Smug little liar: when Matt Hancock opens his mouth to make a claim,experience shows it will probably be wrong.
Our nurses are right and Matt Hancock is a liar. He would resign if he had an ounce of integrity but of course he doesn’t, so he won’t.
He has said he would not resign after a High Court judge ruled he was responsible for unlawful delays in revealing how billions of pounds were spent on gowns, masks and other protective equipment at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.
He told Sky News’s Sophy Ridge: “My officials, with my full support, spent every waking hour buying PPE so that, even though we came close, we never actually ran out of PPE in this country.
“People can make up their own view about whether I should have told my team to stop buying PPE or whether I was right to buy the PPE and get it to the front line.
“And they did that even though the paperwork got delayed by, on average, just over a fortnight.”
Nurses don’t have to make up their own minds. They have the facts. They have experienced the deaths of their colleagues, who were exposed to Covid-19 needlessly because Hancock did not supply them with PPE.
In fact, as I stated earlier, not only did the Johnson government give away the PPE it had, it later wasted millions – if not billions – giving contracts to useless Tory cronies who either couldn’t supply the goods or provided equipment that could not be used.
That will be the buying that Hancock mentioned to Ms Ridge, then?
I also mentioned the fact that nurses caught the virus because they didn’t have proper PPE:
“According to Metro,
Three nurses who wore bin bags on their shifts due to a shortage in personal protective equipment (PPE) have reportedly tested positive for coronavirus.
Just weeks ago, the nurses had shared a photo of themselves with clinical waste bags on their heads and feet as they issued a plea for proper masks, gowns and gloves at Northwick Park Hospital, in Harrow.
“I wrote: ‘One of them had said they were all “terrified” that this might happen, knowing that colleagues had caught the disease from patients, and having treated those colleagues. They had seen what the illness does… We know what the government that failed them is going to give them: Platitudes.’
“How right I was.”
Now, responding to Hancock’s comments, community nurse Angela Roberts recalled the incident when she asked:
Why were nurses forced to use bloody bin bags? Out-of-date masks?
She continued:
Why was PPE downgraded for NHS staff?
‘Why was there no PPE for care homes and community nurses except for plastic pinnies?
And Anthony Johnson, lead organiser for Nurses United, said:
He thinks that he can try to gaslight millions of health and social care workers who had to re-use PPE.
If so, he thinks wrong.
But what difference will it make if there are no consequences for his actions?
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Yet again: the PPE used in UK hospitals at the start of the Covid crisis is pictured bottom right. The infographic was made when the UK had hardly any personal protective equipment – but now Matt Hancock is trying to save his job by claiming there was never any shortage.
The Death Health Secretary is trying to rewrite history:
Health Secretary Matt Hancock shamelessly refuses to apologize, show any regret or remorse for breaking the law, says what he did was in national interest & tries to rewrite history saying because of what he did there was no national shortage at any point of PPE
The Tory government of the day was told in 2016/17, after Operation Cygnus, that the UK’s health service would be unable to cope with a pandemic virus infection without plentiful supplies of protective equipment for health workers… and decided that such an investment was too expensive.
This led to a situation in March 2020 when an NHS procurement chief, Alan Hoskins tweeted: “What a day, no gowns NHS Supply Chain. Rang every number escalated to NHS England, just got message back — no stock, can’t help, can send you a PPE pack. Losing the will to live, god help us all.”
The tweet was subsequently deleted, possibly under duress as even then the Tory government was trying to hide the facts. As This Writer put it on April 3 last year: “it seems doctors have been warned not to make any comments about shortages on social media, as well as avoiding talking to journalists, and NHS England has taken over media operations for many hospitals and health trusts in order to ensure that they all stay “on message”.”
On April 17 I brought public attention to the plight of nurses who had been forced to wear bin bags instead of proper protection. According to Metro,
Three nurses who wore bin bags on their shifts due to a shortage in personal protective equipment (PPE) have reportedly tested positive for coronavirus.
Just weeks ago, the nurses had shared a photo of themselves with clinical waste bags on their heads and feet as they issued a plea for proper masks, gowns and gloves at Northwick Park Hospital, in Harrow.
I wrote: “One of them had said they were all “terrified” that this might happen, knowing that colleagues had caught the disease from patients, and having treated those colleagues. They had seen what the illness does… We know what the government that failed them is going to give them: Platitudes.”
How right I was.
On April 19 I quoted a Sunday Times piece on the Johnson government’s PPE failures that showed he had sent 278,800 items of protective kit to China in February – immediately before the UK had needed it:
Downing Street admitted on February 24 — just five days before NHS chiefs warned a lack of PPE left the health service facing a “nightmare” — that the UK government had supplied 1,800 pairs of goggles and 43,000 disposable gloves, 194,000 sanitising wipes, 37,500 medical gowns and 2,500 face masks to China.
