Creative Midfielder

First time I've heard this mentioned as an option and my immediate reaction is that it is one of the least worst options and certainly far better than all the ridiculous and artificial ways that have already been proposed for 'completing this season'. Still think that the 'correct' decision is null and void simply because that reflects the reality of the current situation but if there is sufficient pressure (which there may well be from Liverpool and to a lesser extent some of the other currently well placed clubs) to continue this season in some form then this looks like far and away the most sensible and fairest solution to me. The only other real downside with it is that we'll be stuck with our truly atrocious implementation of VAR for another season.

Finally, some points on which we agree completely.

Sorry BB but this gets worse - you appear to be an apologist for this government whatever your prior views of Brexit/this government, and you continue to harp on about left/right and Brexit which as others have already pointed out wasn't a left/right issue either!! I get that you support this government and think they are doing a good job - fine that is your opinion and many agree with you. What I don't get is why you can't understand that criticism of the government for their handling of a major crisis from all parts of the political spectrum (including the Tory party itself), from many NHS workers on the front line, many independent experts and of course us muppets on social media cannot be related to the poor performance and incompetence of the government but is entirely motivated by our prior dislike of the government. Well I think Herman has already said something similar but even if so it bears repeating - I've never made any secret of my dislike for this government on the brexit thread but this crisis is nothing to do with Brexit or left/right politics. You could say that this was a perfect opportunity for this government to prove to me, and many others with similar views, that we were wrong - at least in sense that even if we didn't agree with their political policies they were nevertheless competent and effective in dealing with this enormous crisis. Well if so then they have blown that opportunity in spectaclur fashion - we are a long way from the end of this crisis and therefore far too soon to draw any final conclusions but equally it is already obvious that the initial stages of the UK response to the crisis is at the very poor end of the spectrum of European states and that is the direct result of a lack of leadership and incompetent governance. I'm sure that at some point in the future this crisis will recede, and Brexit & the state of economy will rise up the agenda again and you can dismiss criticism of the government as Remainer, leftie or whatever categorisation you choose - back to business as usual you might say 🙂 But at the minute the argument is about competence and nothing else, and your continual references to Brexit, remainers etc is nothing more than an attempt at deflection from real issues underlying the disaster which has been, and continues, to unfold in front of us all.

Well you are right that we know very little for certain mainly because the government has tried to keep the proceedings entirely secret - this itself is a matter of considerable concern because there is no obvious good reason why when we are repeatedly told that the government is following scientific advice - why they are so secretive about what the advice actually is and who provided it. But that really is a completely different point. You say that 'there is no evidence that they have been involved in determining that advice is there?' but I'm think there is - what the government have admitted to is that the political advisors have been involved in the discussions at a number of the meetings going back ot late February (I think, certainly a good number of weeks). Whilst we don't know anything about what their input was and what effect it had on the eventual advice I think its a pretty fair assumption that having the Prime Minister's senior advisor involved in the discussion will inevitably had some effect. In any case it is completely contrary to all previous practice - a number of people who have been previously involved in this and similar committees have said that at times other people/advisors have also been in the room but purely as observers to listen to the discussion in order to understand the eventual advice better. That seems entirely reasonable and sensible, but all of them have said that it is unheard for anyone other than the scientists to take part in the actual discussion. Do I believe they could be overruled - of course I do!! Bear in mind that some of these experts especially the CMO and CSO are civil servants and this government already in just a few short months has a track record or ignoring and indeed actually dispensing with civil servants that insist of providing ad vice they don't like. But its not as simple as overuling is it? These committees are obviously trying to reach a consensus on the science and even with only scientists present that isn't always possible. With political advisors involved it is even less likely. So sometimes the outcome will be a compromise (not good if a supposedly scientific report is compromised by political considerations) or as has happened in the past the disagreement is so fundamental that a minority of the committee will report a dissenting view to the advice agreed by the majority. Again we do not know whether any of this did or didn't happen and despite what the government keeps saying we don't know whether they are following the main thrust of the advice or perhaps just a few threads of it. What we do know though is firstly that they acted too late and when they did act the first stage of their strategy failed and then at the second stage they initially set off in one direction only to do a complete u-turn when such august medical bodies as the English Premier League and the London Marathon organisisng committee (and many others) could see what the government and their experts apparently couldn't. Now I don't know about you but IMO science is one of a diminishing number of fields that the UK still does very well in. So, we don't know the details and probably never will, but I don't believe those scientists are so poor that they would ever have advanced the total nonsense of the 'herd immunity via letting the virus work its way through the population' strategy. Anybody with an understanding of very simple arithmetic could see that meant hundreds of thousands of deaths in the UK and I just don't believe that our scientists are that bad.

