The End is CerTEIRnly in Sight ...

[dancemom]

New thread, possibly the last?

I don't think anyone is as bad as the tories. There's a few eedgits on all sides but this right wing sycophantic government in Westminster is the worst I've seen and I'm old. They do more for Scottish independence than 1000 Nicola Sturgeons.

@SoMuchForSummerLove 😂😂😂 in 100% agreement surrounding Patrick Harvie.

I wish they would all just stop the shite. They are all so beholden to whatever strategy they chose. Just bloody accept no one knew what would happen and work with the facts that you have now. I am optimistic we might go down that road now in Scotland. Will have a lot more respect if that is what happens

They’re all appalling, in my view.

@SoMuchForSummerLove 😂😂 yes, always the answer to Patrick Harvie

I prefer the greens lady who sounds Canadian, she talks a lot of sense

"Just bloody accept no one knew what would happen and work with the facts that you have now."

That's what NS has tried to do, I think, and it has gone down on these threads like a bucket of cold sick every time.

Every time she's said 'I can't give an exact date because we have to see what direction things are headed in' people have lost their shit on here to quite a degree. Even though that was quite obviously just a fact in a completely unknown pandemic scenario.

There's no way to win, I don't think.

@SoMuchForSummerLove 🤣 oh yes, something we can agree on. I’d add that he needs to go fuck himself even more than you first said.

Ok I do see what you mean to a certain extent but I think a lot of anger came with the tighter restrictions throughout the year when case numbers where incredibly low. Inadequate financial support for business. Some of it was nigh on impossible to access at certain points.

I do not think lockdown is a permanent strategy that should have been used. Care homes where a scandal and we are just supposed to accept that. For me it's the constant oh look how bad the UK gov have done ... people in glasshouses. ScotGov equally shite in my opinion

@SoMuchForSummerLove

Oh, and the most important thing - Patrick Harvie can go fuck himself.

The Universal Truth to bring all of Scotsnet together, regardless of political persuasion

I didn’t and don’t support the strategy but I don’t see how the snp can criticise WM on this one. That’s all.

@WouldBeGood

I didn’t and don’t support the strategy but I don’t see how the snp can criticise WM on this one. That’s all.

This is it summed up well for me. 👆🏼

See i don't see how anyone can't criticize westminster. Things up here are far from perfect but its not even close to that shitshow down there.

@WouldBeGood

I didn’t and don’t support the strategy but I don’t see how the snp can criticise WM on this one. That’s all.

The SNP hasn't said anything I don't think. Although I don't know exactly what DC said either to be fair.

• 546 new cases of COVID-19 reported
• 28,674 new tests for COVID-19 that reported results
◦ 2.1% of these were positive
• 0 new reported death(s) of people who have tested positive
• 6 people were in intensive care yesterday with recently confirmed COVID-19
• 98 people were in hospital yesterday with recently confirmed COVID-19
• 3,155,733 people have received the first dose of the Covid vaccination and 1,913,809 have received their second dose

@ssd

See i don't see how anyone can't criticize westminster. Things up here are far from perfect but its not even close to that shitshow down there.

Exactly. Have you listened to any of DC's evidence? In MARCH they were talking about encouraging people to have Covid parties, like you'd have chicken pox parties. After watching what was happening in Italy.

Wee-ell how can the SNP criticise a strategy they didn't diverge from?

I agree on the people side of it - how Matt Hancock is still in a job I despair, the poor civil service. That has to be a new low for politics-civil service relations although we will never find out the civil service's side of the story as they are bound by codes they adhere to!

Still, I'm not sure after the Salmond/NS affair I've got a much higher regard for them. The opposite case, perhaps a too cosy govt/civil service relationship there.

Civil servants lose their jobs if they don't abide by the code, DC knows this full well!

None of this should be used for political point scoring as was implied in PMQ by Ian Blackford today.
No one is coming out of this in the UK without having made serious errors in judgement. They all did the same thing.

Today and subsequent fall out to come is exactly why I think politicians are all as bad as each other. As said not one party, politician or leader in the UK has the moral highground with any of it.

Scottish I honestly think if you listened to what DC said today (notwithstanding the fact that he's, well, who he is) you wouldn't think they are all the same. Some of it is truly shocking. Matt Hancock being caught lying multiple times in cabinet meetings and still has his job to this day. Covid parties to hasten herd immunity?

Come on. It would be truly unfair to claim that every politician is essentially making decisions to wilfully kill people.

