The FUs keep coming. Instead of handing the funding and responsibility for testing and contact tracing away from the failed private sector initiatives to local authorities and NHS trusts who have the skills and knowledge, and are already rising to the challenge without the funding they need, the government is bunging money at MacKinseys, who don’t come cheap, to try to review their failed contact tracing service. “ Yet despite all this, it still hasn’t published the details of its contracts with the likes of Serco. According to the Treasury, £10bn of public money has been allocated to England’s test and trace programme. Only £300m of additional funding has been offered to local authorities to support the system.”

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/31/outsourcing-england-test-trace-nhs-private

I used to work with MacKinseys, they have no magic bullet, indeed I am sure if the brief was right, they would advise using existing public resources as the most cost effective solution. But the brief won’t be what is the best solution, it will be how do we fix the broken system and prove the private sector is always better than the public sector..... Even if tens of thousands of deaths prove otherwise

The expertise is out there
www.local.gov.uk/our-support/guidance-and-resources/comms-hub-communications-support/covid-19-recovery
but our "government" refuse to pay attention

@yoikes my dining room is a very dark blue with a red ceiling One of the perks of being single is you can be as dramatic as you like IMO! It is very atmospheric although a friend installed the chandelier slightly illegally as it has no earth which is fine as long as I don't stand on the table and touch the metal ceiling rose when someone flicks the switch

I am worried there seems to be a perception that the mess ups are scientists and the NHS rather than lack of funding, strategy and privitisation

I am worried there seems to be a perception that the mess ups are scientists and the NHS rather than lack of funding, strategy and privitisation
And I wonder who benefits from that perception .....

Omg sounds amazing!
I have the smallest chandelier in the world in my bedroom.
Just had a very very dramatic thunder storm with impressive lightning ⚡
It was hitting 34 degrees here before that 😟
I need to watch some trashy TV and get a bit squiffy

The irony is that people like me who have actually worked for companies like Deloittes and MacKinseys actually do understand where the blame lies. Sadly Tory politicians and their voters don’t have that experience and are blinded by ideology. Every time I pass the empty Deloittes drive in testing centre looking like something out of. Banksy’s Dismaland I wince, especially when it was on the way back from the well organised properly run ( with proper PPE porotocols) NHS testing centre where the results are made available by the hospital lab in hours and sexual health nurses follow up positive tests with their contact tracing skills. As I have said before, we have some of the best scientists and public health experts in the world and the government have ignored them. We have been outplayed in terms of controlling the virus by Vietnam.....

Emily
I've driven past my local Deloitte centre every day of lockdown
I was one of the few people on the road in April
such an offensive waste of taxpayers money should be a scandal on the front page of every paper and TV channel

A friend of mine is running the most effective non PHE testing system in the country.

I've worked with and for consultants.
They find what they are paid to find
and will never find what will put them out of a job

Listening The only time I have seen a queue of cars there was the 30 April, lots of well upholstered Jags and other executive cars and 4WDs carrying affluent looking over 60s. Apparently a clarion call had gone out from the local Tory website to the faithful to up the testing numbers ahead of the end of April 100000 testing target. Fairly obviously not the care home workers from South Oxfordshire 50 miles away who were amongst those it was supposed to serve....

If you read Mumsnet and take the 50/50 between the supposed 'Dementors' and the 'Flouters' then you will get roughly the same percentage as Brexit.

My DD is 8. Very sensitive due to things that have happened to her in the last 2 years. She loved me home schooling her, but would prefer to be with her friends. However, she did have problems with bullying. For every person who shrieks "kids need to get back to school. Mental health!!' there will be some who flourish being at home.

Speaking as a lone parent who has given up my job because I'm caring for my Mum who has cancer. Again, different circumstances will influence any parents decision. But I'll be asking her teachers how safe they feel.

Kate Hoey being elevated to the Lords - strewth. Obviously being a traitor to you party is one qualification. Being kicked out by the electorate another.

I don't quite have the same problem with Hammond - he was pretty loyal to May.

But let us tell ourselves that one day these ghastly people will get their come uppance. I was reminded the other day about how the Tories in 1997 had their worst defeat since 1905 - a few years longer than Labour and their worst defeat since 1935 which the Tories crowed and crowed about. Ten years later, who romped home with a landslide?

Hmm like the defeat of the Nazis or the fall of communism, or the end of apartheid in South Africa - we just have to keep plugging away.