That doesn't make any sense whatsoever. The job of Sage is to provide indepent expert scientific advice - the government has a much more difficult job to do which is to take a decision based on a whole range of advice, including economic and political factors. So in the actual process of making a decision it is entirely normal for government advisers, political or otherwise, to be involved. But for them to be involved in determining the independent expert scientific advice quite clearly undermines and devalues the whole exercise as they are patently not independent, experts or scientists. The government have insisted repeatedly that they are following the best scientific advice, even though that has been obviously untrue from the start. I think that most people are grown up enough to realise that in a situation like this any government has to balance a number of factors in responding to such a crisis and would have a lot more respect for the government if they actually treated us like adults instead of telling us daily fairy tales about how well its all going.

Actually it has nothing to do with right or left or 2016 - quite why you choose to view everything through a Brexit lens I don't know. As far as this much more important crisis is concerned I think all most people are interested in is whether the government is competently/effectively dealing with a pandemic which has brought the country to a halt and killed tens of thousands of its citizens. I would have thought it was blindingly obvious why political advisers shouldn't sit on committees which were supposed to comprise of expert and independent scientists, and so it seems do MPs in all parties including former Tory ministers.

Worst definitely than France, Spain and Italy - not sure about Belgium but the figures for the other three countries include all deaths. The UK figure is only deaths in hospital plus a tiny figure for care homes and the community. All the evidence from similar countries (and from UK care homes as well) shows that the deaths in care homes and the community are broadly equal to the hospital deaths so the true figure for the UK is roughly double the currently stated figure. That puts a completely different slant on your little table and as it happens you are wrong about Brexit as well - many critical workers will meet the points total but they won't hit the income threshold and won't get visas. Assuming of course that they still want to come here in the first place and the evidence is that already even though this year they can still enter the UK under freedom of movement very few are choosing to do so.

Well I've looked at several descriptions of SAGE, including the Government's own on Gov.uk, and they all talk about scientific and external experts. Not one of them suggests that political advisors are/should be members and I think it was Channel 4 who were reporting that this had never happened before although I've not seen the source for that quoted anywhere. But it seems entirely consistent with Johnson's disdain for experts and his reliance on a small group of advisors whose only ability seems to be to generate messaging as if he was running a continous election campaign rather than running a country - hence the ohgoing stream of spin without any real substance.

In theory yes it does, in practice when it runs contrary to the political dogma of an idealogically driven government then no it doesn't - as Aggy has already pointed out. Then there's the other rather obvious flaw that we've always been in control of over 50% of the immigration into this country but that hasn't achieved the desired result so I don't think having control over the other nearly 50% (with the intention of cutting it it significantly) is going to do the trick either. Still, as things have turned out we're heading into a period of mass unemployment so maybe this particular problem will just sort itself out........🙄

Agreed, the scientists seem mostly ok although as the select committee observed rather heavy on mathematicians and modellers and rather light on public health expertise - but what the hell are the two political advisors doing there???? Presumably that is the reason behind all the secrecy (because there was never a good one) - those two should never have been anywhere near a 'scientific' committee. Still, I suppose the membership is a very belated start at least, I wonder whether we'll ever get to find out what their actual advice was and which bits of it the government did or didn't follow.

We don't know one way or the other do we? From the little we have been told the Cobra meetings have been pretty insubstantial and the key forum has been the Sage committee - the membership of which remains a tightly guarded secret. Although we do know that advisors from No 10 were present which is pretty odd given that they are political advisors and not, so far as I'm aware, experts in any of the scientific disciplines whose advice the government is supposedly following. We also know that the Select Committee, who do know which 'experts' sat on the committee, were shocked and 'disappointed' that there was so little input from medical or public health experts. A Select Committee that was chaired by a Tory former Secretary of State for Health and of course with a Tory majority. So that is not carping from the opposition, that is the governing party seriously alarmed at their own government's actions/judgements.

