“I’m a member of the government. We have a government view. That view has yet to be established,” said Therese Coffey on the possibility of benefits being linked to inflation.
So the government doesn’t have a view, then?
What an absolute imbecile.
Told that refusing to link benefits with inflation is a de facto benefit cut, she started talking about taper rates rather than deal with the issue – indicating that a benefit cut is on the cards.
What a moron.
Those of you who like to play the Tory Party Drinking Game will enjoy her mention of “Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine,” also.
Here’s a clip – and it’s only the first:
Now let’s have a montage showing the deputy prime minister saying she doesn’t know what’s going on in her own government:
Pathetic.
Have YOU donated to my crowdfunding appeal, raising funds to fight false libel claims by TV celebrities who should know better? These court cases cost a lot of money so every penny will help ensure that wealth doesn’t beat justice.
Vox Political needs your help! If you want to support this site
(but don’t want to give your money to advertisers) you can make a one-off donation here:
Here are four ways to be sure you’re among the first to know what’s going on.
1) Register with us by clicking on ‘Subscribe’ (in the left margin). You can then receive notifications of every new article that is posted here.
And do share with your family and friends – so they don’t miss out!
If you have appreciated this article, don’t forget to share it using the buttons at the bottom of this page. Politics is about everybody – so let’s try to get everybody involved!
Still going strong: the delta variant of Covid-19 is now dominant in the UK after more than a year of Tory refusal to close the nation’s borders – and is almost three times as likely to put you in a hospital as the original strain of the virus.
When you learn that the dominant form of Covid-19 in the UK now is the ‘delta’ variant that was discovered in India only recently, what does that tell you?
It tells This Writer that Boris Johnson’s insistence on keeping the UK’s borders open was an act of homicidal stupidity.
And it shows that the silly ‘traffic light’ system to indicate which countries are safe to visit does not work at all.
That’s because this new variant of Covid-19 has not only beaten all the supposed safeguards that Johnson’s government has imposed; it is now infecting more people than any other strain of the disease.
And it is more likely to cause serious illness than any other variant, too:
Not great. New variant has over twice risk of hospitalisation. Cases increasing rapidly. Lots can be done NOW, including in masks in schools next week given high case rates there. Increasing vax deploy in hotspots. With exponential spread why wait? https://t.co/Eh5Ymnt3w9
The facts show that 75 per cent of new cases are of the delta variant – and that it is being transmitted most commonly through schools.
This should end the debate over whether it was a bad idea to reopen schools while the pandemic was at its height; of course it was.
And it still is. Parents are now 1.6 times more likely to end up hospitalised if their children bring the delta variant home with them than they were with the original version of the virus last year.
It also shows that press releases from Public Health England should not be treated as factual. Consider:
here are this week's ONS numbers by age.
Marked increase in secondary school age children. And starting to see an increase in their parents' generation too.
Cannot understand how PHE think schools are just fine.
— Prof. Christina Pagel (@chrischirp) June 4, 2021
this is quite astonishing in how it takes the rosiest possible data and spins it. https://t.co/nPxVsvp3sw
— Prof. Christina Pagel (@chrischirp) June 4, 2021
Possibly the worst part of all this is that many Tory MPs seem determined to finish the “unlock” (as Grant Shapps referred to it in the Guardian article) on June 21, no matter how many people suffer as a result:
You see, your health doesn’t matter to these people. It never did.
Money matters to them.
You are stock. You are a commodity that they use in order to make money for them. The granting of billions of pounds of public money to Tory donors via PPE contracts that went unfulfilled – causing tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths – is an example of that thinking.
And if some of the stock dies out due to disease, it will replenish itself in a few years’ time, so they’re not bothered about that at all, either.
Don’t you wish you lived in New Zealand?
That country had a sensible, socialist prime minister who locked down properly, as soon as she heard a whisper about how bad Covid-19 might be – including closing all that country’s borders.
It was then able to carry on as normal, with the minimal number of cases that did present themselves receiving proper treatment, correctly isolated from the rest of the population. I believe there was a functioning test and trace system there, too.
So New Zealand has been able to function more or less as normal while other countries scrabbled to develop a vaccine – and now the vaccine is available, it is running an efficient injection programme.
The people of New Zealand chose their leaders wisely.
The UK’s diehard Tories (coupled with Labour traitors who hated Jeremy Corbyn) forced Boris Johnson on us.
They gave us the incompetence and corruption of Matt Hancock, Dominic Cummings, Gavin Williamson, Rishi Sunak and all the other ministers who have ignored their duty to the public in order to line their pockets and those of their friends.