Peregrina
Kate Hoey being elevated to the Lords
I wish you were kidding but I know you are not

the Lords is now so discredited it does deserve abolition

One thing I have been wondering about is why companies like Deloittes let themselves get dragged into what was clearly an evolving shitshow. Obviously there was the temptation of the government throwing money around without the constraints of normal purchasing common sense, let alone legal requirements; loads of money, forget tightly defining deliverables, measures of cost effectiveness etc etc. However someone should have been flagging the long term effect on the company’s reputation, Corporate Social Responsibility is one of the developments in corporate strategy that recognises this is an important factor in long term success.

So I went looking, and you will need to turn your irony dial right down or it might never work again, and found this advice for Deloitte clients. In a crisis like Covid there will be victims, heroes and villains. I think we all relate to that even if nobody wants to be a victim or a hero with its increased risk of death, long term health implications, low oay etc etc . However beware businesses because “ Reputational scenario planning will become more important. Organisations can think through potential future scenarios that involve a mix of external events (over which they have no control) and internal developments to imagine ‘worst case’ situations where they could be viewed negatively by stakeholders or the wider public. Understanding the triggers or decisions that create such scenarios, and making sure there are actionable plans to mitigate them, is a helpful exercise to check the developing strategy.” www2.deloitte.com/uk/en/blog/risk-powers-performance/2020/reflections-on-the-covid19-pandemic.html 🙄🙄🙄

And Kate Hoey too? We are the new Burma / Cambodia . Cronies rule OK.

Emily
I chat regularly to senior folks at KPMG, Capita, Deloittes, Serco
irony bypasses are part of the promotion process sadly

The whole debacle around the House of Lords... Kate Hoey , Claire fox and Evgeny Lebedev😳 and apparently Boris is livid as some of his suggestions were rejected by the lords oversight committee.(as reported by the telegraph)

I thought we could go any lower......

And what's TM hubby done to deserve a knighthood? It all utterly stinks

If you read Mumsnet and take the 50/50 between the supposed 'Dementors' and the 'Flouters' then you will get roughly the same percentage as Brexit.

Wtf are the dementors and flouters?

Just been to my local. It was notably quieter than it has been despite now having an extended beer garden for the first time.

Barmaid was saying how much the business is struggling. We are seeing it as our civic duty to sit outside behave responsibly and keep the damn place open (knowing my mates the alternative is we will end up buying the sodding bar otherwise).

There's a thread in the coronavirus topic that call themselves floaters cos they don't give no shits and dementia who point out that they are concerned/worried/infection and death rates going up/children going back to school.
As with brexshit, those who don't beleave (or act as normal in this case..) are dementors* and somehow its all their fault (?)

• I think this is a Harry Potter reference

flouters!

Dementors!

Ffs. I hate autocorrect!

RTB
my friends range in age between 50 and 70
many of us have decent sized gardens

my family went out for supper with one of my parents this week
to a restaurant specifically chosen by my kids to be sufficiently distanced

trying to get the economy back will involve building confidence in the decision makers

I'm a General Election away from that

I was wondering why floaters! 💩

Deloitte do my taxes, I can't say I'm blown away by them but it isn't something I have any personal choice in.
They once did some pro bono work for the charity I worked for which was actually quite good in pointing out just how much time we wasted on paperwork ( sadly the charity ignored this and gave us even more paperwork to complete)

Lewis Goodall@lewisgoodall (BBC Newsnight)

Considerable change in language and tone from the PM.

A few weeks ago there was talk of a potential return to normality by Christmas, no sign of that today.

Also used to be clear there would be no return to national lockdown.
Today he hinted that that could be a possibility.

V significant comment from Whitty

"What we're seeing from the data is that we've probably reached near the limits of what we can do in opening up society.
So what that means that if we want to do more things in the future we may have to do less of other things."

"The idea that we can open up everything and keep the virus under control is clearly wrong."

That idea is precisely what the PM was articulating on 17th July...

"I said I would not hesitate if there was the slightest sign numbers went in the wrong direction"

If you take what PM says literally this doesn't stand up a strategy.
Was inevitable with loosening that numbers would go up.
What we haven't heard is what acceptable increases are..

Listening A certain business run by a croney of Thatcher, and gifted various roles advising on policy, used to have a selection process for promotion based on adversarial interviews. So at the first round managers would be pitted against each other to put forward their ideas for whatever and the best would go forward to the next round. By the final round they had long run out of constructive things to say and they would be down to questioning parentage and other insults. The result was that the managers I had to deal with were, not surprisingly, utter shits. Perhaps we are coming full circle, as business strategy inevitably / inexorably always does. I and many of my female peers who had broken through the glass ceiling jumped ship even when things seemed to be improving because it was all lurking ready to surge back and we wanted control. From my peers, childrens’ peers and customers it seems it has... whatever their websites say. All part of a wider pattern....