I think you should have said SENIOR Civil Servants. It really pi**es me off when all the Civil Service is lumped into one. My wife is going to work at Gatwick without PPE, dealing with who knows who, 2 of her colleagues at Heathrow have died and a very good friend of ours has just spent 9 days in intensive care If you can tell me what c*ck up she is responsible for, I would be very interested.
With regard to open borders I totally agree with you

Soros

We've suffered badly because we were too slow to react and in the good ol' British tradition disorganised at all levels.

We were unprepared, our lockdown was tardy ... we STILL have open borders ... and we've had long enough now to manufacture our own PPE and testing equipment.

How could that be? Is it due to too many ar$e licking brown nosers telling their bosses what they want to hear rather than doing their jobs properly? All the Civil Service is supposedly working on full pay ... not that you'd know it from the plethora of c0ck ups.

I fear we are not even playing catch up because, in some cases, it seems we still haven't embarked on the journey. An unimpressive performance from the leadership of the seventh richest nation on the planet. There's no disguising that fact and the public won't forget it later.

What can Boris tell us on Sunday that we don't already know for ourselves? We need to work and some of us are going to die prematurely. There's not enough testing or protective equipment even for those who need it right now so the rest of us will never see it. I'd like to think he has got a plan that will give us some hope but on current form, I sincerely doubt it!

Not really mate, its just one thing after another, even you would concur! I like Boris, as i said before, but something is going badly wrong in his cabinet, every day another spanner in the works appears, the revealation today that the plane load of PPE from Istanbul was crap had to be mentioned, in case someone missed it, i"m just the messenger spider, playing devils advocate!

Fair enough. The initial problem, imo, was that no-one knew what we were dealing with and to a certain extent still don’t. It would appear the virus was around before we were aware and the Chinese seem to have been somewhat secretive about the whole issue. With regard to decisions being taken I can only conclude that these were on the advice of Senior Civil Servants, who the Government seem to have total confidence in (bizarrely). As an example, years ago when Poland were about to join the EU, an advisor whom I was friendly with, told the Government that only between 10-12000 would come and most would go back after a short time. This is not a dig at the Poles but trying to highlight the type of advice the Government receives. Couple that with each department working to a budget, there are disasters waiting to happen.
Hopefully the present situation will lead to massive changes in the way the Civil Service operates, but there again....

On the news now, France saying they had Covid in December.Maybe we were the early victims!