TIme and time again other nations have stepped up sooner to the plate whilst we hang about "waiting for the science" or developing our own solutions.
What makes us think we are cleverer than everyone else?
FFS - if something is strange is not right with you then include Covid as a possibility until you can rule it out - but why wait to add Loss of Sense of smell? Why not put it in earlier then relax it if it turns out not to be the case. So what happens, health workers pass on the virus to a few hundred more people.
Masks - every nation that has experiences MERS, SARS was wearing masks of some sort early on. Us? Well the scientists hear the word "masks" and assume we are going to deprive the NHS of medical PPE - when the rest of the world is talking about cloth, homemade, or even industrial.
Overseas arrivals - what a nonsense we are making of this. And why can't all arrivals be tested?
This tracking app is going to be a disastrous implementation typical of so many large scale IT schemes in the UK. Why not just use what others have got going?
I'm sure there's more to add to the list but any thought that we are cleverer than the rest of the world dissipated when the motorcycle industry thought the answer to the Honda motorbike was to merely add indicators to British bikes in the early '60's.
Deluded.
Last edited by SwalePie; 18-05-2020 at 08:16 PM. Reason: Fixed title/prefix format
Wide boys playing it off the cuff, I didn't think they could be this hopeless, they're worse with there twisting lies.
British exceptionalism is nothing new. But it’s probably never cost so much to be fair.
This crisis and the reactions to it, both from our politicians and officials as well as posters on here, have shown me that the kind of attitude you have described is not a lazy caricature but is real and widespread.
I think it goes a long way towards explaining the last few years' political developments too.
See Brexit, pretty much every economist said it will cost us but the right wing know best. Same with Covid19, they know best, it's only when people start dying in large numbers and bojo gets it that they take it seriously. I can't believe their initial plan was do nothing and watch 600,000 upwards of people die. I'm hoping that this is the last generation or last hurrah of a dying breed.
I don't want to overstate the political aspect of it because it will turn the thread into the usual slanging match, but I think I have noticed an almost perfect correlation between people with points of view like the ones in your OP and certain political viewpoints.
Anyway I even see the mentality you're talking about in subtle things like:
We can't have a lockdown which would save lives because of 'the inalienable right of an Englishman to go to the pub' (which got alienated).
You shouldn't make mask wearing compulsory, despite the evidence it works really well (whatever, it's only for scared foreigners).
You can't enforce the lockdown in the UK because we have 'policing by consent' (here's me thinking the government made laws and the police enforced them, and if you didn't comply you got arrested. Like pretty much every other country. I can't remember giving my consent to laws I like and refusing it for laws I don't).
I think some people are eager to sell the idea of British exceptionalism because it's a useful tool, and some are very eager to lap it up because it feels good to be automatically superior to everyone else by virtue of birth.
Agree with all posters.
Thinking of the welfare of the population is totally alien to the likes of Johnson, Gove, Raab, Hancock etc.
Politicians like this aren't even competent to run the economy, they're a bunch or radical reformers and ideologues hellbent on turning the UK into an offshore tax haven where corporations lord over everything, a Singapore-by-the Thames.
So naturally their first reaction was to deny that Covid19 was a problem and then say it should just run free through the population, killing much of the 'herd'. I think Cummings seized on this in the SAGE meetings and the rest of them must have loved the sound of it - free market economics applied to a virus - hurrah!
They're still the same people, the very worst possible to be in charge at this time, sociopaths every single one of them.
Where is our leader now? He seems to have disappeared from the landscape.
You would think that after Piers Morgan and his news team called them outright liars in yesterday's GMB, they would at least challenge through some kind of statement.
Tomorrow's PMQ should be interesting because Tory HQ have asked for a bigger presence in the House so that Doris doesn't look quite so hopeless in the face of Starmer's forensic analysis.