O/T:- Who needs Parliament?

[jackal2]

Interesting post.

Thank you.

So you’re saying that ‘Project Fear’ was in fact valid and that anyone who didn’t believe it was “casting their vote in fantasy land’? That also obviously implies as well that we shouldn’t have believed those on the winning side of the referendum who said we’d get a great deal and sunny uplands?

'Project Fear', as the name implies, was an exaggeration of the truth. Not entirely without validity, but some claims were certainly speculative and overblown. To be fair, the same could be said of some Vote Leave claims. You get hyperbole in most elections and referenda, so it's up to the voters to decide what they believe and what they don't.

I've said several times on here that anyone who voted Leave without appreciating that there would be a significant period of disruption would have been very naïve. It doesn't take great powers of deduction to realise that if you leave a system you've been locked into for several decades, there will be a period of turbulence. However, you would have had to be equally naïve to believe all of forecasts of doom put out by Cameron's Government at the public's expense.

The Yellow hammer documents aren’t a worst case scenario, they’re a base scenario but they’ve been renamed when the government was forced to publish them.

Yes I've heard the semantic arguments going on between Michael Gove and Rosamund Urwin. The title of the document as published refers to 'Reasonable Worst Case Planning Assumptions', whereas 'Baseline' is open to interpretation and can mean 'average' or 'lowest' depending on the context, so people can make their own minds up what they believe.

In my view, civil servants tend to err on the side of caution when they predict need and demand, to ensure they have an ample budget to cater for the worst case scenario (and a portion of bureaucratic incompetence). It's only public money after all, so they may as well estimate for a bit too much contingency rather than too little. The only time I've known civil servants underestimate a budget requirement is when they're trying to convince their political masters to sign off a public infrastructure vanity project, after which the cost usually skyrockets!

How many deaths due to a shortage of medicines do you think are acceptable?

Most deaths are due to a range of factors so it will probably be difficult to measure, if a shortage occurs at all. Put it this way, if we can aim for a figure lower than the deaths caused by NHS negligence, including the misuse or failure to administer available medicines, then I wouldn't say it's acceptable but it would no doubt be fewer.