A destroyed school in Yemen in 2017 – three years after the conflict there began – where a Saudi-led coalition has been accused of killing thousands of civilians.
The Johnson government has cut aid to war-torn Yemen by as much as 60 per cent, claiming it cannot afford the cost because of the Covid-19 pandemic.
But the entire cost of government measures to deal with Covid-19 has been paid already, with money the government created specifically for that purpose. There is no financial pressure at all.
Meanwhile, sales of weapons – to the Saudi-led coalition that has been accused of killing many thousands of Yemeni civilians in the seven years since the conflict began in 2014 – continue unabated.
So a decision to cut life-saving aid, quoting
“recent global challenges”
that have created
“a difficult financial context for us all”
is a decision based on a lie. No wonder 101 charities have condemned it.
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This BBC story could explain much about the Corporation’s wholehearted support for Rishi Sunak, even though he’s utterly vile.
The Beeb presents as a good news story the deaths of so many over-65s that the cost of paying pensions is set to plummet by £1.5 billion by 2022.
And wait! because there’s even more Good News!
The government will also receive an extra £0.9bn from inheritance tax, partly due to Covid-related deaths.
Every cloud has a silver lining, eh? As in thirty pieces of silver, if you recognise the reference.
Here’s an interesting slip, though:
More than 144,000 deaths involving Covid-19 have occurred in the UK since the start of the pandemic, figures published by the UK’s statistics agencies show.
That’s 21,000 more than the official figure of 123,000 at the time of writing.
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— Victoria Derbyshire (@vicderbyshire) March 1, 2021
Four those who can’t read images well, the question is: “Do you agree or disagree that you would be happy to have a physical relationship with a disabled person?”
The implication is that people with disabilities are sub-human and should not enjoy the same relationships as the rest of us – and that shows despicable prejudice by the Tory government.
As I say, my own partner has a disability so I know this subject very well.
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The Department for Work and Pensions is to run trials on a new “integrated” assessment service, putting sick and disabled benefit claimants under the same conditions as Universal Credit claimants.
What a disaster for people with long-term illnesses and disabilities.
Universal Credit is known to be harmful to its claimants. The five-week wait before anything is paid puts most people into debt and forces them to take out advance loans, meaning that the amount they receive – when they do get it – is much less than their government-assessed need, and continues to be so for many months.
This creates serious mental and emotional stress and otherwise fit and healthy UC claimants have done horrifying damage to their own health as a result.
People with illnesses and disabilities are already suffering damage to their own health. The current system already piles mental and emotional stress on them –
Only yesterday I wrote about “brown envelope anxiety”, that pushes sick and disabled people (especially) to avoid opening communications from the government, in the expectation that the message inside will inflict harm upon them.
– and putting them under Universal Credit conditions can only make matters worse.
I notice that the new trial is set to start in April, when the effects of Covid-19 are expected to be dying down.
Is it the Tory aim to immediately replace one fatal attack on sickness and disability with another?
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“Perfectly safe”: this photo was taken on a school staircase after Boris Johnson ruled that it was “perfectly safe” for children to go back there in September – no social distancing, no PPE… not safe at all. Now he is planning to do it all again, with infection rates nearly seven times higher than when this image was made.
Boris Johnson loves announcing big plans without giving us the facts and figures behind them, and he has done it again with school reopening.
How humiliating for him that it has been up to school pupil Jamal Elaheebocus to explain that when schools were recklessly reopened in June last year, one in 1,100 people were infected with Covid-19. When they were recklessly reopened in September, this had fallen to one in 2,000.
In mid-February, the infection rate was one in 115 people. It is hoped this will have fallen to one in 300 but that is nearly seven times more than in September last year – and look how that turned out!
Jamal reminds us of a few more uncomfortable truths:
the prevalence of the virus in communities remains high. As Johnson himself admitted on January 4, schools are vectors of transmission.
To any of us working or studying in schools, the reasons why schools are hotspots for infection are obvious.
Fitting thirty students and a teacher in a classroom makes social distancing impossible, overcrowded buildings means that several year groups who are separate bubbles then mix together.
Students are then packed on buses and trains to get home, spreading infection not only among themselves but among the wider public as well.
The latest data from Imperial’s React programme showed that 5 to 12 year olds had the second highest infection rate of any age group. Given this, there is no doubt that schools will increase the infection rate again. The difference this time is that infection rates will be much higher.
