A Tragic Milestone

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The New Statesman

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4.4 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 29 January 2021

⏱️ 42 minutes

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Summary

Over 100,000 people have now died with Covid-19 in the United Kingdom. In this episode, Stephen, Anoosh and Ailbhe look at the mistakes that were made, how they might yet be countered, and what the electoral cost of the disaster will be when the country next heads to the polls.

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You can follow Stephen Bush on twitter @stephenkb. Anoosh Chakelian is @Anoosh_C and Ailbhe Rea is @PronouncedAlva.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	The New Statesman Podcast is sponsored by Barclays, sparking opportunities in your community.
0:06.0	Through Barclays' life skills, the bank is helping millions of people develop the vital employability and financial skills they need to succeed at work, thrive in the digital age and better manage their money.
0:18.0	With a focus on supporting underserved communities, Berkeley's life skills is being delivered in partnership
0:25.2	with leading charities and educators, like Family Action, Street League, and The Talent Foundry
0:31.0	to support families, young people and young adults to create a better future.
0:36.0	Barclays is sparking opportunities in your community through Barclays life skills.
0:42.0	To find out more, search Barclays communities. I'm Alva, I'm Anush, and I'm Stephen. And you're listening to the New States from
1:00.8	podcast. On today's episode we mark the terrible
1:04.4	milestone of 100,000 deaths from coronavirus. We look at what went wrong and
1:09.6	you ask us, will the Conservatives pay the price of that electorally and should Labour be doing better?
1:17.0	So we've reached a terrible milestone this week in the UK. 100,000 people have died with
1:28.1	coronavirus in the UK since the beginning of the pandemic which is the worst death rate in Europe and one of the
1:37.6	worst in the world by any measure. So we thought that to coincide with a special issue of the magazine to mark this
1:46.0	milestone we would look back at what has led us there. So if we go back to March, I think I suppose those mistakes are
1:56.8	are the obvious ones. Like we can kind of agree that we locked down to in March and there
2:01.7	was so little known about the virus and that collectively
2:04.5	Western European countries made a big error there.
2:08.1	Yes, yeah, I think that's probably one of the sort of standout mistakes that if you sort of asked someone on the street,
2:14.8	which obviously you're not allowed to do now, but if you did, they would probably say, and you can see
2:19.1	from the polling as well from at the time and since then that we locked down too late and whether or not that was a sort of unique British mistake or not that was a mistake and we can say that that caused more harm than good the sort of dithering before locking down.
2:33.5	And the suggestion that we may not even need to,
2:36.4	quite late into March as well.
	...

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