I wouldn't trust what Cummings said if he told me it was raining... but I can imagine the chaos that was going on behind the scenes in early 2020. And I do have sympathy for BJ and NS (and Drakeford/ Foster too) to a certain extent. It's easy for us with hindsight to say "they should have done this 2 weeks earlier" or "that was a disaster and caused more damage than another method would" but it wasn't up to us. And of course looking at only one thing may give a different "best" option than considering everything together. Let alone having other, non covid stuff still going on, and needing decisions.. . Of course it's their job to make these decisions, and ultimately take the flack when it fails, but I don't think it's necessarily true that everyone involved made the stupidest choices at every opportunity with the information they had. But of course it's easy to spin that that was the case, and convenient for political opponents to do that.

What I do think would have been better would be for there to have been a much more coherent 4 nations approach right from the outset. So relaxing restrictions/ reimposing them/ what financial help was available at what stage/ who was allowed to travel where etc should have been kept more consistent, with regard for different situations in each of the 4 nations. And that doesn't imply NS alone was at fault, but that BJ should have responded to the concerns of the devolved nations more rapidly and they should have had an agreed position on financial support vs health concerns vs social/ MH considerations vs international and trade implications and so on.

I think the issue was that "economic" concerns were solely on the head of the UK gov who held the cash, whereas the devolved nations could be as health-cautious as they liked and not have to worry about the money because they could blame Westminster for not providing it. So it's easy for Scotland to blame "the UK" for everything bad, whereas in practice, even making "our own" decisions, there hasn't been much difference in how the nations have fared. And we may well have done better if there hadn't been bickering and one-upmanship (from both BJ and NSs sides) and worked better together to share resources and expertise.

A united UK policy would have been much better.

I’d love to have been in charge 😂

The whole 'the best way to protect the economy is to keep covid cases low' line was not at all current until the second lockdown at least, agree that the actual decisions were not at all easy at any point.

@ResilienceWanker but what if what the nations want differs significantly? DC said that BJ has never wanted, and still doesn't want, a border control policy. I think it's pretty obviously true by the small, difficult to keep track of, late policies he's implemented.

But his decision in terms of borders made the rest of the UK vulnerable. Certainly NS didn't agree, but what choice was there? Devolution is a mess, and this has shown it quite starkly. We have a terribly ineffective PM, as is very clear, and yet if any other nation wants to make better different policy choices, it's always politicised as a power struggle.

It does nobody any favours.

Listening to Dominic Cummings is fascinating and terrifying in equal measure. It seems to me that the basic problem surrounding the timing of lockdown (or one of them!) was that initially SAGE were basically an echo chamber, not allowing any external scrutiny of their assumptions, and giving very bad advice. The herd immunity plan (assuming you shield the most vulnerable) is/was not unreasonable if you accept their assumptions about infection being inevitable and the only question being when to best time it to avoid overwhelming the NHS. In that context, if all your advisors are telling you that you need low risk people to get it then chicken pox type parties aren't that outrageous an idea. It was also quite reasonable to assume there wouldn't be a vaccine as none had EVER been produced on anything like this short a time scale - it was a truly remarkable achievement actually. So I do have some sympathy for politicians whose advisors are telling them there are definite/very extreme harms from lockdown and we're going to have to build immunity through infection anyway, so it's best to do it in the Spring/summer when the NHS is a little quieter.

The problem is SAGE's assumptions were wrong, the modelling was well off, and we were already well into the pandemic by the time lockdown arrived, hence it was all a last minute panic. In retrospect we shouldn't have waited so long to lockdown, but then at the same time I think in Scotland our leader/s were also in the thrall of experts giving bad advice, most notably for most of 2021 where we have been (until this week) pursuing an utterly implausible 'maximum suppression' strategy that is guaranteed to cause harm from restrictions, but unlikely to work because as much as a certain professor might like to proclaim otherwise, COVID is nothing like Measles. It's likely we'll all end up in much the same place as regards deaths etc. despite us having harsher restrictions, but if reported antibody levels are a reliable indicator, Scotland has some catching up to do in terms of achieving that herd immunity.

"chicken pox type parties aren't that outrageous an idea"

OK, let's imagine that, after weeks of wall-to-wall footage of people dying on the floors of Italian hospitals, that the government had proposed that?

Of course it's an outrageous idea.

He said the problem describing the situation is lions led by donkeys

I agree with him

This government is only in power because the rest are shite and too many English believe whatever they are told.