Will this crisis lead to a change in Conservative attitudes?

Lots of very interesting interpretations and thoughts I’ve enjoyed reading all the different takes on the situation but I’m not as knowledgable as most of you seem to be so I’ve learnt some things too.

Perhaps details of Sunak's subsequent career might help to dispel the 'grounded' notion, Pantglas?

Why do you suggest that John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn are 'ungrounded'?

Our death toll is shocking! MY DS is a New Zealander and there has been one death there so far. Ok it's a small country but similar in size to Scotland which has sadly suffered hundreds of deaths. Care homes being particularly dangerous places.

I cannot admire a government, whose leader, despite warnings and when the situation in China and on cruise ships was dire, attended an international rugby match and who allowed the Cheltenham festival to go ahead and allowed 3000 Spanish football fans to attend a match at Liverpool.

He does not care very much about any of us. He just likes being head boy.
Will he change? I doubt it.

Pantglas Where people come from can make a difference to their attitudes. So, whilst Corbyn and McDonnell might be well educated they have striven to improve the lot of the ordinary person. Whilst Corbyn comes from a relatively comfortable, middleclass background McDonnell certainly doesn't.

So it's wrong of you to impute that McDonnell doesn't know how ordinary people coped. As regards Corbyn, his parents were both members of the Labour Party and they too would have known about the lives of the working people.

McDonnell's father was a bus driver and a trades union man. The young McDonnell went to Gt Yarmouth Grammar School and being born in 1951 he was the right age to benefit from taking the 11 plus.

Thinking that he had a religious vocation he later won a Local Authority grant to go to a Catholic Boarding school in Ipswich. Apparently he discovered girls and changed his mind. Later he studied for A levels at night school before going to Brunel aged 23. He later did a Masters at Birkbeck.

Furthermore I doubt that Sunak's parents made the decision for him to go to Oxford and Stanford. The latter being after his tenure at Goldman Sachs.

So, we are judging people on their actions and beliefs and not on the decisions made by their parents.

I’m not the one suggesting it - just using the crazy logic suggested by others that public school, uni education means you’re highly unlikely to be grounded. Perhaps it only applies to the evil Tories and lovely Labour mps are immune to the vile influence of it all!

Pantglas, of course where people come from matters! It is the very root of our class-based system of privilege. Why do you think there are no council-estate MPs in the HOC?

Exactly, Grammaretto.

Tony Benn, father and both grandfathers were MP’s.

Benn went to prep school then Westminster School, then Oxford.

Grounded ?

just using the crazy logic suggested by others that public school, uni education means you’re highly unlikely to be grounded.

And then cited 2 Labour politicians, neither of which had done the public school, uni route and neither of whom went into the finance 'industry'. Try looking at the whole picture, not the bit that appears to support your argument.

Same comment for you, Annie. Look at the whole picture, not just the education bit.

The only reason I didn't rehearse Sunak's post education career in my first post about him was that someone had already done it. a couple of posts earlier.

MaizieD please do not tell me ‘look at the whole picture’
you may ask me but not tell me

Certainly! Remorseful Boris has gone to Chequers with a sewing machine to sew up hospital isolation gowns .

Oh, if only that were true...

Pantglas2 & Anniebach

Neither of you get it, do you. The MPs that you cite as having gone to public school and uni and are therefore, in your opinion, ungrounded, are Labour MPs. Perhaps you would like to explain why you think they're ungrounded?

Surely, being Labour MPs means that they have some awareness of how poorer people exist. Also, being Labour MPs they want to do something about the conditions of the poor. Otherwise, they'd be sitting on the Tory front bench and doing a lot better job than the current lot.

Tony Benn's paternal grandfather's were both Liberal MP's
His ethics were beyond question, he was genuine
'If we can find the means to kill people, we can find the means to help them'
He was a gentleman

GagaJo. (21:07). David Davis MP was born to a single mother and brought up on a council estate in Tooting. There may well be other MPs brought up on council estates.

Tony Benn went to quite a lot of trouble to protect his family wealth from inheritance tax! Sensible? maybe! but not quite in the spirit of socialism! more of a dirty Tory trick I would have thought!!!

I consider myself to be left-wing and I have often criticised China on this forum.

When President Nixon went to China in the 1970s and opened it up to the world it was thought that process would eventually bring democracy to that huge nation. However, Tiananmen Square demonstrated that even the mildest of democratic thinking would not be tolerated by the extreme autocratic Chinese government.

The left throughout the world has consistently condemned the Chinese government since that time, while the right has only seen the wealth that is to be made from the huge amount of cheap labour that is available in that nation.

However, perhaps following this unprecedented crisis the world will reassess its total reliance on China for it's manufactured goods, but I very much doubt that will actually happen.

Dinano

If all Labour MP’s are caring and all Tory MP’s are uncaring

What of those who vote for these parties ?

I voted conservative and will do so again, I also read the Daily Mail. I grew up in poverty with labour voting parents.

Anniebach

A touch of whatifery here I think.

You remind me of the time I tried to claim on a travel insurance policy - each time I put forward a response to the company and asked a question, they ignored me and came back with something totally different. In the end I had to go to the Omsbudsman to sort it out.

Anyway I digress. Nowhere have I said that all Tory MPs are uncaring, or that all Labour MPs are caring. There's caring and uncaring in both parties.

I was a Labour Party member for over 50 years so I was a caring person, I left the party (Corbyn) so became an
uncaring person, I joined labour again last year so became a
caring person again

John Major came from a 'humble 'background, so I think did Sajid Javid.

Even Thatcher (I think her parents had grocery shop).

The problem with judging and denigrating people by their privileged education, parents jobs, childhood backgrounds is that, logically, you have to apply it everyone and that’s where it begins to look silly. So I don’t do it.

oscaroll: I voted conservative and will do so again, I also read the Daily Mail. I grew up in poverty with labour voting parents.

Would you mind explaining why , please?