They’re giving us the delta variant.
They’re giving us the potential of a premature end to all lockdown restrictions that would trigger yet another wave of Covid-19 infections in the summer or the autumn.
Have YOU donated to my crowdfunding appeal, raising funds to fight false libel claims by TV celebrities who should know better? These court cases cost a lot of money so every penny will help ensure that wealth doesn’t beat justice.
Vox Political needs your help! If you want to support this site
(but don’t want to give your money to advertisers) you can make a one-off donation here:
Here are four ways to be sure you’re among the first to know what’s going on.
1) Register with us by clicking on ‘Subscribe’ (in the left margin). You can then receive notifications of every new article that is posted here.
And do share with your family and friends – so they don’t miss out!
If you have appreciated this article, don’t forget to share it using the buttons at the bottom of this page. Politics is about everybody – so let’s try to get everybody involved!
“Who do we NOT save?” a whiteboard showing the moral bankruptcy the Johnson government reached in the Covid-19 crisis.
There’s a big problem with Dominic Cummings’s evidence to the government, as provided (and reported ad nauseum yesterday): we all know he’ll say anything to justify himself.
Remember the narrative he created in order to justify breaking lockdown rules to visit his family? We all knew he did it because he thought he was above the laws the rest of us have to follow.
And he was proved right, too, because he was not punished at all.
So it is hard to accept anything he said yesterday at face value. He was trying to justify himself and to disparage his former colleagues in Boris Johnson’s Tory government.
“Tens of thousands of people died, who didn’t need to die.” This is the soundbite that sent the mass media into a frenzy. But it has prompted no resignations among the Johnson government yet.
“Senior ministers, officials and advisers like me fell short of standards the public has a right to expect. When the public needed us most, we failed.”
Boris Johnson had ‘ignored advice’ and was late to introduce both the first and second lockdowns. The PM was consistently anti-lockdown, ignored scientific advice and failed to take Covid seriously – even ranting last summer that he should never have done Lockdown 1.
It would not have been helpful for Johnson to attend emergency COBRA meetings in February – five of which he missed – because he would have had flippant responses to the crisis: “In February the Prime Minister regarded this as just a scare story. He described it as the new swine flu.”
It was suggested that Johnson should tell everyone “It’s swine flu, don’t worry about it, I’m going to get Chris Whitty to inject me live on TV with coronavirus so everyone realises it’s nothing to be frightened of.”
Cummings “blamed” Johnson for the second wave, thanks to his flat refusal to lock down for a second time in September. He told MPs: “Fundamentally I regarded him as unfit for the job.”
On March 12, Cabinet Secretary Mark Sedwill said, “Prime Minister, you should go on TV tomorrow and explain to people the herd immunity and that it’s like the old chicken pox parties – we need people to get this disease because that’s how we get herd immunity by September.”
That day, Chief Scientist Patrick Vallance told the nation suppressing the virus completely was not “desirable” because some immunity was needed. And Boris Johnson told the nation “many more families are going to lose loved ones before their time.”
Cummings said March 12 was the most “surreal” day of his time in government because, just as he was waking up to the danger of Downing Street’s “delay the peak” plan, he claimed, “suddenly the national security people came in and said Trump wants us to join a bombing campaign in the Middle East tonight. Fortunately, thank God, the attorney general persuaded the PM not to go along with the whole bombing campaign.”
On top of all this, that day the Times had run a huge story about the Prime Minister and his girlfriend and their dog. “And the Prime Minister’s girlfriend was going completely crackers about this story, and demanding that the press office deal with that. So we had this sort of completely insane situation in which part of the building was saying are we going to bomb Iraq, part of the building was arguing about whether or not we’re going to do quarantine or not, the Prime Minister has his girlfriend going crackers about something completely trivial, and you have all these meetings going on through the course of the 12th.”
Cummings became downright festive in his descriptions of Matt Hancock’s contribution to the Covid-19 tragedy – as described in a separate article on This Site.
Boris Johnson had no idea for weeks that people leaving hospital into care weren’t being routinely tested in late March.
That led to the virus being seeded into care homes and tens of thousands of residents dying.
Matt Hancock promised that people were going to be tested in care homes – but this did not happen: “It was only in April after the Prime Minister and I had both ourselves been ill that we realised that what we were told never did happen, or only happened very partially and sporadically. The government rhetoric was ‘we put a shield around care homes, blah blah blah’ – that was complete nonsense. Quite the opposite of putting a shield round them, we sent people with Covid back to the care homes.”
Until the second week of March the consensus in Downing Street was that there was no point locking down because it would only delay the inevitable peak.
