Former Tony Blair advisor: Albania managed pandemic better than Britain

It says: Alaska Campbell

Well, I've been very negative lately. It is hard not to be with the hail of Boris Johnson's clowns and charlatans who produced a national disaster. But today, I have a happy ending story to warm your hearts and to prove that the prime ministers are not all alike and that politicians can make a difference.

Happy ending came shortly after midnight, in the early hours of Thursday morning through a message from my barber: “la came out! ”

When in mid-April I wrote about the 20 things I was missing in quarantine, the Burnley team's games were at the top of the list and “external issues” were not far behind, as trips to France, Albania, Singapore, Australia and Nashville had been postponed or canceled due to Covid-19.

But in the 14th address was a letter in which it read: “My partner, Fiona, has done a pretty good job, considering she's never cut hair before. But they are growing up in a very strange and uneven way. ”

I've never been fond of fancy haircuts, and for years, Alex Palushi, whose salon is near my home in Gospel Oak, in North London, you know what I want, does it, it requires eight pounds and I give him a ten.

We usually talk about football and politics. He's a disgruntled fan of Arsenal, I'm a Bernly freak. He closely follows Albanian politics and knows that I go to Tirana regularly to advise Prime Minister Edi Rama. He is not a supporter of Boris Johnson or Brexit, has warned for years that Jeremy Corbyn will never become prime minister and thinks that Keir Starmer is likely. So when he says he made it, what was he talking about?

Just over a week ago, I received a message from him saying that his father, who lives in Albania, is seriously ill at the hospital. Alex still wanted to go home, but he was worried about quarantine and if he had to be alone when he got there and he couldn't see Dad. I did research and discovered that Albania, which was soon isolated, was coming out of isolation and that early quarantine would be removed. To this point, very well.

However, it was difficult to obtain flights, and he finally decided to drive with his brother. I warned him that there might be difficulties in France, but wanting to see his father, he took that path. No joy. He went back to the border. So he drove north, set himself on a ferry and left for Holland, got more luck there, and then drove through territories in the Netherlands, Germany, Slovenia and Croatia before reaching the Croatian border with Montenegro.

As British naturalist, Alex has a British passport. Sorry, the Montenegrin authorities said, you can't go any further . . He tried to clarify the situation about his father, but he got the look that he said “na was sorry, friend, the computer says no”.

In despair, he called me and gave him phone numbers to try and said I'd search the Internet to see what advice I can find. In doing so, I discovered that there was an app with which anyone could contact the ministers of the Albanian government directly, clarifying the problems that each minister has and has a team to provide help to solve those problems.

Alex tried the numbers and used the app and six hours later, he was crossing the Croatian border with an Albanian diplomat, on his way through Montenegro to Albania. They had estimated that the two boys from England came to see the sick father had a basis for special assistance.

I also discovered that in addition to the app, people have published their needs and problems related to Covid-19 even on Eddie Rama's Facebook page and he has tried to fix them as well as possible, big and small.

The difference in the level of sensitivity between a government that encourages people to seek direct assistance from the ministers, in the Albanian manner, and the level of sensitivity of our ministers, who talk about how wonderful they are in almost every aspect of the crisis, is visible and shameful.

People can forgive the lack of sensitivity or even the casual act of hypocrisy by a government counselor if they see basic skills. But they don't see anything like that. They see a huge lack of skills, amounting to the limits of criminal neglect, which leads people to check whether government departments are named as corporate bodies held by possible clothes of a corporate butcher.

In Albania, 34 people have died of coronary. In Great Britain, even with official statistics, more than 40,000 have died, but the extreme death rate is over 60,000. Just Friday, ten times as many people died from Covid-19 in Great Britain as they died in Albania during the entire crisis. Of course, Albania is a much smaller country, but it has faced exactly the same challenges as everyone else and is much closer to Italy, which, at a certain point, until Johnson and his company failed to break the job, seemed to be the European head of the Coronavirus.

For anyone thinking of making fun of Albania, consider this: the mortality rate for a million people there is 11. Ours is almost 600. This calls “visible success” Prime Minister Johnson.

When Johnson was still holding his hands at the hospital and encouraging people to go to the race and watch football games at the stadiums, Albania was in complete isolation, including a police watch from 1: 00 a.m. to 5: 00 a.m. Only one person from a family was allowed to come out to buy food and be forwarded via the Internet.

Rama sent me pictures of empty streets. He sent me a BBC title, where Johnson said that schools would stay open because their “closure could cause more damage than benefits”, writing to me “WTF! May God help you, if this is his scientific advice... Italy has been destroyed by this approach.” He sent me a photo taken on a bus, where a masked policeman made sure that only health workers were boarded. Along with this picture, he sent me another picture of a train loaded with people in London. Do they know what they're doing? You're headed for disaster”, he wrote me. That's how it happened.

Two weeks later, the situation in Albania was under sufficient control for Rama to be able to send doctors and nurses to Italy, where, according to a survey, he ranked first in an analysis of world leaders and their work in crisis management. The 63 - percent figure of his support was in contrast with that of the two most famous names found at the bottom of the list, " Trump by 29 percent, and Johnson by 23 percent.

And what does this say about the situation where Johnson and his click of EU departure have turned the country into that a British passport is now a smaller leverage for progress across Europe than an Albanian app?

Perhaps the British government should ask the Albanians to take over the “Isle of Light” app, which was becoming the “director of the game”, or to ask Prime Minister Johnson to place a sock on it when he claims it is implementing the test and escort of the world system, when clearly it is not.

I've known Rama for years and seen someone who knows how to do the prime minister's work. I know Johnson for years and I've seen enough to know he can't do that. Indeed, if he didn't have the sound of the upper layer, Eton/Oxford's résumé, I'm not sure he would provide the floor cleaning work in Palusz' salon and leave the leadership of one of the most wonderful places in the world.

And for the end, can you cut your damn hair? Even if Carrie made a mess of them, they might seem worse than they look right now and a terrible mess would at least be a message for his prime minister brand. /♪ Nasuf Abdel ) Express Journal