Well the Epsom Hospital director says they are (running it - I assume therefore that they are managing it or in this case mismanaging it) If its a case of who do I believe then I think I'll go with the hospital director who is trying to get his staff and patients tested rather than the overpaid accountants who are facing having a lucrative contract taken away from them. And it still leaves unanswered the bigger question of why Deloittes were ever involved in the first place. .

Well it seems that isnt the view of those directly involved - In an email written in early April, and seen by the Guardian, the chief executive of Epsom hospital said: “Deloitte who have been commissioned by the Department of Health directly for this are not running this as well as we would like … [We] are asking whether we can take over the running of the Chessington centre because we really need it to work much better than it is.” And of course the much bigger question is which idiot allowed a company like Deloittes anywhere near public health services. I mean let's face it, they are not even a comptent firm of accountants and if we had an even half competent government they (and the rest of the big four) would have been broken up into smaller (and competing) companies or had their licences removed many years ago. Even the dimest of the dim governments would have done something in the wake of the Carillion collapse..........turns out that what they've done is to keep shovelling cash into companies as incompetent as themselves.

Said with feeling but you're absolutely right, we've all been there before. Strangely we can't actually say it (accurately) about the UK at the moment because we've no idea who is in charge (if indeed anyone is), or in the case of the Sage committee which is supposed to be steering us through the current crisis who is even in the room!!

Aren't we just printing most of it??

In reverse order, worst as in deaths; simple as that. Of course there is a strong argument to suggest you should look at deaths per 1m population although in comparing the UK with France, Italy, Spain etc we would also be the worse in Europe if we were reporting true figures for non-hospital deaths. Of course there are difficulties and some inconsistencies in classifying cause of death in all countries, even within Europe. But our NHS /ONS, if not unique, is extremely unusual within Europe in its failure to report on virus deaths outside hospitals, whether they be in care homes, people's own homes and now apparently prisons, and of course the lack of testing which applies to all these categories just makes our data substantiantially less useful than it should be which is a major worry given how crucial the data is to guiding future policy. There are even a number of question marks hanging over our NHS hospital figures although they may just fall into the category of genuine mistakes/inconsistencies but there are definitely those on the front line whose experience in the last few weeks lead them to believe that it may be policy rather than accidental.

Yes, the French have included care homes as have most other European countries - I'm really wondering when most people are going to finally wake up to the fact that the published UK figures are only somewhere around half the real total. This has been clear for at least two weeks but has effectively been confirmed this week - we are already by far the worst European state, the US is going to be the only place which makes our performance look acceptable.

Promised by Matt Hancock in a feeble attempt to distract from his abysmal failure to deliver on earlier promises.

Sadly the evidence from some of our neighbours who are counting more accurately suggests that, as many people have been saying already, is a huge under-stating of the numbers. Can't remember all the countries involved (but Ireland, France and Belgium spring to mind) but there was quite an in depth acadmic study published (last week I think) looking and deaths from the virus an where they occurred in what were comparable countries to the UK. Their main conclusion was that the proportion of deaths occuring outside of hospitals was in the same very narrow range (45%-55% of total) except for the UK where it was around the 10% mark. I believe they allowed for the fact that in several countries the reporting of non-hospital deaths often lagged behind the hospital figures but basically concluded that in the UK the majority of non-hospital deaths simply weren't being reported as Covid deaths at all - even though in the case of Care homes it is clear that staff believe that many were Covid. Of course they were never tested so we'll never know for sure which once again emphasises how poor the UK data is by comparison to many other countries, which is pretty worrying given the importance attached to the data in informing our future policy in tackling this crisis.