But former Deputy Cabinet Secretary Helen Macnamara allegedly said another top official, Mark Sweeney, had told her: “I’ve been told for years there is a whole plan for this. There is no plan. We’re in huge trouble.” In fact there was a plan – but it had last been updated in 2011 and was nine years out-of-date.
Ms Macnamara said on March 13: “I think we are absolutely f****d. I think this country is heading for a disaster, I think we are going to kill thousands of people.”
Carrie Symonds had pursued “completely unethical and clearly illegal” attempts to pack No 10 with her own friends. Cummings said: ”My resignation was definitely connected to the fact that the Prime Minister’s girlfriend was trying to change a whole bunch of different appointments in No10 and appoint her friends to particular jobs. In particular she was trying to overturn the outcome of an official process about hiring a particular job in a way which was not only completely unethical but was also clearly illegal.
Cummings said he told the PM on March 14: “There is no lockdown plan. It doesn’t exist. SAGE haven’t modelled it. [The Health Department] don’t have a plan. We are going to have to figure out and hack together a lockdown plan.”
He said by March 11, when there was “pushback” about ordering people with coughs to stay at home, he believed “the system is basically delaying announcing all of these things because there’s not a proper plan in place.”
Officials also dodged locking down because they thought the public wouldn’t accept it. But that was clearly “false”, and he said he realised that when family members were texting pleading for information.
Cummings said claims about extensive preparations for a pandemic were ”basically completely hollow” and “we didn’t figure this out until the back end of February”.
Boris Johnson refused pleas to lock down for a second time in September, only doing it from November 5.
“He wasn’t taking any advice. He was making the decisions himself,” said Cummings.
“The Cabinet wasn’t involved…there wasn’t any formal Cabinet meeting to discuss it. Or if there was, it was a purely Potemkin exercise.”
The PM had decided he was protecting the economy, and Mr Cummings said “we could not persuade him that if you basically took the view of ‘let it rip’”, it would lead to an economic and health “disaster.”
Mr Johnson later used the phrase “let it rip” as a catchphrase to showcase the kind of approach he would not take.
The government was turning down ventilators in late March because prices had been marked up. [Instead, it has been alleged elsewhere, Johnson offered James Dyson tax breaks to manufacture ventilators – but that came to nothing].
Downing Street staff drew up a back-of-a-fag-packet plan for Covid-19 on a whiteboard, which included the line “Who do we not save?”
We’re about halfway through Cummings’s allegations. They have prompted a huge verbal response from the public, along these lines:
Is Boris Johnson under arrest yet? If not, why not?
— Northern Independence Party 🟨🟥 (@FreeNorthNow) May 27, 2021
The worst response I've heard: "OK, Johnson and his government were useless, but nobody could have done any better."
They did, in New Zealand, South Korea, Singapore, Iceland, Taiwan, Vietnam and more, they did do better.
Even Matt Hancock, the minister Cummings attacked most strongly, is still in his job.
Have we all stopped caring that these self-obsessed incompetents killed off our relatives and friends due to their own inability to do their jobs?
Or have we just given up expecting them to be visited by any kind of justice – after Cummings himself got away with his Barnard Castle rule-breaking junket?
Have YOU donated to my crowdfunding appeal, raising funds to fight false libel claims by TV celebrities who should know better? These court cases cost a lot of money so every penny will help ensure that wealth doesn’t beat justice.
Vox Political needs your help! If you want to support this site
(but don’t want to give your money to advertisers) you can make a one-off donation here:
Here are four ways to be sure you’re among the first to know what’s going on.
1) Register with us by clicking on ‘Subscribe’ (in the left margin). You can then receive notifications of every new article that is posted here.
And do share with your family and friends – so they don’t miss out!
If you have appreciated this article, don’t forget to share it using the buttons at the bottom of this page. Politics is about everybody – so let’s try to get everybody involved!
Hospital ward: many people who desperately need medical care will not get treatment in one of these for years, because the Conservative government spent years starving the NHS of cash and resources (including staff) before the Covid-19 crisis.
That’s right – around one-fifth of the UK population did not receive hospital care because Boris Johnson’s Tories couldn’t be bothered to fund the NHS properly.
Don’t tell me the money isn’t there because experience over the last year has shown that it quite clearly is – the Tories simply don’t want to spend it on a service they are quietly trying to privatise.
We all knew that the Covid-19 pandemic would disrupt normal NHS services; this was inevitable no matter how well-resourced the health service would have been.
But the Tories have spent years starving it of funds and hiving off elements of it for sale to private companies that are simply incapable of helping in a crisis, even if their bosses were inclined to do so.
