The UK situation is quite amazing and despite everyone backtracking and denying very fast (including the roughly 80% of the news media - yes including the BBC - that exist only to put out Tory press releases). this
is what happened.
Last week, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced plans to let up to 500,000 of his own citizens die. “I must level with the British public,” Johnson said in a statement following an emergency meeting over the coronavirus crisis last Thursday. As the virus continues to spread, he continued, “many more families are going to lose loved ones before their time.”
In large part, this was because Britain’s response, unlike that of basically every other nation, was designed around accepting that almost everyone in the country — up to 80 percent of the population, according to one leaked document — will at some point become infected with the virus. The idea, such as it was, was that this sort of stiff upper lip fatalism would allow Britain to generate a “herd immunity” other nations would not have, protecting the elderly and immunocompromised who are most at risk from the virus and allowing the British economy to ride out additional waves in future.
The "smart" rich people in the UK are just as dumb as all the "dumb" rich people in the US, except they were forced to read a few more books and memorize a few more Latin passages when they were young.
Clearly what all of this implies is that basically no one in the upper echelons of British government knows what they’re doing. The crisis which has emerged in the wake of this pandemic is rapidly leading to a post-Chernobyl style reckoning with/unraveling of an economic system which has already had its shortcomings brutally exposed, and they are treating it as one might do one of those Oxford seminars in which they all got their start, where it is perfectly fine just to say whatever you think might sound clever to see if it sticks.
"Laughing" at all the fretting about dishonesty by, for example, the Chinese government. These things are never precise competitions, but the lies and gaslighting in the anglosphere are absurd and ridiculous and dangerous, also, too.
