Notable that all of the pressure is being piled specifically on Andy Burnham, not council leaders (notable one of them, Bolton's, is Tory). As I said earlier in the week, govt will direct this at *him*; his high profile is both a blessing and a curse.
Today's press conference isn't a bit of a subtweet of Greater Manchester, it's basically just about Greater Manchester.
I think if you zoom back out to where we were earlier in the summer in Greater Manchester - then look at where we are now - it's important to bear in mind the battles that local public health have been through along the journey to this point.
GM has never had the contact tracing capability/control that it needs, for a start. We didn't reach this point this week. We reached it over a long period of time.
Makes me a bit despairing that so many of us here feared this. This is the 'what is a local lockdown and how does it work' argument - which goes back to May - on steroids. That's not to argue in favour of what should be done now. But this situation did NOT come out of a vacuum.
So frankly, I wish someone would ask the counterpoint to what the government is saying: Why didn't you provide the contact tracing control and capacity that was being asked for by DPHs months ago (and was promised in August)?
There's a ton of things that can be levelled at GM's position; re the lack of consensus beneath the surface, about its position moving around triangulation, even. But summer recess, that was the time to prevent us getting to this point. And a lot of national mistakes were made.
And with that, I am: going to the pub.
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