As a result, we now see that 4.6 million people missed out on hospital treatment – mostly because hospitals suspended their normal services in order to handle the huge influx of people who were severely ill with the virus as a result of Boris Johnson’s incompetent failure to lock down the UK in time to prevent a tragedy.
A further six million fewer people were referred by GPs to hospital for diagnostic tests and treatment because of the disruption to care, a wish not to further pressurise the overstretched NHS, and a reluctance to send patients to a place where they could catch the virus.
This means the NHS is likely to face even more pressure as these missing millions demand treatment as the pandemic eases off. And what if another wave pushes hospital admissions up again?
More to the point: how many patients have died?
And crowdfunding website GoFundMe has reported a huge increase in the number of people seeking donations to support medical care: 87 per cent more citing “waiting lists” as their reason, 60 per cent more stating they need cash for “clinical trials” and a deeply concerning 55 per cent more saying they need cash to buy cancer drugs.
The concern here is that people who pay for private surgery often end up being sent back to the NHS to have botched operations fixed.
So people who pay for operations to take pressure off the NHS could find that they are still only making matter worse.
The extent of the problem is highlighted by The Guardian:
The number of people forced to wait more than a year for their operation has rocketed from 1,613 before the pandemic to 304,044 in January this year, and more than 1 million people have been waiting at least six months, even though 92% of patients are supposed to be treated within 18 weeks under the referral to treatment scheme.
“The waiting list is already at the highest level it’s been since comparable records began in 2007, and if it did rise from 4.6 million now to 9.7 million by March 2024 as we estimate, that’s more than double the waiting list now,” [said Tim Gardner, a senior policy fellow at the Health Foundation].
Rachel Power, the chief executive of the Patients Association, pointed out that patients have gone without life-saving treatments:
She said the association was “particularly concerned by reports of treatments being cancelled that could be life-saving”.
Finally – and to hammer home the point that this is a political issue: the disruption to hospital treatment was almost one-and-a-half times as bad in poorer areas than where people are richest. The worst-affected English region was the North West.
This confirms not only that poverty affects health but also that Tories like Boris Johnson couldn’t care less; after all, they haven’t done anything about it.
It will take years to reduce the number of people waiting for treatment until the 18-week target time is achieved – even with a government that genuinely wanted to help. The experts say it won’t happen until long after the next general election.
But local elections are happening much sooner – on May 6. Tories will be concerned that voters will use them to express their displeasure with a government that let them down badly, and has been lying about what a good job it has done.
Have YOU donated to my crowdfunding appeal, raising funds to fight false libel claims by TV celebrities who should know better? These court cases cost a lot of money so every penny will help ensure that wealth doesn’t beat justice.
Vox Political needs your help! If you want to support this site
(but don’t want to give your money to advertisers) you can make a one-off donation here:
Here are four ways to be sure you’re among the first to know what’s going on.
1) Register with us by clicking on ‘Subscribe’ (in the left margin). You can then receive notifications of every new article that is posted here.
And do share with your family and friends – so they don’t miss out!
If you have appreciated this article, don’t forget to share it using the buttons at the bottom of this page. Politics is about everybody – so let’s try to get everybody involved!
Money, money, money: Boris Johnson thinks it’s for handing out to his party’s friends and donors rather than for investing in the UK economy. Labour needs to explain why his Tories, despite their false claims, are silly with our cash.
It’s no secret that Labour under Keir Starmer is failing to make the right points against Boris Johnson’s lying Tories.
Some of the worst falsehoods in the Tory narrative are about the economy – but, as Mainly Macro‘s Simon Wren-Lewis mentioned (on which I expanded), Labour has consistently failed to address them in any meaningful way.
Professor Wren-Lewis has followed up his article with a new piece suggesting possible pressure-points Labour could attack.
I think he’s wrong to suggest Keir Starmer should do so, as Starmer is unlikely to want to – or indeed to be around for long after the local elections next month, but the ideas are sound and whoever becomes the new leader should certainly consider them seriously. They are:
1. Austerity – Conservatives from David Cameron onwards claimed austerity was a vital response to the economic crisis of 2008 onwards; in fact it harmed the economy.
Labour should assert – forcefully – that there was no debt crisis and the economy needed stimulation rather than starvation. Tory austerity not only delayed any recovery, but diminished it so that wages are now – perhaps permanently – lower.
So the Tories attacked the UK’s economic well-being in order to impoverish the wider population.
2. The second wave of Covid-19 was much worse that it could have been because Tory Chancellor Rishi Sunak resisted an early lockdown.