Don’t worry – it seems we may be getting some of it back. It’s just that the government isn’t sure, having lost £15 billion worth of PPE, some of which it has bought (back?) from other countries including China:
The government is not sure where billions of pounds worth of personal protective equipment (PPE) is located, the head of the National Audit Office has disclosed.
Gareth Davies, the comptroller and auditor general, said outside consultants had been brought into Whitehall to find all equipment, which is stored at different sites around the country, or is in transit from abroad.
Under questioning from the public accounts committee, Davies said: “We have been working closely with the DoH. It has commissioned consultants to advise it on first of all understanding where all the PPE that has been bought actually is. It sounds like a strange question but it is a really big issue because it is not all standing neatly in an NHS store somewhere.
“We have amounts in containers, in storage around the country, there’s some on the docks and there is some en route somewhere from China.”
On April 18 last year, I quoted a Mirror report that
NHS doctors and nurses will be asked to treat patients infected with coronavirus without full-length gowns – or re-use the ones they have, it has emerged tonight.
The Government has been under fire for weeks over the distribution of personal protective equipment (PPE), with some frontline staff warning that they have had to work in situations where they feel unsafe.
Public Health England guidelines currently state that full-length waterproof surgical gowns should by worn by medical workers to stop Covid-19 spreading into someone’s mouth or nose.
However, there has now been a U-turn advising staff to wear a flimsy plastic apron when gowns run out or not wear one at all
And Matt Hancock has the cheek to tell us now that there was never a shortage.
Here’s a tweet about PPE availability in one hospital on April 19:
Well this is some gold dust…
A minister has tweeted the PPE stock levels and really importantly the daily usage rates of PPE at their local hospital trust in Lincolnshire – pointing out that such transparency helps confidence… pic.twitter.com/jTTpueK6Mg
The following day we learned a much-touted delivery of PPE from Turkey would last just three days. It had been previously reported that Boris Johnson had refused to join an EU scheme to provide PPE where it was needed (see the Peter Stefanovic tweet towards the top of this article).
The UK’s stockpile of personal protective equipment (PPE) for use in a pandemic… has been outsourced to a private company, Movianto, which was sold two weeks ago for $133m (£107m) by its owner, a large US healthcare group.
Later in the Covid crisis we learned that the Tories were using the emergency procurement system which bypasses the competitive tendering process and allows the government to purchase items and services direct from chosen firms, was being abused.
Tories were giving cash to their cronies in return for equipment that simply wasn’t fit to be used.
The classic example is that of Board of Trade president (and cheese queen) Liz Truss, who spent £150 million of your money on 50 million face masks for the NHS that couldn’t be used.
She had been approached for the contract by one of her long-standing friends and advisors, Andrew Mills. Oh, and apparently it was sourced through a tax haven so this guy can keep all the money.
Mills was subsequently removed from his advisory position. But Truss didn’t go anywhere.
All the way down the line the Tories have failed us.
They gave away our PPE when we needed it.
They failed to join an international scheme to provide it where it was needed.
They failed to source it themselves.
They gave money to their friends and cronies who had no experience in providing PPE, and received trash in return.
As a result, health service professionals caught Covid-19. Many of them died.
And Matt Hancock, who is on video record from last year, saying he wished he could wave a magic wand and eliminate the PPE shortage, is now telling us he shouldn’t have to resign for breaking the law by hiding contract details – because he made sure there was never a PPE shortage.
He is a LIAR.
He should resign NOW.
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Remember this? PPE was a tragic joke during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. Rishi Sunak later spent £15 billion to secure a supply of the equipment (after his boss Boris Johnson had sold it all off in the belief it wouldn’t be needed. And now the Tories have lost it.
This site’s coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic – or rather, the political tragedy that has accompanied it – has been patchy lately, I’ll admit.
But how can one keep up with the constant stream of inadequacy excreted from Downing Street, Whitehall and the Palace of Westminster, often at a rate of several times a day?
The constant barrage of blunders has put us all into a state of desensitised delirium in which it is hard to distinguish the important milestones from “Same Sh*t, Different Day”.
I read a message on Facebook that struck a chord:
“The seven-day rolling average of new Covid cases per day is down to ~15K… almost exactly where it was before the government relaxed the lockdown at the start of December. A relaxation, lest we forget, that scientists were *begging* the government not to do.
“And 55,000 people have died during that period.
“I am genuinely unable to comprehend the free ride this government is getting in the media, and the lack of outrage among the public.
55,000 people dead so Johnson could get a few “Boris saves Christmas” headlines… and he didn’t even do *that*.”
The statement attracted a comment that I thought was spot-on, too:
“The media side is easy – most papers are ferociously right wing and only turn on a Tory PM once they’ve got an alternative lined up and get the nod from the power brokers. Other news outlets just follow the agenda set by those papers, so there’s a huge swathe of stuff that never gets addressed.
