Is the UK now giving off strong Third World vibes?

K-9

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121201103#Comment_121201103

World leader on deaths too

Slightly Kwackers

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121201118#Comment_121201118

When you have nothing to offer but fear of an alternative and the trough is in danger of not being able to sustain yourself and your cronies, then you can always rely on the multitudes of forelock tuggers.

You can easily steal from the great unwashed by making them feel so superior to the "enemy of the week".

kirk.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121201192#Comment_121201192

What does that mean

jetsonx

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121201208#Comment_121201208

If you make migrants the enemy, uneducated people will start to resent them. And while all their resentment is focused on the migrants, the focus is turned away from the leaders.

Fianna Fail used to use this trick. For example, during the last recession, when the heat was turned up on the economy, Fianna Fail would hint that public sector workers (like nurses and teachers) are the real problem in the economy. They would pit the public sector against the private sector and let them squabble. The media would often follow. Meanwhile, FF would be in the background robbing everyone.

Strazdas

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121201145#Comment_121201145

The Daily Mail and Daily Express had opinion pieces this week saying it would be a great idea for the Tory Party to remain in power i.e. a media that are no longer even holding the government to account and even acting as cheerleaders / propagandists for it.

RetroEncabulator

If we’re going to throw around insults let’s get them right. It’s showing signs of becoming a ‘Banana Constitutional Monarchy.’

PommieBast

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121200995#Comment_121200995

For FY2020-21 I was almost exactly 50:50 in Ireland and the UK. UK got a lot of things wrong (e.g Eat Out to Help Out) but there was the underlying belief that people need to get on with their lives. They at least kept things ticking over whereas most of the Irish state went into whole-sale shutdown.

Francis McM

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121201135#Comment_121201135

Not sure if you could call Tesco a mediocre retail company - last time I looked it has turnover of 60 or 70 billion pounds and net income of one and a half billion pounds per annum . That is 1,500,000,000.00

OK, not world leading - like they were in the development of a Covid vaccine - but still not mediocre, I would have thought.

RetroEncabulator

I think pretty much all countries got COVID wrong. Johnson wasn't the ideal PM to have in office during a massive crisis that involved being sensible, but their response was reasonable enough.

Both countries did extremely well on vaccine rollouts, although the UK probably would have been better off not trying to engage in oneupmanship with the neighbours. I think some of the arguments with the EU were just petty nonsense that spilled over from Brexit and were more about tabloids having a shot at people than reality. The UK's AstraZeneca's vaccine turned out to be a bit of a damp squib in the end, but it was a good effort and the EU just spread its bets and landed very safely on BioNTech/Pfizer and Moderna.

The real story was Ireland, the EU and the UK and the US all did pretty excellently on the vaccine rollout in particular. It was a real triumph of science and global research capabilities. Politicians have relatively little to be taking credit for other than making sure they got resources in place to allow things to ramp up.

Nobody got all of COVID right. Some aspects were over cautious, some aspects were over conservative while others weren't cautious enough or took counterproductive or ineffective approaches. That applies to both Ireland and Britain, but everywhere else too. We'd no idea what we were dealing with and it's a crisis that I think many of us are still only just now getting our heads around.

However, I don't think the UK's response was a disaster. They just weren't perfect, but they were usually making best efforts.

The scandalous bit about the UK response is mostly around panic contracts that were awarded to complete cronies.

Francis McM

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121202152#Comment_121202152

Johnsons response was reasonable enough you say? His country, partly thanks to the UK government, was the first in the world to develop and roll out a vaccine, showing a bit of light at the end of the tuinnel for the rest of the world. Tests on their AstraZenica carried out in 2020 showed that the efficacy of the vaccine is 76.0% at preventing symptomatic COVID-19 beginning at 22 days following the first dose, and 81.3% after the second dose.

Here our government increased the national debt by billions unnecessarily by, for example, giving every 15 or 16 year old who had worked a Saturday job for a few Saturdays automatic entitlement to €350 per week. And you talk about "panic contracts"!

RetroEncabulator

After a lot of initially very positive results, AstraZeneca didn't really prove to be all that great.

The effectiveness lagged a lot with the variants and by 2021 several countries had already abandoned it in their rollouts and it never got FDA approval in the US. There were also concerns raised about side effects quite early on.

It didn't form the basis of rollouts in most western countries. The two mRNA vaccines became the mainstay of the vaccine programmes in the EU, US and most Western countries. AstraZeneca and Jannsen / J&J, both using similar technologies with Adenoviruses as a vector didn't' end up as the core technologies used in most developed countries.

The first vaccine used in the UK was actually Pfizer/BioNTech btw. They approved it slightly before either the FDA or the EMA had signed off, using an emergency authorisation, but it was effectively German-American technology.