This delay meant not only that many more lives were lost to the virus than ever needed to be, but also that the lockdown that eventually had to be imposed had to be much longer.
So the Tories attacked the UK economy – and caused many thousands of unnecessary deaths – by failing to lock down strongly and early when cases started rising.
3. Brexit has created a bureaucracy mountain that has hit exports and many firms very badly. I suspect Professor Wren-Lewis wrote his piece before the extent of the violence in Northern Ireland became clear to him, otherwise he could have mentioned this.
It means the Tory-created bureaucracy has harmed the UK economy in a way that has actually re-kindled the Troubles in Northern Ireland after 23 years of hard-won peace.
Professor Wren-Lewis goes on to state that Labour avoids the argument because party leaders know the Tories will answer it with claims about “overspending” by the last Labour government.
But these claims have always been false:
EXPOSED! Tory Project Fear
How the Tories with the help of BBC altered the public perception of a deficit
To alarm the public to accept austerity
This is the story that exposes just "HOW" people became to believe austerity was needed
— Ramesh Patel – They Would Rather You Ignore This (@IamalrightJack) April 6, 2021
Prof Wren-Lewis also suggests a few responses to the usual attacks we can expect from the Tories and their lackeys in the mainstream media. For example:
No, the Coalition government’s austerity measures did not save the UK from a financial crisis. The Conservatives have demonstrated, many times now, that the Bank of England will create any money needed to cover the UK’s debts, if the markets won’t or can’t do so. Risk of inflation is negligible for reasons we’ve seen in action in the Covid crisis.
No, it isn’t reasonable to suggest Labour was partly responsible for the damage the crash of 2008 onwards caused by pointing at its failure to regulate the banking sector. At the time, the Conservatives were demanding even less regulation, meaning they would have caused more harm to the economy if they’d had the chance.
And no, Labour did not “overspend”. That party left office in 2010 with a record deficit of more than 10 per cent of GDP, but only because of global economic events and measures taken to prevent job losses after banks started collapsing. After 11 years of Conservative rule the UK has a record deficit of 17 per cent of GDP – because of “overspending”? Arguments that Labour would also have introduced austerity can be overcome by pointing out that the party’s critics can’t criticise the party for both over- and underspending.
Finally, Prof Wren-Lewis suggests that the argument about Tory economic incompetence may be wrapped up in a larger attack on Tory incompetence in general:
Boris Johnson and his Tories have been incompetent in handling Covid, running the NHS, looking after law and order, and handling public money.
Their only success has been in handing public money to their personal friends and funders.
Put it like that and Labour is on a path to electoral victory again – if that party can devise policies that capture the public imagination (Jeremy Corbyn was very good at that) and defend them against Tory attack lines (he wasn’t quite so successful there).
But Keir Starmer won’t put it like that because he simply doesn’t have the grit for it. That’s why we have to wait for the next Labour leader and hope that they will.
Have YOU donated to my crowdfunding appeal, raising funds to fight false libel claims by TV celebrities who should know better? These court cases cost a lot of money so every penny will help ensure that wealth doesn’t beat justice.
Vox Political needs your help! If you want to support this site
(but don’t want to give your money to advertisers) you can make a one-off donation here:
Here are four ways to be sure you’re among the first to know what’s going on.
1) Register with us by clicking on ‘Subscribe’ (in the left margin). You can then receive notifications of every new article that is posted here.
And do share with your family and friends – so they don’t miss out!
If you have appreciated this article, don’t forget to share it using the buttons at the bottom of this page. Politics is about everybody – so let’s try to get everybody involved!
No ventilator for you: the government is continuing to ensure that only able-bodied people with coronavirus can have access to a ventilator. The rest can die as a result of the Tories’ refusal to make proper preparations at the appropriate time.
Children are suffering again because the Conservative government is incompetent.
Back at the beginning of the Covid-19 crisis we learned that, despite having been warned that a flu or flu-like pandemic was on its way and they should stock up on ventilator equipment, successive Tory governments under David Cameron, Theresa May and Boris Johnson ignored the advice.
They didn’t buy ventilators, causing a crippling shortage of equipment when the inevitable happened and the virus hit us.
Then, when the EU generously offered Boris Johnson a chance to join a bulk-buying scheme that would have brought much-needed ventilators into the UK, he refused. His reason? “We are not in the EU.”
Pathetic.
Here’s the result:
Jane Hill simply unable to hide her consternation here. A government in need of 30k ventilators, that stayed out of the EU program because “we can do it ourselves” has delivered just THIRTY in one week. Holy shitpic.twitter.com/39EcGmD89U
Johnson was then able to treat the lack of ventilators as a golden opportunity to rid the UK of some of the “useless eaters” (as I’m sure the Tories call them, picking up on Nazi terminology). So people with disabilities were told they would be denied ventilators if they caught Covid-19, the excuse being that their disabilities mean their chances of survival are less.
