Ouch. Right in the feels. Lump me in with ‘thousands just like you’ without knowing anything about me or my political views beyond attacking a clearly incompetent government’s handling of this pandemic.
You, on the other hand, are clearly the type to latch on to a post that had nothing to do with you, beat your chest about how alt-woke you are (because that’s exactly what you are doing), then attack a figment of your own reductionist imagination.
You seem really insecure about the possibility of having a firm opinion on a subject (whatever that might be, if indeed there is one) and allowing others to do the same. Seems very ‘cancel culture’, which surprises me on an open forum like this.
So you think Johnson has handled this well?!!
So.. now I'm at a computer instead of my phone and I can get this done properly rather than shitposting.
First up, you're trying to present yourself as a centrist, a normal person. And you used the phrase 'Boris The Butcher'. That is the kind of language you only see from a certain class. It's like if someone uses the word cuck you know what you're dealing with, so you know that Boris The Butcher, the idea of our elected Prime Minister as some goon grinning maniacally at the deaths of thousands, looking for new and exciting ways to torture his poor slaves, when someone thinks that way you're not dealing with someone who is thinking clearly and rationally. That I've encountered this type so often in Bristol, and so infrequently elsewhere, and that these people are all basically cut-out clones of each other, makes it easy to paint a picture of you. Bristol is infested squatters/XR-cunts.
So, having established that it is almost impossible that you are any kind of centrist, that you are in fact almost certainly either on the far-left, or deranged by the mass media into being one of those people who thinks 2016 was the worst, apart from Boris being elected which is even worse, let's get to the business of whether or not Boris is competent to do the job.
First up, I think we must acknowledge that there is no magical solution where one can wave a wand and guarantee that nobody dies. Further, there is not necessarily full agreement even now, let alone back when this started, on what the best solution is. We'll look at some of that early response.
First up, you accuse the government of being callous with people's lives with the herd immunity thing, proving conclusively that you take your talking points from Twitter. At that time the spread wasn't too fast, it looked manageable. We had the prospect of waiting 18 months for a vaccine (and that's assuming it comes - that's not a certainty). The alternative is to manage the infection through the population so that the NHS can cope with the rate of infections and then you can get people who have had that exposure back into the economy to keep business working, people fed, rent paid, and allow Britain to come out the other side in a healthier shape than our competitors. There's value in that when our competitors include China and Russia - the West needs to come out of this strong or the world risks becoming more authoritarian through their influence, but I'll leave that to one side for now. The strategy here bypasses wishing for a vaccine miracle, and gives us a better preparation for the next pandemic, as our immune systems will be in pretty damn good shape for fighting the next one given the work-out it'll have with this one.
This strategy might have worked had the spread been manageable. It turned out it was not. It spread more quickly than expected. Now the spread is a tricky thing to predict from the off because it depends on many things but mainly on how many people each infected person meets and for how long, in how close proximity, etc. That is highly dependent on culture, demographics, density of population in different places, etc, so it's a hard calculation to get bang on. We tried, it didn't quite come off, so we're going to plan B which is to slow the spread down through lockdown. Even there, the government has resisted authoritarianism - I genuinely believe that Boris is not a fan of it. He doesn't want to be the PM that put the army on British streets, he wanted people to have the common sense to do the right thing. He could probably have been stricter but hindsight is always 20/20.
Yesterday Matt Hancock wrote off £13bn of NHS debt. Boris was elected on a promise of huge investment in the NHS, and since the crisis he and Rishi Sunek have given the NHS a blank cheque, though it's worth noting that no amount of money can make this manageable since there is still a finite number of individuals available with the right training, a finite amount of materials, a finite amount of production capacity. The underfunding of the NHS under previous Tory governments has definitely been a problem - but it seems to me that Boris doesn't want to work that way. Given very little of the current cabinet was behind the policy decisions that led to austerity (let's face it, that was Cameron and Osbourne's baby) and given the influx of new MPs from the North with a very different set of priorities, I'd say this is a new government and should be treated as such, while accepting that there are pockets of arseholery such as Jacob Rees-Mogg.
Having got through that, let's consider testing strategy. First up, testing as we go isn't necessarily useful. If we know someone's probably got it because they have the symptoms, the goals are to get them through the disease and prevent them from spreading it. The advice given has been to self-isolate, solving the latter problem, while for most people a few weeks in bed will solve the former. For the cases that require hospitalisation, they go to hospital. This strategy has the added bonus of not stretching an NHS that's going to need all the resources it can get (oh by the way we're rapidly building huge NHS Nightingale hospitals to help with that). So the testing here isn't useful. As for testing NHS staff: I go back to my earlier point. A test won't tell people anything they don't already know - the only time it's actually useful is if a staff member is self-isolating so we can figure out whether we can get them back onto the front line to help our country in crisis. With the number of asymptomatic carriers it's a given that, despite anyone's best efforts, doctors are going to come into contact with people with the disease, so managing staff in terms of getting them out if they have the infection but are asymptomatic doesn't necessarily do anyone any good, and potentially deprives the NHS of a useful person. Where I do have a criticism is the lack of PPE, but while there are a small number of good examples, most countries have struggled with this. The government should have done better though, and the media has for once been useful in holding the government to account on that.
Next let's consider the way they've chosen to support the economy, given your comment about millions being unable to pay their bills. The government launched support the likes of which we've never seen in this country, offering to pay the wages of employees to enable companies to keep their staff while they have no income. Other countries are not as generous. I work for a company that is having to furlough staff - our British staff aren't losing a penny as they are topping up the furlough but our staff elsewhere are losing out because similar schemes don't exist in their countries (and we can't transfer them to the British company to furlough under British law sadly). This isn't just generous though, it's smart, because those companies will be able to restart quickly once we're in a position to fire the economy up again. It's a vastly better solution than airdropping money into people's accounts as Trump plans to do because all that would do, with nowhere to spend the money, is push up the price of toilet paper. The whole way through this you can see the government not just looking at what's the best short-term play, but what's the best way to come out the other side with as many people as possible in the best possible shape biologically through immunity and economically (and the latter is important - people need to be able to pay the rent and feed their families).
I hope you give a considered response to this post, there is more that I wanted to say but it's too fucking long already and I suspect most people won't want to read something as long as this. TLDR the government is thinking ahead, there are no perfect solutions and it's easy to snipe from the sidelines when you're not under enormous pressure (honestly I'd not want to be Boris right now and I reckon probably Boris doesn't want to be Boris right now).