ITV Breathtaking

[Fatmarley]

I've looked at a couple of trailers recently, including this one, and to me, they look far too depressing. So I don't bother.
I think with some, it's the, "soap influence." I could never understand why such miserable plots could be so popular.

To me, it's about seeing the truth, because according to a lot of people on Facebook, nurses spent all day making TikTok videos because they had nothing else to do.

 

[Mike Hughes]

I think this is, to a degree, semantics though. Nobody is suggesting they are physically pushed to a workplace, it's rather more that in order to survive on the reduced UC, taking up some form of work is, in effect, essential. So no, nobody is forcing anybody, they are free to slowly decline, starve, freeze or do whatever, should they choose to.

I wish it were semantics. The reality is that people on UC who are found fit work simply do not then go and get work. That’s absolutely what politicians sell buit there is zero evidence that’s what happens in practice.

The reality is that people

- find ways to stay on UC albeit often at drastically reduced rates and making choices between heating/eating etc. although in many cases they’d have already been making those choices anyway.
- challenge and mostly win the found fit decision.
- cease to claim UC and find other ways, often not legal, to survive.

I have yet to come across anyone for whom the answer was some form of work, The reality is that if it were that easy they’d have already done so.

 

[Mike Hughes]

To me, it's about seeing the truth, because according to a lot of people on Facebook, nurses spent all day making TikTok videos because they had nothing else to do.

I do wonder if people who find the truth/reality depressing struggle to listen to ballads, county music, murder ballads, folk music, the blues etc.

 

[Mick P]

For clarity: Mick P is a long-standing Conservative Party activist/door-knocker and has a son who is a Conservative Party councillor. His is not, and never will be an impartial view.

For your information, I was a long standing activist, but not now.

I recognise that the Tory government was far to complacent, just like most EU countries and even America.

However I also recognise that a large chunk of the UK population acted like idiots due to a form of "I know best" and utter selfishness by ignoring common sense. Very few came out of covid smelling of roses.

 

[Tony L]

However I also recognise that a large chunk of the UK population acted like idiots due to a form of "I know best" and utter selfishness by ignoring common sense. Very few came out of covid smelling of roses.

They reacted to the lies and anti-science misinformation that the party you so actively promoted pushed out. Not everyone assumes governments lie, some even take things at face value or read anti-science propaganda and conspiracy theory in the right-wing media.

I did my own research and tried my hardest to ring alarm bells as to just how bad the government advice was, but many, many people followed it. I will not remove a shred of blame from the monsters you were supporting at the time. They even saw it as a means to steal £bns from us.

The Conservative Party own the UK death toll. If so many folk like me could see exactly what was coming why couldn’t the vacuous Bullindon shithead you went door to door promoting even be arsed to turn up to Cobra meetings?

This was a Conservative Party pandemic response. You are not blaming the public for this.

 

[Cheese]

an impartial view.

Tony, do you consider your view to be impartial ?

 

[Tony L]

Tony, do you consider your view to be impartial ?

I have never been a member of a political party. I have always been a floating voter. I have no tribal allegiances. I am a loner. An outsider.

In the case of covid I did my own research whilst watching what was happening in China and Italy. I followed the science. It was obvious very early on that the UK government was not trustworthy. They were not following the science.

 

[paulfromcamden]

I saw it rip through China and Italy so went into ’lockdown’ of my own volition in late-February. That was weeks before the narcissistic grandstanding prick Johnson had even attended his first Cobra meeting. We knew what was coming.

Same. I was in higher education at the time and notified my tutors late Feb that I wouldn't be coming in and would be studying from home.

I remember lots of the early reports on deaths coming out of China being strongly linked to diabetes which as a T1 was even more unsettling.

 

[paulfromcamden]

I also recognise that a large chunk of the UK population acted like idiots due to a form of "I know best" and utter selfishness by ignoring common sense.

I wonder how many of the UK population were having weekly Friday afternoon piss-ups in the office.

 

[ff1d1l]

The wife and I flew out to Spain for a 6 week holiday in March 2020 (the same time span as shown last night) and a couple of weeks later we were trapped out there because of border controls and airlines and airports shutting down. That was a world wide thing.