“As for the public…I don’t know. I think we’re punchdrunk from five years of very intense bad shit happening, and a general sense of endtimes malaise. There are so many problems that have been around for so long that I think most have just given up trying to reconcile them, and that’s how you get shit like the “Boris is doing his best” excuses. We can’t get our head around it, and have stopped expecting our politicians to as well.
“I also think the pandemic stuff is so big, the death toll so outrageous, that it has become abstract. 100 people die in a disaster, we (as a society) can grasp that, we can picture it. Over 100,000 people die over the course of a year? It almost becomes invisible, even when it’s right in front of us.
“I’m trying very hard to be positive, but I can’t shake the feeling that we’re in the final spins of a very long cultural death spiral.”
Finally:
“I think we’ve become so numb to the constant exposure. It’s almost like the Government are trying their hardest to make us more apathetic with every wrong turn, u-turn, bullshit ppe fiasco and statements they have done everything they can, so when the next election comes they get a free ride and carry on. Why we’re not all buying pitch forks online is beyond me.”
It’s a good question, especially when you see the Tories failing yet again over a matter for which they have already been hammered in the press and condemned in the court of public opinion.
What the blazes are they doing, losing billions of pounds’ worth of personal protective equipment?
The government is not sure where billions of pounds worth of personal protective equipment (PPE) is located, the head of the National Audit Office has disclosed.
Gareth Davies, the comptroller and auditor general, said outside consultants had been brought into Whitehall to find all equipment, which is stored at different sites around the country, or is in transit from abroad.
Under questioning from the public accounts committee, Davies said: “We have been working closely with the DoH. It has commissioned consultants to advise it on first of all understanding where all the PPE that has been bought actually is. It sounds like a strange question but it is a really big issue because it is not all standing neatly in an NHS store somewhere.
“We have amounts in containers, in storage around the country, there’s some on the docks and there is some en route somewhere from China.”
I seem to recall writing a few months ago that Boris Johnson actually sold off UK stockpiles of PPE before the pandemic arrived here, under the pretext that it wasn’t needed.
That’s how incompetent he and his Conservative Party really are.
As I write this, another 621 deaths over a 24-hour period have been revealed. That’s roughly equivalent to everybody on the Mid Wales estate where I live dying overnight.
The number of deaths overall – the real number rather than the sanitised figure you get from the government – is almost equivalent to the entire population of the county where I live (Powys).
An entire county, emptied because of Boris Johnson’s bone-headed stupidity.
And yet we’re not buying pitchforks and throwing them at Tories whenever we see them; we’re not setting fire to Tory property in an effort to erase their misrule from the face of the UK.
Why are we, as a nation, so apathetic? Why won’t we stand up for ourselves?
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Two-fingered salute: this will be the likely response if we ask Boris Johnson politely for an inquiry into his procurement methods for Covid-19-related equipment and services.
Listen to the following video from our old friend Jeremy Corbyn:
The government has handed billions of pounds to the private sector throughout the pandemic.
It's been a disaster.@jeremycorbyn is right. The government should put the NHS, public health teams and primary care services in charge of the pandemic response.pic.twitter.com/FDjYM63fTc
He’s right about the cronyism. The New York Times – a US newspaper and one from a country that supports private enterprise over socialism – recently ran an article examining the phenomenon.
Its findings were an indictment against Boris Johnson and his ragtag gaggle of freeloaders, for whom the phrase, “We’re all in it together,” actually means, “Everyone for themselves!”
Under the heading Waste, negligence and cronyism: inside Britain’s pandemic spending, the paper stated: “In the desperate scramble for protective gear and other equipment, politically connected companies reaped billions.”
It began: “When the pandemic exploded in March, British officials embarked on a desperate scramble to procure the personal protective equipment, ventilators, coronavirus tests and other supplies critical to containing the surge.
“In the months following those fevered days, the government handed out thousands of contracts to fight the virus, some of them in a secretive “V.I.P. lane” to a select few companies with connections to the governing Conservative Party.”
The paper said it analyzed the roughly 1,200 central government contracts that have been made public, together worth nearly $22 billion (£16.28 billion):
About $11 billion [£8.14 billion] went to companies either run by friends and associates of politicians in the Conservative Party, or with no prior experience or a history of controversy.
Meanwhile, smaller firms without political clout got nowhere.
It said the procurement system was cobbled together during a meeting of anxious bureaucrats in late March, and a wealthy former investment banker and Conservative Party grandee, Paul Deighton, who sits in the House of Lords, was later tapped to act as the government’s czar for personal protective equipment.
Eight months on, Lord Deighton has helped the government award billions of dollars in contracts –– including hundreds of millions to several companies where he has financial interests or personal connections.
