The Edition: what's the Prime Minister's way out?
Best of the Spectator
The Spectator
4.4 • 785 Ratings
🗓️ 30 April 2020
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
With James Forsyth, Adrian Wooldridge, Owen Matthews, Isabelle Khurshudyan, Katy Balls and Katrina Otter.
Presented by Cindy Yu.
Produced by Cindy Yu and Gus Carter.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Edition is sponsored by Charles Stanley, one of the UK's leading wealth managers, providing bespoke investment management and financial advice. Find out more at charles-hyphenly.com.com. |
| 0:11.2 | Hello and welcome to The Edition, the Spectator's weekly podcast discussing some of the most important and intriguing |
| 0:21.4 | issues within our pages with the writers behind them. I'm Cindy Yu. The government has adopted |
| 0:27.2 | a test, track and trace approach to coronavirus. But why didn't it do this before? I speak to James |
| 0:33.5 | Forsyth and Adrian Waldridge. Also on a podcast, we take a look at how the coronavirus is a |
| 0:39.8 | stress test for Putin and last exactly what it's done to the wedding industry. First up, James Forsyth |
| 0:46.4 | writes in his cover piece this week that the government is going South Korea on the coronavirus. |
| 0:51.3 | James joins me now, together with Adrian Waldridge, the Badget columnist for |
| 0:55.1 | the economist. So James, can you explain the government's new approach to coronavirus? |
| 1:00.5 | Their aim is to drive the R number, the kind of reproductive rate of the virus down as low as they |
| 1:06.2 | can, and then to move to a test, track and trace model, which has been so successful in South Korea in terms of containing the virus. |
| 1:16.8 | I think this begs the obvious question, why wasn't this the approach from the off? |
| 1:22.0 | And when you speak to people in government, it becomes quite clear. |
| 1:25.5 | It's because the state wasn't capable of doing this |
| 1:29.2 | initially. The UK had this plan for dealing with pandemics, but it was a plan for dealing |
| 1:35.7 | with pandemic flu, not a SARS-style virus like COVID-19. I think this is akin to the kind of fall |
| 1:43.7 | of Singapore in 1942 when the |
| 1:46.0 | British were convinced that Singapore was almost impregnable because there were these huge guns |
| 1:50.4 | mounted in the harbour that could basically blow any ship coming towards it out of the water. |
| 1:54.9 | And then the Japanese came through the jungle and took Singapore that way. Nobody had expected |
| 1:59.3 | that. And I think this is, the problem is, |
| 2:01.6 | you had a whole series of state planning about how to respond to a pandemic. That was all based |
... |
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