We could watch events in the UK on the TV and spoke almost daily to our sons. Everyone knew that this was going to kill people by the thousand but there was no big plan anywhere in the world.

Spain acted quicker than the UK and was far more aggressive in implementing controls. For instance, when you lot were still wandering around wondering if a lockdown would be implemented, Spain had closed down.

We were allowed to shop twice a week. Only one of us could travel in a car and you had to go to the nearest food shop. All non food shopping was banned. There were soldiers on every round a bout and you had to shown your documentation through the windscreen as well as a receipt of your shopping. Even the most trivial violation carried a €600 fine per person. Only eight customers were allowed in the shop at a time and obviously there were long queues of spaced out people outside. The elderly could jump the queue.

That continued for 4 months and then there was a slow reduction in restrictions but still much tougher than in the UK.

When we arrived home in November, Sue popped into the local supermarket and wore a mask. She only saw one or two people wearing a mask, so the UK was a running target for re infection.

The are a few points that need to be made.

Despite the heavy restrictions, Spain had a massive amount of infections and deaths in the big cities such as Barcelona and Madrid where a large amount of the population live in tower blocks and apartments. They had one of the highest rates of infection in the EU due to everyone living close to each other. We were on the coast in Andalusia were the locals tend to live in spaced out villas and from memory, the town where we lived had less than twenty infections for the entire year which made Andalusia the least infection region in the EU. Despite that, they kept to the same restrictions as the rest of Spain did.

We returned to the UK in November and we both had to wear a mask in the car. Everyone in the Spanish airport wore a mask and also on the plane going back. When we arrived at Bristol Airport, hardly anyone was wearing a mask. No one on the buses was wearing a mask and again, no one on the train was wearing a mask. The British government was complacent but so were the UK population. Everyone just seemed to be carrying on as if nothing happened.

The British public were as stupid as the Government were complacent. Returning to normality over rode continuing the fight against covid. UK citizens were walking around outdoors whilst we were restricted to our houses. We were lucky, we were "imprisoned" in a villa with a pool but millions of Spanish were stuck in small tower block apartments, often with active and noisy children which must have been hell.

The Spanish were prepared to put up with this for the common good but other counties, the UK included, just looked after number one and balls to everyone else. We continued to wear our mask long after our return because it seemed the decent thing to do, but I have lost count of the number of times, people in supermarkets took the piss out of us.

A fair percentage of Brits stoped taking vaccinations even when they were available. We despite being in our 70s have yet to catch covid because we played safe.

So by all means, watch the programme, feel free to complain about poor government performance but just accept the fact that the British public were far too eager to drop restrictions earlier than what was sensible. Very few Brits acted sensibly and blame everyone except themselves.

Arguable, but one of the aspects of government handling was very poor information dissemination, compared with, say, the aids campaign, and poor example set, even before partygate we had eyetestgate, after which many people thought why bother.

 

[Mick P]

I wonder how many of the UK population were having weekly Friday afternoon piss-ups in the office.

They reacted to the lies and anti-science misinformation that the party you so actively promoted pushed out. Not everyone assumes governments lie, some even take things at face value or read anti-science propaganda and conspiracy theory in the right-wing media.

I did my own research and tried my hardest to ring alarm bells as to just how bad the government advice was, but many, many people followed it. I will not remove a shred of blame from the monsters you were supporting at the time. They even saw it as a means to steal £bns from us.

The Conservative Party own the UK death toll. If so many folk like me could see exactly what was coming why couldn’t the vacuous Bullindon shithead you went door to door promoting even be arsed to turn up to Cobra meetings?

This was a Conservative Party pandemic response. You are not blaming the public for this.

Please show me where I have defended any government, political party or country in this discussion. I have stated at least twice that they were complacent.

The reality is that no government in the world really knew how to tackle it.

 

[Mick P]

Arguable, but one of the aspects of government handling was very poor information dissemination, compared with, say, the aids campaign, and poor example set, even before partygate we had eyetestgate, after which many people thought why bother.

Everyone knew that this was a contagious disease and that it made sense to wear a mask, stay away from everyone else, stay home etc. People just used complacent rules to do what they wanted.

