3. The above poster accepting he's a hu[imong[/ious bellend.

Didn't read past the first page when people were surprised about any politician lying.

If you are Labour it is easy to suggest all the problems in the NHS are to do with funding - in reality its a combination of issues - waste in the NHS is huge but it isn't nice to say it. Could the NHS have done much better during the pandemic of course it could but it is not great to suggest so.

Could the kids have been better serviced by their schools during the closure of course they could have but to say that would upset the unions and your supporter base.

Much easier to focus on sleaze/trans issues - sadly most people care much more about getting their cataracts done and the their kids getting a decent education - addressing these challenges would upset their funders. Perhaps if Labour didn't dilly dally around these subjects their stock might rise. Suggesting a 12% pay increase in the NHS - the vast majority of which did less work than normal is - to say the least - barmy.

In what ways, specifically, could the NHS have done better during the pandemic given the politicians’ decisions (which were difficult, I admit)? I’m sure there are some, but I’d be interested to hear what you think they are. You talk about waste in the NHS but it is probably on of the most efficient healthcare delivery systems (for the funding receives), in the world. It is threadbare now in places, but after years of austerity what would you expect? The idea that most NHS staff did less work during the pandemic - what is the basis for your assertion? It doesn’t chime with the first hand accounts I have had from healthcare professionals across different areas of medicine.

Have trans issues been heavily emphasised in Labour policies, press releases or campaign materials lately? It hasn’t regularly been a focus at PMQs, for example. Sleaze has, and it has been an easy target, I agree. Sometimes easy is effective though - it was much easier for Johnson to ride nationalist populism into number 10 than it would have been to come up with a coherent set of policies to attempt to address the underlying frustrations that prompted so many people to want change. It’s not like Johnson built his electoral success on better delivery of healthcare or education. Flags, lies and whining worked. Labour maybe needs a dash of that cynicism, but too much and what is the point?

How do you know this? What were they doing instead? Where are these baseless assertions coming from?

He doesn't
They were working
Thin air to fit his narrative

Has the waiting list for appointments and operations not grown significantly??

Now I have no idea what they were/are doing instead, but from personal experience

- a relative with cancer having his appointments/scans/treatment put off until you literally have to beg for scans and the appointment date with the consultant to be met
- to then have a scan 4 weeks prior to the appointment, then arrive at the appointment to be told by a registrar (consultant in a meeting, despite it being his normal clinic time) that the scans haven’t yet been read and someone will phone us but couldn’t say when

GP’s no longer undertaking face to face appointments without a telephone consultation first - and whilst giving a day can’t say at what point during that day they will phone. Indeed the wife’s GP surgery still has locked doors so you can’t get to reception, forms handed out through windows and any face to face appointments through a side door

Tough times for NHS workers no doubt, and especially critical care - but rest of it not covered itself in glory in my experience

Aye were working - just like teachers

It is sad, a tragedy in fact, but they had to prioritise. Which meant other things were de-prioritised - because the resource to cope with what had happened and everything as else as well doesn’t exist. It wasn’t that the oncologists weren’t working, for example, it was that many of them were assigned to managing patients with COVID-19 instead of carrying out their normal practice.

Dont make excuses for them
Theyre all just excessive waste, sat on their backsides at home, hiding behind unions because their lazy.
Slag them off without any knowledge of what goes on day to day just to fit a twisted narrative

Having read your other post I take this now as sarcasm.

Yip, they're all just lazy, part of the problem, expressive waste, lefty woke snowflakes.
(Just thought I'd join in)

Honest question because I don’t know, but what was an Oncologist/Urology/Cancer consultant- and their team - doing with COVID patients ??

Offering the best care they were able. All hands to the pump sort of thing. It’ll have been difficult even for those working in more immediately relevant areas of medicine, trying to treat patients with a new disease. But they’ll all have some useful/applicable knowledge from their training/rotations.

There’s also things like patients with cancer, multiple sclerosis, etc., etc. being routinely treated with immunosuppressive therapies, and managing the additional risks associated with that, developing and implementing new treatment guidelines, which will also have created more work for oncologists, neurologists and other specialists. To be fair, I don’t know how much impact that had overall, but it was something I was quite aware from my work.

You make a good point about teams, as well. There’ll inevitably have been disruption to them and I can easily imagine that’ll have created bottlenecks, or required fewer people to each do more.

Cheers for that, clears things up with me a little, not sure it’s something that can be measured but based on all this there are going to be a lot more deaths from other causes than COVID that would have been avoided under normal circumstances

Do you know if GP’s have had similar roles because a lot of practices don’t seem to be having as many face to face or even telephone consultations- and it sounds like it’s going to be the norm rather than going back to the old ways- and things like telling my 80 year old mother the only way she can book an appointment is via an online service, of which there was not a chance of her doing that.

You think of the intellectual horsepower in the NHS - its huge some of the brightest people in this country work within it. What was the bottleneck that Covid caused that stopped the NHS functioning as normal? ICU all its capacity was used up by Covid patients. In a private company that issue would have been tackled and an alternative strategy devised and implemented pretty quickly and given cost wasn't an issue even more so. Next will be we didn't have the staff - how difficult would it have been to retrain nurses to work in ICU with Covid patients - let's face facts most of them were receiving exactly the same treatment. You could then have deployed your expert ICU nurses/doctors back to doing what they were used to everything carries on?

