Quote Originally Posted by Fellbeast View Post

I'm absolutely no fan of Boris and co and they have so screwed up in so many ways really (cheltenham races, the Liverpool game, ignoring early lockdown advice from Italy and Spain, f**king up testing and tracing, not testing or quarantining at entry points, not having sufficient protective gear in the NHS, dumping infected elderly patients on care homes, setting a gob smackingly shameful example to the country asking them to swallow the Dominic Cummings bollocks, wasting valuable time 'developing' a now dumped, unusable smartphone app through a crony firm linked to Cummings etc etc) but despite of all that, you can't really say Wales and Scotland have done any better. Northern Ireland have though I guess
Some of those failings are undoubtedly true, but are they all the fault of the Government?

Take Cheltenham and the Liverpool game. At the time Patrick Vallance was not in favour of banning those events. He said it would not have a big effect on transmission rates. So rightly or wrongly the Government was only following the advice of its chief scientific officer.

Testing and PPE provison in the early days were both inadequate but they were the responsibility of Public Health England. For a whole month PHE turned down requests from private and university labs to assist with the testing. It was only when the Government got involved and overruled PHE that this changed.

I said at the time that Cummings made an error of judgement, but ultimately the worst that the police could say about the whole episode was that he might have committed a minor breach of lockdown rules in going to Barnard Castle. Most of the criticism was clearly politically motivated. The most vehement critics of Cummings have turned out to be the people who have cheered on the mass BLM protests, if not actually taken part in them themselves. This has been a much larger breech of lockdown rules.

I have to say though, the failure of an NHS App was entirely predictable. Why they didn't go for Apple/Google in the first place is beyond me.