It looks like we should start making a list of names in advance of a future corruption inquiry, and this Lord Deighton should be at the top of it!*
That’s if we ever get all the information…
Citing the urgency of the pandemic, the government cast aside the usual transparency rules and awarded contracts worth billions of dollars without competitive bidding. To date, just over half of all of the contracts awarded in the first seven months remain concealed from the public
The paper mentions some of the firms with Tory connections that received funding:
Uniserve Group: Awarded $1 billion in PPE contracts, the company is among the biggest winners. Its founder is an adviser to a pro-Brexit think tank panel chaired by two prominent government ministers.**
Randox Laboratories: Awarded $646 million in testing contracts. Owen Paterson, a government minister [and another name for our list], is a paid consultant for the firm.**
Deloitte: Awarded a contract to consult on PPE procurement retrospectively and without competition. The company has made non-cash donations to the Conservative Party and others.**
Around $6 billion went to companies that had no prior experience in supplying medical personal protective equipment. Fashion designers, pest controllers and jewelers won lucrative contracts.
PPE Medpro: This company won its first contract barely three weeks after it was set up. It went on to win nearly $274 million in PPE contracts.**
Ocean Footprint: The marine equipment supplier was awarded a $7 million contract without having any prior experience in supplying medical PPE.**
PestFix: The pest control supply firm won more than $470 million in PPE contracts. It supplied 600,000 face masks that could not be used for their original purpose.**
More than $5 billion was awarded to companies with histories of controversy, from tax evasion and fraud to corruption and human rights abuses.
KPMG: Its UK arm recently faced a negligence lawsuit over alleged accounting failures linked to the collapse of outsourcing giant Carillion.**
Serco: Awarded $285 million for testing and contact tracing. The company admitted… defrauding the government and paid a $30 million fine in 2013.**
Honeywell: Embroiled in two global bribery probes. The UK PPE czar is a shareholder.**
All of the companies named by the NYT have denied wrongdoing, and there is no evidence to suggest that government officials were engaged in illegal conduct.
But there is ample evidence of cronyism, waste and poor due diligence. Some of it has been documented by the British media, but the scale of the problem is wider than previously known.
Officials ignored or missed many red flags. Dozens of companies that won a total of $3.6 billion in contracts had poor credit, and several had declared assets of just $2 or $3 each. Others had histories of fraud, human rights abuses, tax evasion or other serious controversies. A few were set up on the spur of the moment or had no relevant experience — and still won contracts.
The paper contacted the Department of Health and Social Care, which led the Tory government’s pandemic procurement. In denial of all the evidence, a spokesperson said that “proper due diligence” was carried out for all contracts.
How can it have been?
Did this person mean that they ran all the necessary checks, saw the information that showed the firms were not suitable to receive these huge contracts (and this huge responsibility), and handed over the cash anyway?
If so, then the government was negligent. Considering the system as described here, this seems likely:
Junior staffers reviewed thousands of proposals and passed on a chosen few to their bosses, who often had only a day to sign off on contracts, according to a government official involved in the process. Some businesses said they were left waiting months as their proposals went unanswered. Others said it was difficult to keep up with what the government wanted, with safety specifications sometimes changing after deliveries had already been made.
Normally, companies would bid on individual contracts with requirements published in advance. But given the government’s frenzied need for supplies, most companies simply submitted broad proposals through a government website. Government officials then decided yes or no, or in some cases approached companies themselves.
The race to procure PPE – Personal Protective Equipment – is a very clear example (and a sore point for the government).
The necessity to have such equipment easily available in readiness for the arrival of a pandemic infection like Covid-19 was highlighted by Exercise Cygnus in 2016 – the Tory government’s own simulation of the effect of a pandemic on the UK which predicted that the NHS would collapse due to lack of resources – and by top medical journal The Lancet, which published a direct warning to Boris Johnson that he needed to secure “supply chains of pharmaceuticals, personal protective equipment, hospital supplies and the necessary human resources” on January 24.
Johnson ignored the warnings. In fact,
Ministers could have avoided the panicked spending spree, critics said, had they not ignored their own pandemic preparedness plan and sold off stocks of P.P.E. from rainy-day reserves in the first three months of the year.
So the government’s claim that
the huge global demand for P.P.E. had created “a highly competitive market” and that it used “the quickest and most accessible routes” to buy protective gear
appears to be nonsense.
Having given way his own supply of PPE, Johnson then had to scrabble to buy some back. You can bet he had to spend more doing this than he raised from the sale, too – those are the laws of supply and demand and as a Tory, he should have known such things. But his people’s behaviour was actually worse:
In choosing speed over due diligence, however, ministers squandered millions on “unsuitable” items, including some that did not meet safety standards, according to the National Audit Office.
The government said that only a tiny portion of the supplies, 0.5 percent, had been found unfit for their intended uses.
Yes, but then the government said it followed due diligence in awarding contracts to unsuitable firms as well, so its people are hardly to be trusted.