Senior citizens faced the same discrimination.
Now the Tory decision is making children suffer as well.
Child malnutrition has already at least doubled since the Covid-19 pandemic hit the UK. Now this:
Parents of children reliant upon ventilators are being asked to reuse vital parts after the demand caused by COVID-19 created a shortage.
Maisie Lossau, 15, has needed the equipment day and night following surgery to remove a brainstem tumour four years ago.
But when her mother, Dawn, put in an order for supplies she was told there were none to send.
“We have a very small piece of equipment which is called an HME, which is a humidification valve, changed every day.
“When we went into lockdown we were told there was a shortage of those and we would have to change them on a less regular basis… once a week maybe or twice a week if we could.
If that gets too wet, too damp, and we don’t change it, it becomes a breeding ground for germs.”
The danger then is infection.
There are more than 3,000 seriously ill children like Maisie across the country and the charity WellChild says supplies must be ring-fenced for them.
The government has dissembled; it won’t address the subject directly.
So a statement merely says: “We have put in place a range of measures to address these challenges, including making it easier for clinicians to report shortages and identifying opportunities to open up new supply options and using additional brands.”
The Tories said nothing about actually supplying the equipment. We must conclude that they have no intention to do so.
Have YOU donated to my crowdfunding appeal, raising funds to fight false libel claims by TV celebrities who should know better? These court cases cost a lot of money so every penny will help ensure that wealth doesn’t beat justice.
Vox Political needs your help! If you want to support this site
(but don’t want to give your money to advertisers) you can make a one-off donation here:
Here are four ways to be sure you’re among the first to know what’s going on.
1) Register with us by clicking on ‘Subscribe’ (in the left margin). You can then receive notifications of every new article that is posted here.
And do share with your family and friends – so they don’t miss out!
If you have appreciated this article, don’t forget to share it using the buttons at the bottom of this page. Politics is about everybody – so let’s try to get everybody involved!
Johnson: This stupid ass caught coronavirus because he failed to follow his own social distancing advice (once he got round to giving it). Now he’s got the nerve to tell us he may tighten restrictions – but he’ll never admit that he has been at fault.
They’ll never admit it but if it does take half a year or more before people in the UK are allowed to resume their normal lives, it’s because of the stupidity of our Conservative government.
And if the lockdown lasts as long – or almost – that will be because of Tory stupidity too.
Boris Johnson’s letter saying the situation will worsen before it gets better is nothing more than we should all expect.
England’s Deputy Chief Medical Officer, Jenny Harries, said the number of deaths is likely to worsen over the next one or two weeks – because it will take that long before the effects of social distancing begin to be felt.
And Johnson has warned that stricter measures could be put in place if necessary. This makes perfect sense, if deaths continue to rise.
But the reason deaths may continue rising is the government’s failure to impress upon the population the fact that the measures already in place are important.
In his letter, Johnson says, “From the start, we have sought to put in the right measures at the right time.” This is contemptible nonsense.
Before coronavirus arrived in the UK, the Tories had ensured that none of the plans necessary to protect the public against a contagion of this kind were up to date.
And they had dismantled the specialist team in the Department of Health, that would have dealt with the pandemic, nine years ago.
Medical journal The Lancet warned the government to get its act together on January 24.
But Johnson dithered for a further seven weeks, issuing contradictory statements and advice that left members of the public confused.
Is it any wonder, then, that when he ordered us all to stay home and observe social distancing rules, many people have ignored him completely – including himself?
The prime minister himself caught the disease because he failed to follow his own advice.
The news websites are full of reports of street parties being broken up by police, who are empowered to issue fines starting at £60 but rising to £960 for repeat offenders.
This Writer has been told of barbecues in Shrewsbury, and even health professionals have been caught flouting the rules.
This brings us to another point: remember Jenny Harries, who said the number of deaths is likely to worsen? She must take part of the blame for that.
The Lancet (again) has called on her to apologise for claiming that the NHS had “a perfectly adequate supply of PPE [Personal Protective Equipment, worn by medical staff while treating coronavirus patients to prevent them from contracting it or passing on to others]”.
It didn’t – and I note that two doctors are reported to have died in this report alone.
The government failed to join a European Union scheme to provide much-needed ventilators – by misdirecting the email, it seems – and there are concerns over the choices of supplier made by Johnson and his cronies.
