The idea that the state had a duty was largely abandoned.
And so we got to the point where ministers had no plan for a pandemic.
Well, yes, except.
Britain did have a plan for a pandemic. It’s just that it didn’t follow its own pandemic plan. Largely because of the politics of drenched pantswetters like Our Spud.
As I continually seek to remind people, “lockdown” only applied to a portion of the population. The people who kept the country running & eating were required to go to work. Whether they liked it or not.
BiS.
You’ve got a point. Maybe they should look over the stats and work out who can safely be sacked.
” The people who kept the country running & eating were required to go to work. Whether they liked it or not.”
Trouble was, the Government kept going to work too.
If, like Murphy, I’d caught COVID several (5 or 6?) times, each time overlapping with continuing long COVID from earlier infections, I’d be peed off too.
“Britain did have a plan for a pandemic.”
It’s here
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a7c4767e5274a2041cf2ee3/dh_131040.pdf
Is Murphy out of the loop? No promotion of the WHO’s power grab for international health regulation, pandemic preparedness treaty and so on.
Perhaps understandable as the only publicity I see is from people opposed to it on sovereignty, safety, ethical and medical grounds. Also because the WHO is a phvkin useless front organisation for the CCP, I add.
P.S. Thank you Timmy, for reading the Guardian for me, so I don’t have to.
As I continually seek to remind people, “lockdown” only applied to a portion of the population. The people who kept the country running & eating were required to go to work. Whether they liked it or not.
Indeed, and to a loose 1st order approximation the laptop classes working from home were smug Remain types who had been quite happy to sneer at Brexiteers, the ones that kept them supplied and the country running.
What decnine said!
The State of Ohio deemed me an “essential worker”, so COVID restrictions regarding travel, etc. did not apply to me. First time an accountant has ever been deemed essential to mankind in the history of the profession.
However, most of my clients saw the COVID restrictions as an opportunity to stop dealing with me in person and seized it. Everything is now telephone, text or email.
This is what is known as a “win-win” situation.
“The State of Ohio deemed me an “essential worker”, so COVID restrictions regarding travel, etc. did not apply to me. First time an accountant has ever been deemed essential to mankind in the history of the profession.”
Not so much essential to mankind as essential to the role of keeping the taxes rolling in to the State of Ohio……slight difference.
BiS – yes. I work at a tunnel/motorway which is deemed critical infrastructure by the state so I got a permit to travel more or less automatically. My very pragmatic boss told us “text me if you need to come in, don’t be dumb and abuse it, and by the way, I’ve only got three engineers, you’re not allowed on site at the same time, organise that between you. Don’t visit the control room to shoot the shit with the operators unless there’s an issue they need fixed”. One short conversation that pretty much covered what would have been the pandemic plan if we hadn’t chucked it out the window. Melbourne, Oz, which as far as I know made the record for total lockdown duration.
Trouble was, the Government kept going to work too.
For a given definition of “work”
Ltw,
I don’t know what you had in Melbourne. I wish I had chronicled the insanity here better, especially as revisionism is in full swing.
Depending on how you define lockdown we had 5 months of essentially complete closure in winter 2020/2021, then 7 months of Apartheid in 2021/2022, during which the virtuous drug takers had to demonstrate their drug taking to do anything and the granny-killing Untermensch were sentenced to supermarkets and pharmacies only.
The masks, for everyone, vaccine faithful and dissenter alike, in my part of the Reich, were only abolished on 07 April this year, after almost exactly 3 years of vigorously enforced mandates. The courts are still clearing the backlog of fines for the few who dared venture out without one.
4th Reich
Bloody hell – makes me realise how (relatively) civilised England was.
For my part – no one ever forced me to wear a pair of underpants over my face, LD was in practice optional (ie, provided that one had bothered to read and understand what the many exemptions were, and no one I know was ever asked what they were doing in any case), and whilst I’m sure there may have been some later vax restrictions for particular large events, I never myself encountered any, except – travelling outside to Bongo: some of that was indeed verboten for a period but I couldn’t blame our lot for that.
@BiS
As I continually seek to remind people, “lockdown” only applied to a portion of the population. The people who kept the country running & eating were required to go to work. Whether they liked it or not.
You fundamentally misunderstand the point of ‘lockdown’.
While it is true that some people were allowed/made to go to work (which they may have felt was better than staring at the four walls of their pokey flat in Dalston, anyway), no fucker was allowed to go to the pub, gym, cinema, restaurant, concert venue, sports ground, family funeral, birthday party, wedding or anywhere else.
Officially anyway.
Out here in the Cotswolds we said fuck it and carried on as normally as we could, but the village pub was closed so it was mates’ houses, long bike rides, walks and so on. I dread to think of the conditions endured by people stuck in cities, ‘laptop class’ or otherwise.
I visited my parents in Warwickshire regularly and was prepared to get stopped by the old bill, though I never did.
Incidentally, both of my parents died (some years before they might have been expected to) this year, my mother suddenly, my father from a galloping cancer the progress of which astonished his hitherto sanguine oncologist.
Both jabbed of course, the silly sods.
Bloke in the Fourth Reich – two years, on and off. Problem was the announcements were such short notice (like border closed in within 12 hours) that you weren’t happy crossing a state border without a permit. I paid a grand extra to avoid a 1 hour stopover in Sydney on the way to Queensland because we had a permit to travel but the wife and I got a text at 1am saying it had been rescinded and if we stopped in Sydney we couldn’t come home. We had to FaceTime my brother in law’s brother at Christmas because he was over the NSW border and couldn’t cross. Fucking insanity.