The VIP lane
As if the above information wasn’t bad enough, Matt Hancock (another name for our list) secretly authorised a so-called “VIP lane” for favoured companies to win procurement contracts, in April.
These firms
proved to be 10 times more likely to win contracts than those outside that group, according to the National Audit Office.
The government did not carry out systematic company checks, including for potential conflicts of interest, until it had already spent nearly $2 billion, auditors found. Officials did not always document who recommended a company or why it was awarded a contract.
This site has already documented the story of Ayanda Capital. Awarded $340 million (£251.6 million) to supply personal protective equipment, it eventually delivered 50 million masks worth more than $200 million (£148 million) that could not be used for their original purpose, because the ear loop fastenings did not match the government’s new requirements.
One of the firm’s senior board advisers was Andrew Mills (another name for our list) who also worked on the government’s Board of Trade, meaning there was a clear conflict of interest even though we don’t know what part he played in the awarding of the contract, if any.
Ayanda has said the masks met all the government’s requirements when the order was placed and – considering the evidence that requirements were likely to change after contracts were signed – it is entirely possible that this is true. It is the fault of Boris Johnson and his government that this process failed. They chose to employ firms that were unable to provide the equipment that was needed.
Meanwhile,
many companies and business people, often better qualified to produce P.P.E. but lacking political connections, had no access to the V.I.P. lane. Multibrands International, a British manufacturer that had been producing P.P.E. for China since December, was among them. Its owner, Rizwana Hussain, spent months trying to reach government officials through public channels.
Ms. Hussain had offered to supply the government starting in March, her emails show. She was still at it in early May when news broke that 400,000 protective gowns that the government ordered from Turkey had proved to be unusable. “I was so upset thinking, ‘Why are we listening to these disastrous happenings when we’re here and are offering our help?’” Ms. Hussain said.
She said that although her company could produce large quantities of P.P.E. at its factories in China and India, she never heard back from the government.
Government officials said the high-priority lane was set up to efficiently prioritize credible offers of PPE for the National Health Service, and that all proposals, whatever channel they went through, were assessed by the same standards. Does anybody really believe that?
But they have not released the names of the nearly 500 companies that made the V.I.P. list., fuelling questions of cronyism.
It seems clear there is enough evidence here – or lack of it, in many instances – to justify an inquiry. This Writer, being a lay person, is unsure what form such an investigation should take. Judicial review? Public inquiry? Perhaps somebody with more specialised knowledge could let us know.
We already know that Johnson will try to brush this scandal under the carpet (his carpets must be bulging with the amount of mess he has hidden beneath them).
It is our responsibility to ensure that he doesn’t get away with it.
*The New York Times had quite a lot to say about Lord Deighton:
Two of the contracts linked to Lord Deighton were P.P.E.-related. One, for $78 million, was awarded to Honeywell Safety Products, a subsidiary of Honeywell International, a company he holds shares in.
Lord Deighton is also a shareholder of AstraZeneca, the British pharmaceutical company that is developing a vaccine with Oxford University, and was awarded $205 million for test services.
He also holds shares in the consulting firm Accenture, which was awarded a $5.6 million contract to help develop England’s ill-fated contact tracing app and detect fraud in procurement. Another company he has a stake in, UBS, won $770,000.
Neither Lord Deighton nor the companies would divulge the size of his share holdings.
A $406,000 contract was awarded to a consulting firm, Chanzo, to help set up and run the P.P.E. procurement system, including providing a chief of staff for Lord Deighton.
Chanzo’s founder and chief executive, Jean Tomlin, is a long-time business associate of Lord Deighton, and worked with him on the Olympic committee. Ms. Tomlin is also a fellow director at Hakluyt, a corporate intelligence firm founded by former British intelligence officers, which Lord Deighton chairs.
Lady Alison Deighton, his wife, is a former director of N.M. Rothschild, which won a $770,000 contract for consulting services. Another consulting contract of the same value went to Moelis & Company, an investment bank where one senior adviser and Labour peer, Lord Charles Allen, was also on the Olympic committee board with Lord Deighton.
** The article also provides the following information on the companies it names:
PestFix said it had repurposed its business during the pandemic to supply medical P.P.E. and said the government changed its specifications after it had supplied the face masks. PPE Medpro said that it was awarded contracts based on the considerable experience and expertise of its staff. Uniserve Group said that its director had no connections to the Conservative government. Deloitte said that its U.K. arm does not give cash contributions to political parties. Ocean Footprint said it had previously sold masks to the boat-building industry. Serco said that it “took significant steps to reform itself” after the 2013 fraud scandal. Randox Laboratories did not respond to questions and Owen Paterson declined to comment. All other companies mentioned in the article either declined to comment or did not respond to questions.
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One more time: we can hope the PPE provided by Platform 14 was better than what we see here – but the fact that this Tory-run company beat firms that may be considered better-qualified remains a scandal.
This is an outrage.