AstraZeneca's vaccine was at least cheap to produce as it's technically far less complex to manufacture (a normal biotech approach) rather than than mRNA vaccines, which have quite a complex manufacturing process involving encapsulating the strand of mRNA in tiny lipid capsules. The delivery system is very sophisticated. Also the cold chain for the mRNA vaccines subsequently turned out to be somewhat overkill. They had initially taken the most cautious storage approaches possible, but the vaccines provided to be far more robust than that, and they went to be far easier to deliver than anticipated.

However, the whole rollout of vaccines in the US, EU and UK was stellar. There was a lot of shouting at the time, but the speed of development, delivery and scale up of manufacture was an incredible example of scientific and engineering ability.

The UK responses to COVID were mixed and driven a lot by populist rhetoric from some of the ministers. The big negative over there is scandals around PPE purchase and contracts for various things that were just handed out all over the place to cronies. The overall scientific and medical response from the UK though was top notch. The scandalous bits were lack of adequate PPE for nurses, doctors and frontline staff and so on, but that was a scenario repeated almost everywhere else too.

K-9

They f*cked up the start of the pandemic though, what were they waiting on to lockdown?

At that stage Italy and then Spain was getting hit hard. We closed down and everybody was wondering what's the story with the UK?

The model they were relying on was completely wrong, they underestimated the exponential rate by a hell of a lot and it took ages for them to correct it.

As for them doing well or not too bad:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1093256/novel-coronavirus-2019ncov-deaths-worldwide-by-country/

If being world leading in Covid deaths with the US, Brazil, India, Russia, Mexico and Peru was doing well, I'll take our approach all day. Not great company to be in, Trump, Bolsanaro, Modi and Putin. Good company for the purposes of this thread though, BRIC countries, would be second world these days.

Boris was a terrible leader to have, shaking hands with infected patients, "let it rip" comments, indecisiveness, partygate etc. etc. He was never a serious politician and he cost tens of thousands of lives, people who didn't need to die.

His whole pantomime act was shown up for what it was. Jeremy Vine copped to his act years ago. He was presenting an award at some industry show years ago and was at the same table as Boris. Boris was saying how he'd no speech prepared, and Jeremy noticed him busy chatting and drinking away, no prep whatsoever. 5 minutes before his speech, he scribbles down a few notes on a napkin, ruffles his hair, gives the speech and brings the house down. Jeremy thought that's some going.

A year or two later, another award show, Boris there again. Boris proceeded to enact the same show gain, the same pretend lack of preparation, scribbling notes down with 5 minutes to go, and then proceeds to give the same speech again. It was all an act, perfected by Boris over many years. It came undone in his famous Peppa Pig meltdown speech.

That whole Hugh Grant, bumbling idiot character from Three Weddings and a Funeral, Tim Nice but Dim from Harry Enfield:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NC0IJQ_s7No

Or probably based on his age:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGxSM5y7Pfs

Monty Python's Upper class twit of the year.

The biggest con he pulled was making people think he was intelligent behind the act. There's nothing there.

jetsonx

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121202533#Comment_121202533

I remember the Peppa Pig comment alright. That's when some of the mainstream media like Sky News started to turn on him.

Seth Brundle

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121202286#Comment_121202286

From memory, the AZ vaccine development was part funded by the EU. It was the British government who tried to make a vaccine race or battle with the EU.

In terms of the irish government providing wages topeople who were forced to stop working because of cocis, thats a rather strange (if not deliberate) approach to take on it. If you recall, the idea was to ensure that the economy didnt take a massively big hit by thousands suddenly out if work. As this funding policy had to be developed and funded quickly In order to ensure that people had money, there were some who inevitably took advantage of it. However, the money was all taxable plus AFAIK people did have to prove entitlement, in time. However, it sounds like you would have preferred masses of people to find themselves suddenly out of work with no money to pay bills and, long term, how would that have affected the Irish economy?

For Forks Sake

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121200728#Comment_121200728

it will be very intereting to see who buys up all that CPOd land for pennies on the pound...

Count Dracula

I think that getting Jeremy Kyle off the Television was a very progressive step. i found the show fascinating, as a time piece. But it would be imperative that if they are to survive into the future that they start looking after themselves.

Tomorrow is the first Saturday in October and it should be an early start for Rotterham United Fans as they make the scenic journey over the Pennines as far as the stone clad enclave of Macclesfield for a 3pm afternoon kick off. It should give the Rotterham supporters club a great opportunity to gesticulate the wanker sign at parallel traffic on the motorway, or even, offer a chance to drop trouser and moon flat arse into the window at any vehicle driving past inhabited by female English shopping addicts, on the way out for their Saturday fix at the nearest MnS . Nothing like the milk white hairy ring-piece of a 48 year old unemployed, industrial car mechanic.. getting flat arsed to within an ass pube of Jesus's Tomb, whilst being pressed against the side window of a Swedish manufactured tour bus, which smells vaguely of Dog shight, Tennants, cigarettes and hydroponic Purple Haze.

