I don't think this is fair. There is trust in the British people/buisness, then there is trust in the government
As a _people_ we have worked together to do wonderful things.
The government has done one good thing, and one brilliant thing, and many many stupid things.
The good thing is job support. Its not perfect, but its almost at a par with the wider continent.
The brilliant thing is taking a risk with the various vaccines. Paying for doses regardless of outcome makes sense. The cost of the unused doses/useless doses is nothing compared to the loss of 1 million jobs.
But.
The lifting of the second lockdown. The in inability to monitor isolation, the inability of the tracing infrastructure to predict winter. The sheer vindictiveness of the late third lockdown.
40% of all deaths happened because Boris wanted to "save" Christmas. He couldn't stomach the decision to cancel it, even though it was obvious from october. He dithered, dithered and dithered until there was no choice.
I can forgive the first lockdown lateness, we didn't know. Second lockdown not so much. Taking councils to court to force them to re-open schools even though the local hospitals were running at 190%, un-fucking-forgivable. I say this as someone who is vaguely right of (british) centre.
In short, its not an embarrassment of being british. Nothing of the sort, I just wish that our political class would stop tarnishing our country by being so terminally shit.
We should all celebrate a vaccination program being effectively rolled out. It looks like the UK, including government, has handled this well. Credit where its due, etc.
It's not a surprise that many of us were skeptical given the poor handling of so much else. But the UK government completely fucked its pandemic response overall and 100k people are dead. This is a terrible outcome, and I'm honestly kind of concerned that they'll get away with it in part because there will be so much collective loss of memory in the wake of a successful vaccination rollout.
I find it interesting that you perceive this as a recent phenomenon - rigorous cultural self-criticism almost seems like a culturally British trait from my perspective. Are you suggesting this is new?
As a _people_ we have worked together to do wonderful things.
The government has done one good thing, and one brilliant thing, and many many stupid things.
The good thing is job support. Its not perfect, but its almost at a par with the wider continent.
The brilliant thing is taking a risk with the various vaccines. Paying for doses regardless of outcome makes sense. The cost of the unused doses/useless doses is nothing compared to the loss of 1 million jobs.
But.
The lifting of the second lockdown. The in inability to monitor isolation, the inability of the tracing infrastructure to predict winter. The sheer vindictiveness of the late third lockdown.
40% of all deaths happened because Boris wanted to "save" Christmas. He couldn't stomach the decision to cancel it, even though it was obvious from october. He dithered, dithered and dithered until there was no choice.
I can forgive the first lockdown lateness, we didn't know. Second lockdown not so much. Taking councils to court to force them to re-open schools even though the local hospitals were running at 190%, un-fucking-forgivable. I say this as someone who is vaguely right of (british) centre.
In short, its not an embarrassment of being british. Nothing of the sort, I just wish that our political class would stop tarnishing our country by being so terminally shit.