Why is Johnson more popular than Starmer?

So the bit about blindly believing press reports isn't important any more, is it?

Here's an academic article about why people "obeyed the rules". Sadly it doesn't have any pictures of people on beaches "flouting" the rules, accompanied by several exclamation marks. Sometimes a yes/no answer doesn't cut the mustard.

Sorry, here the link.

blogs.lse.ac.uk/covid19/2021/03/10/when-lockdown-law-is-effectively-unenforceable-what-motivates-people-to-obey-it/

Surely we have got to the point when we need a new thread headed "Is Starmer now more popular than Johnson?"

Mollygo

Volver I’m just asking

Don’t you believe the spread of Covid was partly caused by his inability to enforce rules that would have kept more people safe (and the inability of some of the GBP to follow those rules without enforcement.)

As I recall, in the first few months of lockdown the 'rules' where scrupulously obeyed by the greater part of the population. It was once they were relaxed, in July/August (Eat Out to Help Out, anybody?) that people started flocking to beaches. And it wasn't until the Autumn restrictions and the (very belated) mask mandate that we started getting the bigish protest gatherings.

I'm not really quite sure what Mollygo is arguing about as posts have got a bit weird over the last couple of pages. IIRC we started off with her saying that too much hindsight was being invoked when posters were saying how badly Johnson handled the pandemic.

Well, I would disagree with that. We knew abut C19 in January 2020. We knew how it was affecting some European countries (notably Italy) in February, yet nothing was done by our government, and then only after people had been calling for it for a number of weeks. This isn't 'hindsight', this is recollecting what happened at the time. The absence of the PM from COBR meetings and the ignoring of scientific warnings and suggestions. It's documented; the government was culpably lax.

Everything that was done was done too late. And Johnson was too busy with stuff like bonging for brexit, getting divorced etc to pay attention to the looming crisis (which, as Maizie points out many of us knew about in January 2020). I knew about things like asymptomatic transmission, the virus being airborne, the need for mask wearing long before Johnson professed to know about them,. And then, when he did eventually impose measures to safeguard people he then lifted them too early.