Put it all together and you can see that more people will die because of the Tories; there is a lack of equipment to fight the virus because of the Tories; and if it takes longer for life to return to normal – they’ll be responsible for that too.
Have YOU donated to my crowdfunding appeal, raising funds to fight false libel claims by TV celebrities who should know better? These court cases cost a lot of money so every penny will help ensure that wealth doesn’t beat justice.
Vox Political needs your help! If you want to support this site
(but don’t want to give your money to advertisers) you can make a one-off donation here:
Here are four ways to be sure you’re among the first to know what’s going on.
1) Register with us by clicking on ‘Subscribe’ (in the left margin). You can then receive notifications of every new article that is posted here.
And do share with your family and friends – so they don’t miss out!
If you have appreciated this article, don’t forget to share it using the buttons at the bottom of this page. Politics is about everybody – so let’s try to get everybody involved!
The Tories are trying to cover their embarrassment over this latest blunder, but it is already too late.
Amber Rudd is on record as saying police cuts have not contributed to the rise in serious violent crime on the UK’s streets – in direct contradiction of a Home Office Report that has been leaked to the press:
Government cuts to the police “may have encouraged” violent offenders and have “likely contributed” to a rise in serious violent crime, leaked Home Office documents have revealed.
The documents cast doubt on claims by the home secretary, Amber Rudd, on Sunday that cuts to the police were not to blame for rising violence.
The Home Office said it would not comment on leaked documents.
Rudd will on Monday launch a strategy aimed at tackling serious violent crime, which officials and ministers have been working on for months.
Any such strategy will be flawed if it does not take into account the harm caused by the Tory policy of cutting police numbers. And how can it, if the Home Secretary is determined that she hasn’t seen the report?
Dear Amber Rudd, please contact the Mirror soonest, they have a copy of the documents you've not seen. Kind regards… etc. https://t.co/UlA2u2EBcA
— Keith Ordinary Guy #NHSLove (@KeithCameron5) April 9, 2018
"I'm not a liar I'm just dangerously incompetent at my job" is quickly becoming the Government's default defence. pic.twitter.com/D712q3LhKR
One person who has seen the report is Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who commented on the situation in his speech launching the party’s London local elections campaign:
We always said cuts have consequences and now the Home Office’s own officials agree with us.
Todays leaked documents make a nonsense of the Tories’ repeated claims that their cuts to police numbers have had no effect.
You cannot protect local communities when you cut funding to local councils to such an extent they are unable to provide the essential youth service support that stops many young people being drawn into violent crime.
The Tory record on policing and crime is one of reckless failure. Plain and simple – you can’t have security on the cheap and cuts have consequences. Too many communities are living with those consequences.
But Ms Rudd has moved on. It seems she is now blaming local Police and Crime Commissioners:
Amber Rudd diverts blame for police officer cuts by telling @BBCr4today it’s a matter for police & crime commissioners
That Amber Rudd is, as she has been described, dangerously incompetent. Her claim that she has not seen a report that contradicts her position on police cuts is, as LabourListclaims, “either incompetence or dishonest” – and neither is acceptable in a Minister of the Crown.
That Jeremy Corbyn has a much firmer grip on the situation than Ms Rudd.
That voters in London can indicate their dissatisfaction with the situation by voting Labour – and giving Ms Rudd and her Tory blunderers the kicking they deserve for placing the citizens of our capital city in danger.
Vox Political needs your help! If you want to support this site
(but don’t want to give your money to advertisers) you can make a one-off donation here:
Here are four ways to be sure you’re among the first to know what’s going on.
1) Register with us by clicking on ‘Subscribe’ (in the left margin). You can then receive notifications of every new article that is posted here.
And do share with your family and friends – so they don’t miss out!
If you have appreciated this article, don’t forget to share it using the buttons at the bottom of this page. Politics is about everybody – so let’s try to get everybody involved!
“Presidents Club? Never been there,” says David Davis, although his hand gestures tell a different story [Image: PA].
It is stupidity like this that undermines faith – not just in Brexit, which is a lost cause anyway, but in the Tory government and its advisors.
The whole kit and caboodle, as the saying goes.
The UK’s Brexit negotiators are considering asking the EU for a longer transition period than the one they have been offered, amid concerns it will not be long enough to prepare the country for exit.
The possibility of a longer transition comes amid increasing discontent from the Tory right about the period as an EU “vassal state”, and with negotiations on the issue set to start in earnest in the coming weeks.
A Brussels source told The Independent that British officials had asked about the feasibility of extending the period in a recent meeting, while UK diplomats admitted that it might need to stretch beyond the start of 2021 and would not rule out pushing for a later date in upcoming talks.