A Merseyside company specialising in medical wear from its establishment half a century ago was ignored and passed over by the Tory government’s “emergency” tendering process for PPE contracts.
Meanwhile a former Tory councillor was given £276 million worth of PPE contracts for a company that was dissolved in April 2019 after making a loss of around half a million pounds.
The Merseyside firm – Florence Roby – is having to lay off staff – while the owner of the revived Platform 14 has apparently skimmed £1.5 million off the top of his contract and used it to buy a 17th-century Cotswolds mansion with 100 acres of land.
This is Tory cronyism – and profiteering – at its worst.
If Florence Roby – which has five decades of experience – had won some of these valuable contracts, it would have produced excellent PPE. Moreover, the investment in this well-established firm would have provided employment and security to experts in their field.
You can draw your own conclusions about Platform 14 (est. 2012) from the fact that it managed to run up huge losses in seven years, and from what its owner has done with your money.
These are the decisions the Tories have been making regularly since they started using the so-called “emergency” system to avoid going through a proper tendering process for Covid-19-related contracts.
As a result, the effort to control the disease has been hampered by substandard products – where they have been supplied at all – and amateur manufacturers.
And Boris Johnson has run up a borrowing bill that is expected to total more than 316 billion more than this year’s national deficit, when the financial year ends in April 2021.
He’ll expect you to pay for Steve Dechan’s £1.5 million mansion. How do you feel about it?
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Matt Hancock on GMB: when he wasn’t doing his nodding dog routine, he was avoiding answering questions about his many failures over the 200+ days since any government minister has been interviewed on that programme.
After the mauling he took, Matt Hancock probably wishes the boycott imposed on ITV’s Good Morning Britain by former Tory Comms boss Lee Cain was still in place.
It isn’t; Cain is history – and presenter Piers Morgan was determined to go over all the history he could not discuss with government ministers during the more-than-200-day boycott.
It wasn’t pretty. But it was very entertaining:
After a Gov’ boycott of 202 days @piersmorgan finally gets a chance to hammer squirming Health Secretary Matt Hancock with a charge sheet of failures in a rip roaring master class of how to hold a Gov’t to account #GMBpic.twitter.com/zFR1HhMNzY
Hancock tried to defend himself by raising his record on testing for Covid-19:
“On testing, we’ve hit each of the targets that I set – half a million tests a day capacity now. And I’m here to tell you we’re going to double that over the next few months.
“That means we can use testing in order to find where the virus is and crucially we’ve got those turnaround times down and people can isolate if needed.”
So Morgan examined the government’s pitiful record:
Health Secretary @MattHancock responds to @piersmorgan's question about why we aren't seeing the number of people being tested everyday.
By now, if you’ve watched both clips, you’ll have realised what Hancock was doing:
He was avoiding the questions.
If he thought we wouldn’t notice, he was wrong:
Rather wonderfully, Piers Morgan and Susanna Reid are using the 200-day gap to go over the government's record since they last had a minister on the programme, and ask Matt Hancock how so much went wrong.
Hancock didn't answer any of Piers Morgan's questions but because he was asked the right questions by Morgan and pressed to answer them millions of viewers saw what an evasive, lying, smirking little shit he is. #GMB#piersmorgan
Enjoying watching Matt Handjob squirming whilst being interviewed by Piers Morgan on GMB. A body language expert would be in 7th heaven watching this.
— Pippa and my JR Poppy 🐾🇪🇺 European (@PippaPippapoppy) November 16, 2020
Hancock hadn’t done any better with the BBC, where he had been interviewed on Breakfast News. There, he had been asked to defend a photograph of prime muppet Boris Johnson ignoring social distancing with MP Lee Anderson, who then tested postive for Covid-19.
Johnson is now self-isolating in his Downing Street flat, during a week that is crucial for the UK’s trade negotiations with the EU.
The simple fact is that while we all have the same rules, Boris Johnson simply doesn’t think they apply to him. If Downing Street has Covid-secure rules, they don’t mean anything if Tories don’t follow them.
At one point, Hancock said Johnson followed them, which is a flat-out lie.
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It’s only money: Boris Johnson has no problems with handing over fistfuls of our cash to rich religious extremists. His problem is using it to help poor people. And were the contracts even honoured?
After all the criticism for awarding major contracts to firms run by their friends, you’d expect the Tories would have gone back to competitive tendering for their biggest PPE contract.
Not a bit of it!
Instead, they gave nearly a quarter of a billion pounds – for the supply of full-body overalls – to a firm founded and run by leading members of a hardline, conservative religious sect which preaches that the outside world is morally corrupting, according to Byline Times.
Unispace Global Health was also awarded a £103.7 million contract for the supply of examination gloves. Among the contracts so far revealed by the Tory government, these two represent the largest amount of taxpayer cash handed to a single firm for the supply of PPE during the Covid-19 crisis.
