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ITV Breathtaking

Tony L said:
Agreed. They need recognising and rewarding. I felt at the time home delivery was far safer for them as well as the customer; they were largely alone in a van, and then working outside. Enclosed spaces such as shops, supermarkets, public transport etc were vastly more dangerous just by the nature of airborne transmission. The situation in hospitals and care homes is a national scandal that needs to haunt the Tory party until its death. Which is hopefully fairly soon.
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People forget, very many care homes staffed by largely ethnic minorities because the wages are so low and the work, hard and thankless, closed their doors and staff lived in!
 
Cesare said:
I would draw a comparison with the computing industries Y2K project, to find and fix all of the dodgy software that would have broken when the millennium rolled over. Given the amazing efforts and how seriously it was taken, there were very few reported problems, or failures with critical infrastructure.

However, the general response afterwards was to see it as a massive cost with little benefit 'because nothing went wrong'. It's hard to describe how dumb such a response was, but that's unfortunately the level of critical thinking in the mass population.

You see the same with any successful project. COVID response, let's face it, was not exactly stellar, but given the dubious starting point of the government, people *did* pull together, and the vaccine programme *was* successful.
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I wonder what the cost of mitigation was for the leadership vacuum called Boris Johnson. Perhaps there’s a Health Economics paper on the additional cost of delaying lockdown while the human supermarket trolly crashed into the sides of the aisles, the double messages the public got and not least the VIP Lane deals and absence of fraud controls by relevant ministries.The price of misrule.
 
MVV said:
We haven't done enough to recognise everyone who worked through the pandemic, mostly in low paid jobs. I would like to see a thing similar to the cenotaph with all the names of frontline workers who caught covid and died. A minute of silence the whole thing.
But then, supermarket workers and nurses; 10 a penny.
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Yes. This is something that nobody is really prepared to look at square on: many, many people received none of the benefits of lockdown, but still suffered all the costs. I mean it *was* Let it Rip, for them, as workers, and then very strictly policed lockdown once they clocked off. Then dragged through the courts and pilloried in the press for meeting in the car park for a fag.

I don’t think we’ve had anything like an honest reckoning regarding Covid/lockdown. It’s complacent IMO for us just to say, now, Well, lockdown was the least worst option. Almost certainly *this particular* lockdown was not the least worst option, despite being relatively painless for some (myself included).
 
Mick P said:
I am a true blue Tory and so is my wife.
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Thanks for making me smile this morning Mick : )

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Minio said:
Yes. The ideal place to be in a pandemic.

And London. The major international transport hub with twice the population and 250 times population density.

Not so good.
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I was born and lived in the UK until aged 35 (Manchester, Hull and Sheffield), when I moved to NZ. What made the difference here was the quality of leadership. Ours put lives first, was decisive, correctly appraised evidence obtained via scientific method in a way that equipped them to make reliable predictions, was bold, appealed to people's best instincts and values and, very importantly, communicated a clear plan and kept communicating.

Compare Ardern's initial broadcast with Johnson's, in the intent, the clarity, the delivery and the content.

NZ is not a paradise, there are massive inequalities, historical and entrenched racism against Māori and we've just voted in an odious bunch of mostly white men who all went to all boys schools and who always back landowners and farmers to the hilt. However, they're a world away from the criminality of the tories.

I moved here for lots of reasons, but one was that I had a sense of where I believed the UK was heading. I just despaired at so many people in the UK continuing to fall for the same old lies about who the enemy is and whose fault it is: Foreigners, brown people, people who have sex differently from you, unions, etc. If you believe those kind of lies, it's no surprise you can end up with the kind of leaders the UK has had since 2010.
 
Am sure NZ is lovely, with all the sheep n that. I liked Arden too but it’s geographically and culturally a back water. Apart from INXS who were shit anyway I struggle to name a decent NZ band. Despite all our faults or maybe because of them we producedthe. The Kinks, Joy Division, Stone Roses, Massive Attack, Underworld etc. The same is true for comedy, art and literature. So not for me.

Anyway, tonight we watched the third and final episode of Breathtaking which centred around the second wave/third UK lockdown in early 2021. I cried through most of it for the unnecessary waste of human life at the hands of incompetent politicians. Joanne Froggart was superb as an ITU Consultant.
 
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Spraggons Den said:
Am sure NZ is lovely, with all the sheep n that. I liked Arden too but it’s geographically and culturally a back water. Apart from INXS who were shit anyway I struggle to name a decent NZ band. Despite all our faults or maybe because of them we producedthe. The Kinks, Joy Division, Stone Roses, Massive Attack, Underworld etc. The same is true for comedy, art and literature. So not for me.
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INXS was an Aussie band!

Decent AO/NZ bands? At the reasonably well-known side of things who are personal favourites, I’d nod towards The Clean, Terminals, Able Tasmans - each easy equivalents at least of say the Kinks & Joy Division.

Sheep have been outnumbered by dairy cows for years. You can’t swim in many of our easily accessible rivers any more & nitrates poison the ground- & drinking water in parts of the country.

Our new far-right coalition Govt, whose constituent parties have significant funding from Big Tobacco & Big Oil via the Atlas Foundation, is an evil piece of work with accelerationist-style scorched earth social & environmental policies, together with a contempt for democratic lawmaking procedures. The PM is an entitled, brainless puppet unencumbered by any humility. He & the Finance Minister are Truss followers, at least in economic policy. Ministers lie without apology or consequence. It is all unprecedented. The F word has started to be bandied about by critics.

I hope to heaven & beyond that there are no pandemics or natural disasters like a major earthquake during this circus’s tenure as I’d expect nothing less than a Tory response.

I’d still live nowhere else. AO/NZ remains a beautiful country full of good people. Financially, though, you’ll only benefit living here if you’re wealthy.
 
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