Vox Political needs your help! If you want to support this site
(but don’t want to give your money to advertisers) you can make a one-off donation here:
Here are four ways to be sure you’re among the first to know what’s going on.
1) Register with us by clicking on ‘Subscribe’ (in the left margin). You can then receive notifications of every new article that is posted here.
And do share with your family and friends – so they don’t miss out!
If you have appreciated this article, don’t forget to share it using the buttons at the bottom of this page. Politics is about everybody – so let’s try to get everybody involved!
The inhumanity of Iain Duncan Smith: He is pictured laughing at the plight of a rape victim who, under his ‘reforms’, has to pay bedroom tax for the panic room she needs in order to be safe from her abusive, rapist ex-partner.
Iain Duncan Smith must resign after he disgraced himself yet again, with a leaflet containing fabricated comments from non-existent DWP benefit claimants, according to a leading Opposition MP.
Debbie Abrahams, who has been a leading light in the fight to force the Conservative Government to reveal the true number of people who have died following Duncan Smith’s “welfare reforms”, said the Work and Pensions secretary’s behaviour was a “disgrace” and his position was untenable.
But don’t take This Writer’s word for it – here’s Ms Abrahams herself (all boldings mine):
“As a member of the work and pensions select committee, I have called for Iain Duncan Smith to resign following revelations that his department created a leaflet about sanctions containing made-up quotes attributed to non-existent benefit claimants.
“I instigated an inquiry into the use of sanctions by the work and pensions committee, which reported in March this year, and I believe after being caught out so publicly it must be impossible for Iain Duncan Smith to continue as work and pensions secretary and he should do the honourable thing and resign.
“This is yet another example of not only his incompetence, but what can only be described as very shady and unscrupulous behaviour not befitting a Member of Parliament let alone a Secretary of State leading a Government Department.
“Once again, Duncan Smith is caught trying to paint a particular picture of social security claimants. He is a disgrace and should do the honourable thing and resign. When his own department have to resort to this sort of tactic, in a desperate attempt to make it appear as though the system is working, no-one can be left believing that his draconian social security sanctions regime is fit for purpose.
“Only Mr Duncan Smith seems to believe that unfair and inappropriate use of sanctions on vulnerable social security claimants is acceptable. And now he’s shown that he thinks it’s acceptable for his department to produce literature that is fabricated in a desperate attempt to make people believe his sanctions regime is working fairly.
“It beggars belief that David Cameron can, in the light of this embarrassing debacle, continue to back Mr Duncan Smith as a credible work and pensions secretary when he has presided over such a catalogue of errors.
“In the last few weeks alone, the independent Social Security Advisory Committee has produced a report which says that the Government’s sanctions regime should be given ‘an urgent and robust review’.
“And following the Government’s appeal against the Information Commissioner’s ruling compelling the Government to publish figures on the number of people on Incapacity Benefit and Employment and Support Allowance who have died between November 2011 and May 2014, including those found fit for work, a Tribunal has now been set for November 10to hear why Iain Duncan Smith has refused to publish these data.
“I will never forget the fact that not only did Iain Duncan Smith defy the Information Commissioner’s ruling to provide these data on deaths of people on social security, but that he stated to me, personally, in Parliament, it did not exist. But then, just two days later, the Prime Minister said to me, again in Parliament, the data would be published, only for the DWP’s appeal documents to defy him as well, stating publication was not in the public interest!
“The select committee inquiry which I instigated reported in March and the mountain of evidence that was put before the select committee by religious organisations, academics and charities, not to mention those actually affected by inappropriate sanctions themselves, pointed overwhelmingly to a system that is inhumane and deliberately created to skew unemployment figures.
“The sad truth is that Iain Duncan Smith is doing everything he can to cover up the mess he has created.
“This is a mess that is ruining innocent people’s lives and, as the evidence suggests, even killing some.
“The only credible reason he’s going to such lengths to hang on to his job is because he knows he has so much to hide.”
A petition on the Government website, calling for a vote of “no confidence” in Iain Duncan Smith and his removal from office, may be signed here.
If you have appreciated this article, don’t forget to share it using the buttons at the bottom of this page. Politics is about everybody – so let’s try to get everybody involved!
Vox Political needs your help! If you want to support this site
(but don’t want to give your money to advertisers) you can make a one-off donation here:
By continuing to use the site, you agree to the use of cookies. This includes scrolling or continued navigation. more information
The cookie settings on this website are set to "allow cookies" to give you the best browsing experience possible. If you continue to use this website without changing your cookie settings or you click "Accept" below then you are consenting to this.