One of the firm’s bosses is linked to the world leader of the Exclusive Brethren, a subset of the Plymouth Brethren, who avoid contact with non-Brethren as much as possible, because the outside world is morally corrupting.
Apparently their ideology finds a way to allow commerce with the “morally corrupting” outside world, though.
Perhaps the Tories agree with their worldview. After all, “morally corrupt” seems an apt description of their procurement strategy.
And, was the contract even honoured? I seem to recall a lot of concern over the lack of PPE during April and May, when these contracts were awarded.
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You know when we told y’all the rich declared class warfare and you told us to stop being loony lefties. Well now your kids are collateral damage. Wake up, and fight.
— Kerry-Anne Mendoza 🏳️🌈🏴 (@TheMendozaWoman) August 14, 2020
Let’s not delude ourselves. @BorisJohnson does not care for equality & fairness.
Liberals are mistakenly framing #ToryChaos as “callous indifference” or “incompetence”.
It’s class war.
Analysis that fails to explain dynamics of class power & the systematised destruction of the working class is not just bad but dangerous.
— Kerry-Anne Mendoza 🏳️🌈🏴 (@TheMendozaWoman) August 14, 2020
Quite. This is not incompetence. There is no lack of competence In giving contracts to their rich mates or giving them honours or artificially helping the children of the affluent to boost their exam results. This is nor a problem algorithm. This is class warfare.
— Nick Matthews #keepcooperating (@NickCooperative) August 14, 2020
I’m not claiming credit for calling a thing by its name – this is “multiple discovery”, “simultaneous invention”, “synchronicity” or, if you like, an expression of the “zeitgeist”. More and more people are simply coming to realise, understand and accept that it is the policy of the UK’s Conservative government to push them down unfairly.
That is what the decision – and it was a decision, deliberately made – to punish ‘A’ level pupils who weren’t from private schools was all about. Yes, Gavin Williamson and the other Tories are saying it was down to a mechanical system, an algorithm – but that algorithm was written by a human being who intended it to give an advantage to the children of very rich people.
In this way, the Tory class war has stolen your children’s futures and given them to the undeserving rich.
It’s what the decision – and it was a decision, deliberately made – not to fight Covid-19 in any meaningful way was all about. Tens of thousands of people in care homes have died – your relatives, maybe – because Matt Hancock and the other Tories said people with Covid-19 who lived in those homes should be sent back to them – never mind the fact that they did not have isolation facilities and the virus would run through those places like wildfire and be transferred to others by part-time staff who worked in different homes run by the same – private – firm.
The Tories – and their private business collaborators – failed to source personal protective equipment, ventilators, tests and the facilities to carry out tests. The lockdown they imposed was half-hearted and failed to stop the progress of the disease. Now that they have lifted it, albeit with a few measures still in place, more people are contracting the virus again. So they have stopped reporting the daily number of infections.
And the Tories have rewarded their private business collaborators for their failures with hugely expensive contracts to continue failing us – all at the public expense. Serco’s test and trace contract has been renewed, even though we know it won’t stop any second wave (really just a resurgence of the first wave that was suppressed but never went away).
You won’t get justice against the Tories by the normal means available to civil society because the Tories have either corrupted them already or are in the process of doing so. Boris Johnson illegally terminated Parliament’s last session in the autumn of 2019 and what was the result? He called a general election, lied to us until he was purple in the face and was rewarded with an 80-seat Parliamentary majority.
Now he is using that power to ensure that the courts will not be able to stop any more of his corruption by planning a curb on judicial review of government activity. He is imposing a dictatorship – just as he told you he would, if you could have been bothered to read page 48 of his election manifesto.
The police won’t help. Boris Johnson, Matt Hancock, Gavin Williamson and the others are all above the law – no matter what they do. Try reporting a cabinet minister for a crime and see how far you get. They’ll tell you they’re treating it seriously, bounce the accusation around a few different departments and then say there’s no evidence. I’ve been there.
Hundreds of thousands of people have died already because it is Tory policy to kill claimants of sickness or disability claimants, who they consider to be “useless eaters”. That’s why the newspapers have been full of reports showing people with long-term illnesses and disabilities starving to death.
They wanted your homes so they imposed the Bedroom Tax and took them away from you.
The list goes on and on.
And still, too many people think they are the best choice to run the UK – even though the economy is in its deepest recession ever, and Brexit means it may never recover. You will suffer – they won’t. They have been stockpiling your cash and will simply use it to sit out any unpleasantness in the future.
But I feel sure a tipping-point will come – a flashpoint. I wonder how much we will all have to lose before that happens. I’m guessing it’ll be pretty much everything.
By then, many people may think there is nothing they can do. I am reminded yet again of Martin Niemoller’s poem about how the Nazis came for different groups who received no help from anybody else until, by the time they come for the author, there was nobody even left for him to ask.
