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Originally Posted by Damien
I did listen to the clip but I think it's nuts to suggest Murdoch wants Boris Johnson out. It overstates the degree to which a newspaper owner imposes their own politics onto each and every edition, they may have an editorial line in favour of the owner but that doesn't mean every article is in pursuit of that goal. The Times especially has a greater degree of independence than The Sun. It would be the latter that would be making moves if this really was a goal of Murdoch.
As for judging in hindsight then if we're not careful then you can use that to excuse anything. It just becomes an excuse to never to critique the Government because they'll never know everything that's about to happen. The questions are the degree to which they could have predicted future events, the role their existing management of the country helped or hindered a response to those events and what they did when those events occurred.
In hindsight Labour couldn't have predicted the 2008 crash. However should they have paid more attention to regulation of the financial crisis before it? Should they have paid more attention to the warning lights flashing in the year or so preceding the collapse of Lehman Brothers? Are they to blame for the state of the economy and it's ability to cope when the crash did occur?
The Government will in time face similar questions. Did they pay enough attention in the early part of the year? Should the NHS have been in a better position to respond? Did they pay enough attention to the reported results where we simulated the impact of a viral pandemic?
I think the Government did well when the crisis did come but the question of if we could have been better prepared is still open.
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But Damien, the government listened to the advice they were given, they cannot do anything better than that, at the time, the World Health Organisation was playing the virus down significantly, so was SAGE and other government scientific bodies and now we know the whys and how, we cannot blame the government for following the Status Quo, that was, during January through Feb, the virus was played down and that was because the science behind the decisions, WHO listening to propaganda from China, you cannot expect any government to ignore advice that it was given or to act outside of it, especially if it involves peoples lives.
The timing of the lockdown was critical, I've said many times why and being in the healthcare sector myself, it totally makes sense to have done what the government did. To do so any earlier, to listen to the hysteria and screaming from certain quarters in the media, would have been a disaster, more than we are seeing now, 100K deaths for sure and an NHS on it's knees, as it stands, the government strategy has completely avoided this and this is what people don't get, they see the current death rate, compare it to other countries, which I don't deny is very high and behind each one, a tragic death, was a living and breathing person, they see that death rate and just scream incompetence.
It doesn't help when you have an hysterical media outlet, getting it's facts totally wrong, trying to rewrite history, writing stupid remarks, like the "PM missing Cobra meetings", which is the standard anyway and they knew that from the outset, it's just pathetic sensationalism, desperation to sell more papers because it is a dying and failing industry.