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UK Politics: Johnsons Hoaxy Yurt North of Hadrian's Wall


Tywin Manderly

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1 hour ago, Derfel Cadarn said:

Rumour is he’s quitting in the new year, once Brexit’s done. With Murdoch wanting Gove to take over. No idea if any justification for this rumour.

Bojo at least managed to fool people with his bumbling clown persona; quite why Murdoch thinks the public will rally behind a coked-up backstabbing shitweasel, I’m not sure.

I wouldn't be sure on that. BoJo gets down in the dumps whenever he encounters a problem he can't bumble past, but he rallies incredibly quickly when necessary. If we get a handle on COVID faster than expected and Brexit is a "success" (essentially he can spin anything short of Mad Max as such), then he can start doing victory laps on that until 2024.

The Conservatives have to know that when connecting with the wider public, they have no one on their roster who can compare to Johnson in terms of public familiarity and appeal and without him their prospects for the next election are going to be doubtful, especially with someone like Gove who is much more unpopular (and with his infamous Parliamentary temper whenever he thinks the cameras are off him, possibly an actual liability).

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2 hours ago, Heartofice said:

Part of me suspects this is part of Boris' exit plan. I really can't see him lasting all that long at this rate. Outside of just being forced out for sheer incompetence, you get the sense he really is utterly overwhelmed by the whole thing and simply cannot handle it. I'd guess he is looking for a way out.

I think it would be a rare person who could really handle the pressure of trying to govern in a pandemic, you would need someone with the mindset that relishes facing difficult challenges and by all accounts that is not something Boris has.

I'm a bit unconvinced by rumours of him stepping down imminently, but I wouldn't be surprised if he doesn't make it to the next election.

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2 hours ago, Werthead said:

The Conservatives have to know that when connecting with the wider public, they have no one on their roster who can compare to Johnson in terms of public familiarity and appeal and without him their prospects for the next election are going to be doubtful, especially with someone like Gove who is much more unpopular (and with his infamous Parliamentary temper whenever he thinks the cameras are off him, possibly an actual liability).

I've little doubt that probably everyone in the Cabinet looks around the table and agrees in their head that none of these idiotic losers can possibly connect with the public the way Johnson does...

...except me, of course.

 

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None of this government's response makes any sense. 

Get back to work! But don't go on public transport. Go down the pub. Wetherspoons is especially safe, wot! Take your kids to Nandos. BUT DON'T TALK TO ANYONE! Oh, and you can't see your family or friends unless you're killing animals for sport in which case Tally Ho motherfuckas!

Cunts.

 

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I think the rules are actually pretty clear.

Basically don't gather in groups of more than six, except on Sundays, or if it's 5:30 on a Tuesday. You can go to the park, but you shouldn't go if one of you has a K in their name, or is between the ages of 23-27. You can't go out to eat, but you should also make sure that you always go out to eat all the time, but only in a socially distanced way, so nobody in your party can go to the same restaurant, and no two members of your party can go to the same franchise. 

I think if we don't follow these rules strictly then the number of cases will be exponential, just like it showed in the graph, you know that graph that just showed doubling of cases into eternity without any sort of facts to back it up... 

This is all going SO well.

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If the ‘rule of six’ ends up being somewhat effective (which will be difficult to judge, as it’s being countered by the current uptick in cases), wouldn’t boiling it down to this single digit make more sense than the Nando’s scale? People need to know one single number. What’s the rule of (...) today? It’s 4. 4 people can meet up, indoors, outdoors, or at the pub. Instead of a ‘national lockdown’, we have a rule of 2. Which would mean one person can visit one other single person household. They can then attune that number up and down depending on cases, or break it down to local areas (it can be 4 here but 5 over there, in which case the lower number takes effect if crossing boundaries).

But the 10pm thing is feeble. Unless there’s some evidence I’m unaware of that Covid really takes hold in that 5th hour at the pub but struggles with the first 4. And encouraging people to work at home; in my experience people either can’t or still are from the last one?

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The biggest problem the UK government are having really is messaging. Technically, the advice has always been to work from home if you can: so technically, there's been no change to the rules there. Except that government ministers have publicly called for people to go back to working in the office, and are now having to reverse that message. It's the story of the pandemic at UK level - Tory ministers often undermine or confuse their own government's advice, either by public statements contradicting it, or explaining away breaches as harmless, or waffling when asked about the guidance. The underlying problem, I think, is that many of them ideologically dislike what they're having to do, and hate telling people to do it.

By contrast the Scottish government rules aren't all that different but the message from ministers is consistent and therefore credible. They've made mistakes along the way but they basically believe in what they're doing.

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It is messaging, but part of that is that they don't appear to have a strategy. 

At the start of this, I think we pretty much all understood the strategy. Protect the vunerable, keep the rate of infection low enough so that the NHS doesn't get overwhelmed. That strategy then went out the window pretty early, to be replaced by 'contain the virus at all costs', which didn't really make any sense, and was then also in direct conflict with the need to stop the economy tanking. 

Now it just seems to be wack-a-mole, jumping around trying random things to keep any spikes from happening, but without any sort of track and trace system in place. I honestly don't know what the long term goal is here, maybe it's just to keep things low going into Winter.

A clear strategy would make messaging a lot easier. We wouldn't need daily updates as to what we need to do or not do today, because we'd understand the grand plan. But there is no grand plan any more. Like everything else, we've jumped back and forth between strategies and never had the courage of our convictions in anything. 

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