But I am reminded of another group who were put in a similar position. When I visited Bosnia in the 1990s, I was told how – when the tanks from other countries moved in – the people, who were weaponless, left their homes and went up into the hills. They came back at night, when they took weapons – and lives – from the soldiers who had taken everything from them. And slowly, they took back their land from their oppressors.
I can see that happening here in the future.
I would rather it didn’t.
But it will, if people of good conscience don’t wake up, get up and put up a fight.
Keir Starmer won’t do it. He agrees with the Tories. That’s why he’s busy turning the Labour Party into Tory Lite Mk II (New Labour was Mk I) and accusing anybody who disagrees with him of anti-Semitism.
If you don’t want this to fall into violence, then you need to think what else you can do.
The ‘A’ level fiasco creates opportunities. Already some further education institutions have said they will take students who were downgraded, on the basis of their predicted results. Some haven’t. Clearly we should take note of the side that each University, each college, takes. Those who do the right thing should be rewarded in whatever ways we can. Those who do not should be shunned – meaning not only that we should not even try to send our children there, but that we should reject their graduates when they seek employment with our businesses. We know they won’t be any damn good anyway.
And employers who turn down applicants on the basis of the Tory algorithm’s discredited results should also be named, so we can stop buying their products.
That’s the best – non-violent – response I can conceive on the spur of the moment, and these things need to start happening now.
We’d better get to it, if we don’t want to roll over and die. And yes, that means you.
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Yet again: the PPE used in UK hospitals is pictured bottom right. It seems a new inquiry has been commissioned, to claim that this was enough to protect doctors and nurses from catching Covid-19 in hospitals.
When you read that Tory ministers have asked medical examiners to investigate whether the Covid-19 that killed NHS and care home staff was contracted as a consequence of their work, what do you think?
Call me superstitious but it makes This Writer think Boris Johnson is trying to find an excuse to say his government’s failures aren’t responsible.
Bear in mind that Johnson has been heavily criticised for failing to order the personal protective equipment (PPE) necessary to protect NHS staff.
And the Tory government’s decision to ship care home residents who had contracted the disease back to their places of residence was also attacked as a cause of more than 20,000 excess deaths.
It would be hugely valuable to Johnson if a report could be cooked up, exonerating him of any connection with these deaths – or at least, with the vast majority of them.
The medical examiners involved in the review are described as “senior doctors employed in hospitals to independently review all deaths to verify the correct cause of death and identify any treatment concerns”.
By a curious coincidence, they were “introduced in the NHS last year”.
Never mind superstitious – call me plain suspicious if you want, but I have a doubt about the result of this inquiry. How about you?
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Michael Gove: this minister (who once got caught making a joke about rape on the radio, by the way) is in charge of handing out procurement contracts for PPE. They seem to be going to his friends but we’re being told it’s all perfectly fair and above-board.
You’d think the Tories would have learned their lesson after Liz Truss was caught handing £150 million to a Board of Trade crony for face masks that don’t work.
But no – the UK’s corrupt-to-the-core Tory government won’t learn because it will never face any consequences.
So Tory ministers have handed a further £180 million of our cash to supporters of their political party, on the grounds that it is paying for more PPE (personal protective equipment) that will be used to help treat people with Covid-19.
Will it arrive? I don’t know. If it does, will it work? I doubt it.
Seven contracts – worth £65 million alone – were handed to businessman David Meller’s firm Meller Designs.
Not to be confused with the former Tory minister David Mellor, this Tory donor handed £65,000 to the Tories over the last 10 years, so the contract represents a markup of 1,000 times his outlay.
How did he get his contract to provide gowns, gloves, masks and hand sanitiser? Well, he provided thousands of pounds’ funding for Michael Gove’s failed Tory leadership bid and Gove is now in charge of PPE procurement but perhaps you see no connection there.
According to the government, ministers are not involved in the selection process because there is a “robust” system to ensure that orders are of high quality and meet safety standards.
That’s what they said about Ms Truss’s friend and his face masks, wasn’t it?
Some members of the public are sceptical about the Tories’ protests:
This is pure kleptocracy. And the very institutions/mechanisms designed to hold them to account – from media to inquiries – are captured by & in service of the kleptocrats. https://t.co/hsvIhLIw2F
— Kerry-Anne Mendoza 🏳️🌈🏴 (@TheMendozaWoman) August 9, 2020
Track the Covid contracts Trace the money
No transparency No competition No accountability
It’s not an inquiry we need, but a criminal investigation under police caution https://t.co/YLRP13ZNRS
Are the Tories still using emergency powers to avoid scrutiny of these contracts?
If so, I would have thought the emergency was over.
There’s certainly grounds for suspicion of foul play; the firms themselves may say they submitted their tenders in good faith but the Tory decision-making process deserves scrutiny.
But we know what they’ll say:
First it’ll be “now is not the time”, and then it will be “it’s all in the past”. Consequence-free.
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