The idea that the whole resources of a hospital were directed towards Covid doesn't hold water - you would simply wouldn't have the room to house them all. A&E was very quiet - normal surgery non-existent through put was down 80-90% are you seriously suggesting all that excess capacity was all used up managing Covid?

On other matters - there is now a ground swell for unlocking everything earlier given the numbers - Labour want to go with the current timetable. Labour didn't want schools to go back - why because the unions didn't think it was appropriate - have we seen a huge spike since schools returned?

Brexit seems to have quietened quite a lot - to most people it has had no impact to the normality of their existence - which is what Boris told them - Starmer on the other hand said it would be armageddon which as yet hasn't happened. Labour said it was a mistake not joining the European vaccination program - how wrong he was.

Foreign aid - most people would suggest the money is better spent here at the moment - Labour just don't seem to be able to judge the mood at all.

Labour seem to be nowhere - if it was for Boris being sly and underhand with a few things Labour wouldn't have anything to say

Good grief, you've created enough straw men in that post to populate a series of Worzel Gummidge.

Just to acknowledge that I have been looking at this through a fairly narrow window, and I am just some random on the internet.



I think GP surgeries were nervous about becoming infection hotspots, and that contributed to more remote consultations. I’m not really sure, being honest.

I think you raise a good point about your mother and online services. My parents are around that age, just a little bit younger and I know what you mean. I think the pandemic has accelerated a lot of trends, in an already fast changing world, and it is getting difficult for older people to keep up and access the services they need, in both the public and private sectors.

To ZZB:

I think the pandemic was a metaphorical public health tsunami, rather than creating a bottle neck. Not all problems have solutions that allow optimal care for everyone. Like after a battle or a disaster when doctors have to let some people die who they could maybe otherwise save to focus on others with a better chance, or let somebody lose an eye to save somebody else’s life. It really wasn’t just like a bad flu year. Also it went way beyond ICU, there were plenty of very sick people needing care without being on a ventilator. I am seriously suggesting that COVID-19 required A LOT of extra resource and that inevitably affected other elements of healthcare delivery.

I don’t share your confidence that a private company would necessarily have come with a successful alternative strategy, and haven’t seen one suggested. If anything, I’d suggest that track and trace suggests that directing large amounts of public money to the private sector is not necessarily a universal panacea.

Brexit has been swamped by COVID-19. And in fairness, we did avoid a no deal. I mean, it is poop - but it is done. There’s no political mileage for Labour in it, and even the Tories are on fumes in terms of stoking resentment against the EU for enforcing the agreement they campaigned for and signed up to.

Foreign aid - I’m a sceptic. It is often seems to be more about bribery than a real support for ordinary people. Those bribes sometimes aren’t even well-incentivised.

Labour aren’t saying a great deal of substance, I agree. They need at some point to do more than drawing public attention to Carrie Antoinette, Johnson’s inability to redecorate a flat with a public-funded limit of £30,000 and his solution to funding the outstanding £58,000 to get it to a liveable standard. He obviously should have got Marcus Rashford to start a campaign for him. But it is a start and feels like it has got more of a chance than Corbyn’s approach. A low bar, admittedly.

In a post-Brexit, post-Cummings reality, what do you think are the most important Government messages and policies are?

I'm glad you spotted that - It's not even subtle

Some very good point - I take on board your point about the impact of Covid - but I disagree as to how the NHS reacted - it could have been significantly better - the extended waiting lists across all disciplines is testament to that. Stopping vital cancer care seems ridiculous to me - the oncology units are usually separate entities and cancer care is by no means an isolated case.

For me - finish the vaccination program, get the waiting lists down - throw money at it, get kids back to where they should be in terms of learning - again invest but wisely, return society to some degree of normality - no masks etc., clean up the government's act or the perception. Review taxation if we all need to pay more so be it.

Wonder if he will resign after tonight's result in Hartlepool, momentum will want somebody more hard left making alienating tham even more from the working man

Maybe Labour need a proper hard left, Marxist, Communist in charge? Anti-EU, pro-Brexit, pro-Brexit party, pro-Gilets jaune, condemnation of identity politics including LGBT ideology, opposition to Scottish independence. The hard left sound like a dream for these left-behind, working class heroes in post industrial wastelands. Although the anti-capitalism thing might not go down well. These poor, left behind folk don't half love their capitalism.

Maybe just somebody they can connect with ,you know somebody from outside the London centric bubble,somebody like Caroline flint who respected the brexit vote ,a Democrat if you like

The old working class that formed the bedrock of Labour support for decades no longer exists in the post-industrial age.

The Blairite social democratic wing now seems old fashioned and dull. It asked people to be better without offering many of them much in return.

The Corbynite hard left inspires passion but only in a very narrow constituency, and is alienating to many more.

The Johnson Tories have reframed themselves as the champions of those neglected by a long period of quasi-centrist politics. Labour either has to come up with something new (and I don’t know what it is) or hope that people eventually see through Johnson in a post-Brexit, post-pandemic political environment. It is a poop state of affairs for Labour, and I think they might just have to wait it out.

The only chance labour have got is the 2nd coming of new labour ,ousting momentum and reconnecting with the working man of which there are many and appealing to middle England again