I once witnessed a 14 year old boy snorting a line of cocaine on an inter city train during a draw poker game charging 20p for openers, I stared and he advised me to to " foooook off and mine me own busy ness "

They are a charming bunch all said.

I would love to have a threesome with Prince Andrews daughters, both amorously cladded in black leather gear and knee high stilettoed boots.... what is bred in the marrow comes out in the bone, the apple rarely falls far from the tree. They look really filthy, I would say they would be up for anything after a few looseners and a gobble on a large stiff throbbing Golly Bar they enjoy soaking their gaping monarch mouths, which tingle in the anticipation of an SAS officer's cock being shoved down menacingly to almost suffocate their silky throats on, triggering an glistening tear of emotion.

Francis McM

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121203727#Comment_121203727

That only happens in Ireland ( eg Haughey land rezoning etc ) - - has it ever happened in the UK? If so, who?

Francis McM

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121203553#Comment_121203553

For the AZ, "Once the new coronavirus was identified and started to spread in January 2020, the UK government stepped in with more than £33m of funding for the vaccine, on top of the £5m it had given earlier, making it the largest overall source of money, according to the FOIs."

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/apr/15/oxfordastrazeneca-covid-vaccine-research-was-97-publicly-funded

As regards the €350 a week here in Ireland given to 16 year olds living at home who had just worked one or two Saturdays, that was a panic measure if ever there was one. There were students going around that year with more money than they could spend / knew what to do with. Crazy waste of public money, no wonder our foreign debt increased by 20 billion....money which will eventually have to be repaid, with interest.

If the government wants to borrow money to invest in housing or infrastructure , fine - but what is left of the €350 a week the students got? Pi**ed against a wall? Not even votes? At least the UK government invested in a vaccine, and rolled out the first one in the world.

K-9

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121204617#Comment_121204617

Look up the Teeside freeport, seriously dodgy stuff went on there. Private eye did great work on it.

yagan

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121202034#Comment_121202034

And Irish economy still grew.

K-9

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121204660#Comment_121204660

Nah, the Tories would prefer wasting money on the likes of Servo, how many Billions did they waste on the track and trace system that Serco was running?

But f*cking students.

Francis McM

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121204719#Comment_121204719

Googled servo and all that came up was Servo are motors that allow you to accurately control the rotation of the output shaft, opening up all kinds of possibilities for robotics etc.

You sure you are not thinking of the voting machine scandal here, where €54m voting machines scrapped for €9 each, after paying many millions of euro for storage too?

Peregrinus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121201023#Comment_121201023

While the UK's vaccine performance is impressive, they were not the first country in the world with a vaccine; China was. The UK was not even the first country in Europe; Hungary was.

Francis McM

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121204821#Comment_121204821

The UK administered the first COVID-19 vaccine in the world, outside of clinical trials. Early December 2020, I remember it well. I think the person they gave it to may even have had Irish heritage, Maggie Keenan.

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-marks-one-year-since-deploying-worlds-first-covid-19-vaccine

There was light at the end of the tunnel for the rest of the world.

K-9

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121204745#Comment_121204745

Sorry. Serco, they've a history of f*cking up contracts but still, mysteriously, getting bigger and bigger contracts from the Tories. Something seriously odd going on there.

That's the thing with our f*ck ups, I used to think we were a corrupt, incompetent country and the UK did things pretty well. Not perfect, but a damn sight better than us.

After 13 years of the Tories I'm not so sure anymore. They are on a leveling down trajectory as far as I can see.

Its a result of incompetent government after another, 5 prime ministers in 7 years. The internal back stabbing and Brexit shenanigans meant they've taken their eye of the ball.

People have a habit of failing upwards under the Tories, ministers getting promotions or cushy private sector jobs after monumental f*ck ups. Chris Grayling a great example.

kirk.

Subak will go down in history as the PM who cancelled HS2

Don't think he'll be around too long anyhow

Francis McM

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121205031#Comment_121205031

Only part of the HS2 has been cancelled. The part linking Birmingham and London is still going ahead afaik.

kirk.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121205430#Comment_121205430

Theres another part in London that may not go ahead

PommieBast

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121204716#Comment_121204716

Suspect that down to the FAANGs MNCs.

yagan

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121205674#Comment_121205674

Or the fact that biomed and pharma had a good pandemic. Before the pandemic Ireland manufactured half of the global supply of critical care ventilators; Medtronic in Galway went into 24hr production to meet demand.

The pandemic bounce is wearing off now.