 

[paulfromcamden]

Please show me where I have defended any government, political party or country in this discussion. I have stated at least twice that they were complacent.

I would argue it was far worse - that they held the population in contempt.

So many people stuck to the rules and were unable to say goodbye to dying loved ones while No.10 was installing a wine fridge and buying booze by the suitcase load.

My late Mum very rarely had a bad word to say about anyone but she sent me a message when the Partygate stories started to trickle out - "they've taken us for mugs". She was absolutely right.

 

[Mike Hughes]

Please show me where I have defended any government, political party or country in this discussion. I have stated at least twice that they were complacent.

The reality is that no government in the world really knew how to tackle it.

Always likely to be the outcome when you had a very specific and detailed pandemic plan in writing but decided that it wasn’t worth maintaining and that not even the out of date version was worth referring to when an actual pandemic unsurprisingly came along. Let‘s not forget that we’ve had 4 years now, enquiry or not, to go “perhaps we need to resurrect/revisit that plan” but instead they have washed their hands of it; publicly slaughtered the enquiry and simultaneously said they’ll wait to see what it recommends.

Personally, as someone with neither medical nor legal qualifications and zero political aspirations I’d still think “Maybe we should have a plan?” might be worthy of, ooh, maybe a moment of consideration.

There is a significant difference between complacent and specific political arrogance, short termism and contempt. Political colours havie nothing to do with that. This was arrogant, dismissive contempt and it explicity caused a death toll which could have been stalled at low 5 figures to end at high 6 figures. Sticks in the throat that the same people are complaining about the poor state of the economy and the allegedly work shy having explicitly created an epidemic of long-term ill-health that no amount of benefit capping and sanctioning will ever fix.

“No government in the world knew how to tackle it”. My arse.

 

[Mick P]

Always likely to be the outcome when you had a very specific and detailed pandemic plan in writing but decided that it wasn’t worth maintaining and that not even the out of date version was worth referring to when an actual pandemic unsurprisingly came along. Let‘s not forget that we’ve had 4 years now, enquiry or not, to go “perhaps we need to resurrect/revisit that plan” but instead they have washed their hands of it; publicly slaughtered the enquiry and simultaneously said they’ll wait to see what it recommends.

Personally, as someone with neither medical nor legal qualifications and zero political aspirations I’d still think “Maybe we should have a plan?” might be worthy of, ooh, maybe a moment of consideration.

There is a significant difference between complacent and specific political arrogance, short termism and contempt. Political colours havie nothing to do with that. This was arrogant, dismissive contempt and it explicity caused a death toll which could have been stalled at low 5 figures to end at high 6 figures. Sticks in the throat that the same people are complaining about the poor state of the economy and the allegedly work shy having explicitly created an epidemic of long-term ill-health that no amount of benefit capping and sanctioning will ever fix.

“No government in the world knew how to tackle it”. My arse.

Nearly every government in the EU acted in the same way and introduced the same rules.

Even today there is still discussions on whether a lock down was necessary or whether it should have been stepped up. The simple truth is that no one came out of it smelling of roses.

I cannot see how the the death toll could have been stalled at 5 figures.

The death toll was higher in Spain and they were tougher and longer than us.

 

[Cheese]

“No government in the world knew how to tackle it”. My arse.

I can't think of any government either. Even all-perfect Sweden, who did exactly the contrary to what most countries did, registered a huge covid toll. Like the others.

Do you know of one good example ?

 

[Fatmarley]

The reality is that no government in the world really knew how to tackle it.

Have you never heard of New Zealand?

 

[Mike Hughes]

I can't think of any government either. Even all-perfect Sweden, who did exactly the contrary to what most countries did, registered a huge covid toll. Like the others.

Do you know of one good example ?

Missed my point by a country mile. We had a detailed and funded plan. We declined to update it or use it.

 

[Mick P]

Have you never heard of New Zealand?

New Zealand went in hard and early. You know how the Brits would have reacted to that.

 

[Seanm]

Don’t really want to go over all this but it’s sad to see “the British public” still being blamed for everything. Also hilarious to see them castigated for selfishness and individualism by…a lifelong Tory, from his villa in Spain.