Congratualtions Keir Starmer

[drfchound]

IDM, there you go again! I really do suggest that when you go back over the last 4 or 5 years or so of the forum you check out the things I've been called.

Crikey, I only had to look back to post 317 on this thread to find the first one.

[BillyStubbsTears]

The whole issue of nationalism has become so toxic of late.

Yes, there are people on the Left who want to belittle and bring down Britain. Just as there are people on the Right who bathe in an unjustified tub of British Exceptionalism and see us as unquestionably better than other peoples.

Those people are idiots and should be ignored.

Among the rest of us, it wold be helpful if "criticism of the policies and practices of the people who govern Britain" wasn't conflated with "Trying to bring down Britain". Pointing out where we have achieved poorer outcomes than other countries is NOT denigrating Britain. Quite the contrary. Those who ignore that and see criticism as a threat are the ones who are really doing Britain a disservice, because they are implicitly accepting less than we should demand.

Start from that premise and the whole debate would be more civil.

[Bentley Bullet]

BST, perhaps the opinion some people have of others "trying to bring down the government" could be because of the amount of blame the government gets compared to the lack of consideration of other factors that could at least to some extent defend the country's situation. That's my opinion anyway. For instance, why hasn't there been much emphasis on the fact that making international comparisons on Coronavirus deaths is difficult, and so therefore unreliable? Doesn't it, therefore, suggest that using those figures to make a league table quite unfair to any country deemed to have the most casualties, and quite shocking if it is used to show how bad in comparison YOUR OWN country is doing?

Seems like a political agenda to me.

[IDM]

Our country is doing badly in comparison to itself, never mind compared to anywhere else.

Badly may be a bit harsh - perhaps I should say not as well as we should have been doing, had we acted sooner and had more clarity in the message.

For clarity on here - that is not me trying to bring down our government, nor be party political - it’s my honest opinion of where we are at as a country..

[Bentley Bullet]

IDM, so you don't agree with me?

[DonnyOsmond]

I mean ignoring Exercise Cygnus probably wasn't a good start.

[Glyn_Wigley]

Ignoring the experience South Korea has of fighting virus outbreaks and not copying them doesn't look great either. And you have to compare the results, you can't ignore them. Otherwise how will we know what an overwhelming success Boris has been?

[BillyStubbsTears]

BB.

It's very simple.

Some people are "meh" when it is pointed out that we have something like 60,000 deaths, a figure that looks to be the worst in Europe and is FAR worse than some European countries, despite us having had the benefit of starting late and seeing which way the wind was blowing. Those people get cross when other people question whether some of our Govt's policies might be responsible for that.

Other people are rather upset that we seem to have managed this so relatively badly, and would like the country to ask why so that lessons can be learned. Because we are a long, long way from the end, and if the same people make the same mistakes again, we will have a damn sight higher total number of deaths before we get out of this.

You, apparently, are happy that this situation is acceptable. There is no other conclusion to be drawn from your contributions in here.

As I've said before, YOU would have been criticising those who brought down Chamberlain after the Norway fiasco, because it's unpatriotic to ask critical questions of a Govt in a national emergency. You would have hated Churchill in early 1940. You would have questioned his patriotism and claimed he had ulterior motives.

Because your intolerance of the criticism is not based in whether the criticism is accurate. It is based on the fact that criticism is happening at all. And you want to shut down discussion through ad hominems, not through addressing the issues.

[Bentley Bullet]

BST, I'm not suggesting the country has done well! I'm suggesting there are political agendas.

[BillyStubbsTears]

Of COURSE there's a political agenda.

We are where we are because politicians made decisions on how to (or how not to) address the crisis. And the evidence is mounting that their decisions have resulted in outcomes which are somewhere on the spectrum of bad to very bad by international comparisons.

What do you suggest we do as a country in that case? Shrug our shoulders, say, "Mustn't grumble" and leave the same politicians to crack on?

And before you do you knee-jerk response, look at what I have said consistently about Sunak in this crisis. Lift your head up and loo beyond your prejudicial obsessions. It is NOT about criticising for the sake of criticising.

[IDM]

IDM, so you don't agree with me?

Yes, I don’t agree.  I don’t think that criticising the Government, whether a practical or political criticism, means that people want to bring the government down.

[Bentley Bullet]

IDM, so you don't agree with me?

Yes, I don’t agree.  I don’t think that criticising the Government, whether a practical or political criticism, means that people want to bring the government down.

Even if it's unfounded and inaccurate criticism?

[IDM]

Such as.?

[BillyStubbsTears]

IDM

You and I should both know better. There's no talking to him. He is utterly convinced that there's bad faith here.

[Bentley Bullet]

Such as.?

Such as the death figures showing the UK at the top, and people use it as a stick to hit the government with even though there is no evidence that all countries are using the same counting methods?