Well I'm not a Labour supporter at all never mind 'no matter what' so let's put that to one side, especially as the criticism from me, and a great many others, isn't about party politics it is about the competence or incompetence of the government. So back to the government, its not true to say that not one country was ready for this - they may represent a minority but it is very clear that both in Asia (e.g. South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong) and in Europe (e.g. Germany, Portugal, Iceland) there were countries who were much better prepared, much more alert to the danger, took much quicker action and as a result have dealt far better with this crisis than the UK. In this country there was a government review (Cygnus) in October 2016 of our preparedness to handle a pandemic whose findings were apparently so scary in terms of our lack of prepareness and the horrific consequences if we were to be hit by a pandemic (such as this one) that this report has never been made public, although not, it appears, horrific enough for the government to actually take any action - not a single one of its recomendations has been implemented. That IMO is gross incompetence, in fact it's worse it is gross negligence. I'm afraid I can't agree with you either that the government 'reacted ok' - they wasted a crucial 6-8 week window when they should preparing for the crisis and indeed actually acting decisively whilst our infection numbers where still very low. They never really got going properly with testing and tracking which was the only viable option which might have prevented a huge number of deaths and even when they realised the spread was rapidly increasing they still only came up with the utterly stupid 'herd immunity' strategy which provoked such outrage and that had to do another u-turn but still lost more valuble time before going into lockdown - and it is all that lost time that is why many experts are now predicting that the UK's outcome will be the worst in Europe which I would say is unforgiveable given the many missed oportunities to do much better. If you think my criticisms harsh, then that is probably not because of my political views but more because I have two daughters both working our Covid wards (in different hospitals) who have both been asked/expected to treat Covid without proper PPE and who reguarly report that what is actually happening on the front line is a world apart from the daily fairy tales we get from the politicians and senior NHS staff. So I believe I've been pretty fair and for clarity all my criticisms are around the medical/public health aspect of the government's response. The financial aspect in terms of trying to preserve jobs and businesses I agree has been ok.

Yes indeed, quite a significant departure from their usual stance of blindly supporting the Tories in all circumstances, even including those in which they've totally screwed up. To be fair though they aren't the only ones holding the government to account, although they may be the only ones that Tory voters and indeed the Tories themselves take any notice of - I think we can expect even more magic money trees to be discovered in the near future 🙂

Well there you go @ricardo, @Indy et al who have naively swallowed the government's line about following the science\experts advice - don't know if you heard the interview with Sir David King, former Chief Scientific Officer and far and away the best one this country has ever had. He just diplomatically but comprehensively demolished the notion that the government had followed the best advice and totally dismissed any notion of hindsight - just calmly and objectively stated what was known when and how the UK had failed to act consonant with expert advice, both this year in direct response to this crisis and in general how the planning and capability that he had put in place had been dismantled under the pressure of austerity plus the conclusions of the Cygnus exerecise had been completely ignored. He then went on to point out, again diplomatically but quite clearly that he made it perfectly clear to the Government of the day (I.e Blair's) that he would speak directly to the public and seperately from the government as he believed that was the only way the public would trust that he was giving genuinely independent and reliable advice. The government of the day agreed with this and that was the accepted modus operandi which persisted until 2010 at which point the CSO became a goverment patsy rather than an independent advisor - my words rather than his but that is the gist of what he said! He didn't talk specifically about the Sunday Times articles but effectively confirmed that all the major criticisms were correct.

Agree with all of that and sadly I believe that there are also a large number of deaths at home (as opposed to care home) which are not included in that 6,000 and possibly never will be - there are multiple reports of doctors being unwilling to put Covid on the death certificate as of course most of these are people who have never been tested or even seen by a doctor prior to passing away. I would also consider myself to be moderate and thoughful although I won't pretend that I've ever been moderate in my opinion of this government which IMO are unquestionably the worst in my lifetime (and I dimly remember our cup run of 1959!). But none of this is to do with the government's politics, it is about their concern (or lack of it) for the well-being of UK citizens and their competence and leadership (or lack of it) in dealing with the greatest crisis to hit us since............. probably depends on your point of view exactly when but its a hell of a long time ago! IMO they've failed both those tests abysmally.

Same for both of our daughters in Leeds. My nephew working with potential symptons as a Junior Doctor in A&E was repeatedly refused a test at his own hospital and eventually had to drive 40 miles to another hospital where a consultant had managed to organise a test for him - it was positive. This is stupidity on a grand scale and no wonder really that the daily 'briefings' are actually little more than daily fairy tales. Still it appears that some areas of the media are beginning to get a grip - even the Times is now piling in and demolishing the underlying fairy tale that the 'government is being guided by the science and acting on expert advice'. I didn't believe it at the time and it seems that even normally reliable Tory supporting papers are realising that it's just not a sustainble line any more (I although I doubt that will worry the Daily Express, they can just carry on making their own stuff up as usual).

Not at a rate of a dozen or more at a day in a single home they don't!!