[IDM]

Whether we compare with other countries or not is largely irrelevant - we could have done much better compared to our own figures..

[Bentley Bullet]

If the comparisons are largely irrelevant why do we consistently mention them?

[BillyStubbsTears]

And so it goes on.

It's pointless IDM. You're not going to get him to engage. He's utterly certain that you, I and everyone else on "this side" has an agenda.

I pointed out earlier in the CV thread that both Spain and France have published excess death figures up to the end of April and we are higher than both of them. That's a directly comparable set of numbers.

But BB won't engage with that. Instead he repeats a standard Govt line that you can't do comparisons because the numbers are collated differently. A standard Govt line, note. But he's not making this party political.

[IDM]

Ok maybe if I put it another way - we don’t need to look at other countries’ data, to form an opinion that our government could have performed better.

[Filo]

As Starmer pointed out at PMQ’s, if you can’t make comparisons, why have the Government been producing daily comparison charts for weeks?

[IDM]

What does it matter if counties collate death figures slightly differently anyway.?

Regardless of the precise numbers, you can compare how each country dealt with the virus by looking at their data over a period of time - what the effects of lockdowns and relaxations were, by analysing trends over time irrespective of the actual total number of deaths.

So it is relevant to compare the uk to other countries in some respects, but it makes no difference when analysing the UK in its own right.

[BillyStubbsTears]

You absolutely can make comparisons. You just have to be careful that you are comparing like with like, or, if not, only draw the very broadest of conclusions.

Given that as a principle, there are a few things that you absolutely can say.

1) At the very best, we are in a group of very, very badly performing countries. UK, Spain, Italy, France, Sweden, Belgium.

2) It's likely that us or Belgium will turn out to have the worst overall outcome.

3) Whether or not 2  is correct, all that group have much, much worse outcomes than countries which appear to have managed the crisis better, including Germany, Denmark, Norway, Portugal, Austria, Switzerland, Greece and others.


There's nothing controversial, party political or unpatriotic in saying that. Or in saying that a mature, confident country would now be looking very hard at the reasons why we are in the 1)  group, not the 3) group.

[Bentley Bullet]

As Starmer pointed out at PMQ’s, if you can’t make comparisons, why have the Government been producing daily comparison charts for weeks?

You can make comparisons in respect of the rate of increase/decline in deaths with other countries even if they are calculated differently, as long as they have not changed the method of obtaining the calculations. This will give an indication of how the virus is developing.

[BillyStubbsTears]

You can also make broad comparisons on total death numbers, as long as you know what you are comparing.

On the simple, CV-19 death certicate numbers, we have roughly 5 times as many deaths per head and 4 times as many total deaths as Germany.

No conceivable difference in the accounting method is going to change the fact that Germany has managed this crisis far better than we have.

I'll repeat. Stating that and saying we have lessons to learn is not unpatriotic. Quite the opposite.

[ravenrover]

Wasn't it Turkey (Ottoman Empire) once labelled the sick man of europe?
How times have changed

[Bentley Bullet]

BST, my point is why aren't charts showing the UK in a less negative table position shown, if only to give some perspective? Like this one...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1111779/coronavirus-death-rate-europe-by-country/

[BillyStubbsTears]

Because that table is very misleading.

1) Belgium appears to have the most rigorous accounting system for deaths in Europe. They have been including more categories than any other country since the start.

2) It doesn't take into account where each country is in its epidemic timescale. We are at least a couple of weeks behind Spain and Italy. Their weekly recorded deaths are now down to around 1000, whereas ours are still above 3000. Simply tabulating them like that is like, in a time trial race, simply listing how long each competitor has been out on the course, and ignoring how far they are into their race.

3) Regardless of the fine detail, that table still shows precisely what I said earlier. That we are one of a group of countries who have done very badly.

[BillyStubbsTears]

I'm really not sure now what you are trying to prove BB, so if you'll forgive me, I'm going to stop indulging you and get on with this mountain of work.

I suggest you have a quiet think about whether this attitude of yours is justified.

[Bentley Bullet]

A quiet think about whether MY attitude is justified? You're kidding yourself, Billy, not me.

[Glyn_Wigley]

BST, my point is why aren't charts showing the UK in a less negative table position shown, if only to give some perspective? Like this one...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1111779/coronavirus-death-rate-europe-by-country/

Deaths per capita is a reasonable statistic to use. But even if that graph is less negative than other methods of showing data, being 4th in a table of 31 countries is still horrendous.

The very first thing that ought to come to anybody's mind is 'would we have had fewer deaths per capita if we had handled things in the way that those countries with fewer deaths per capita than the UK did?'. And if the answer to that is 'yes', the very next question that should be asked is 'why didn't we as a country do what those other countries did?'.