While the vaccine may help limit the rise in infection to an extent, infection rates will undoubtedly increase. This is a reckless gamble just to get children into schools for three weeks before Easter holidays.
Yes.
So why is Johnson doing it?
This was inevitable, thanks to the pressure from the mainstream media and Keir Starmer.
How low Labour has sunk! Its leader is now counted among those responsible for inflicting an inevitable increase in Covid-19 infections on the UK – yet again. People will die because Starmer did this.
Yes, some of the arguments in favour of re-opening schools have influence – but only because prolonged closures have placed pupils at the mercy of the Tories’ neoliberal system – one that Starmer wholeheartedly supports.
The combined incompetence of the government and the cruelty of the neoliberal system has meant many kids have missed out on free school meals, families are struggling to cope in overcrowded homes and kids have not been able to access online learning because of lack of access to a laptop or good broadband.
Lockdown has been made so difficult for school pupils because of the government’s decision to continue to punish the poorest in society. It is a disgrace that the Tories and the right-wing media are attempting to manipulate the stress and hardship and use it to back up their reckless campaign to open up society and let the virus run rampage.
It is a disgrace.
And the Tories’ adherence to the neoliberal system that demands minimal investment for maximum return (to the very, very rich) means that the reopening will be done on the cheap.
Jamal proposes a series of measures to make schools safe – or at least safer. None of them have been supported – or even mentioned – by Boris Johnson because they cost money.
Teachers should be prioritised for the vaccine since they will be mixing with such a large number of people. This should have been done months ago and as more and more of the clinically vulnerable and elderly are vaccinated, there is no reason not to now prioritise teachers.
There should also be plans to repurpose public buildings as classrooms or put money into new buildings on school sites to facilitate social distancing in classrooms and allow for proper separation of year group bubbles.
Supply teachers and newly-qualified teachers who are not employed can be utilised to allow for smaller class sizes and more social distancing.
The vaccine is not the cure-all that Johnson and his cronies have claimed. It wont protect you as fully as you think, and it won’t protect as many people as you think.
And, of course, it has only been applied to a minority of the population – on a first-dose basis.
How sad that Johnson is so keen to prolong the UK’s Covid-19 agony, just to please his backbenchers, the baying hounds of the mass media… and Keir Starmer.
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Doctors’ surgeries across the UK are being bought up and run for profit by private firms – including at least one from the United States.
American health insurance giant Centene has just taken over 49 NHS GP practices. In the last few years, they have bought NHS surgeries in Nottingham, Basingstoke, Milton Keynes, and Leeds. Yours could be next.
Centene appears to be a “bad actor” too – described by the Daily Mail as “profit greedy”.
In 2018, the company took control of a group of surgeries in Essex, including the historic Osler House surgery, founded in 1955. Soon after, Osler House was closed, leaving thousands of residents without a GP within 40 minutes’ drive from their house.
Healthcare provision doesn’t matter to them, you see. Their only concern is their profit.
In the US, Centene has been sued by thousands of people who bought insurance from them. Court papers showed that those people had “difficulty finding — in many cases cannot find — medical providers”.
Campaigning group We Own It said: “Your own local GP surgery or the local GP surgery your friends and family depend on may not be affected today. But if this takeover goes ahead, your GP surgery is not safe.
“Our local Clinical Commissioning Groups – the bodies that make local healthcare decisions in every area – can stop this.”
The group is urging you to sign a petition calling for an end to Boris Johnson’s privatisation of GP services, and for you to urge your family, friends and colleagues to sign it too. Will you?
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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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Mess: Johnson’s plan to ease lockdown is as muddled as his hair. Even with 80 per cent vaccine efficacy, half the population will still be vulnerable to infection.
Scientists have warned that Boris Johnson’s plan to end lockdown restrictions will cause a huge increase in Covid-19 hospitalisations – even in the most optimistic scenarios.
So much for “following the science”, eh?
It seems that
The government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) [said] tens of thousands more people can be expected to die from Covid because vaccines will not provide complete protection against the disease, and not everyone will have the jabs.
All scenarios led to a resurgence of cases because so many vulnerable people remained unprotected, even with high vaccine coverage.
Johnson’s plan is a bespoke model that does not correspond with any of the SAGE scenarios – but its closest equivalent, scenario three, predicts a resurgence of Covid-19 in the UK around September.
At yesterday’s press briefing on the government’s plans, chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance, who is said to have shares in a pharmaceutical company that was working on a vaccine, warned that even with 80 per cent efficacy, half the population would still be at risk from the disease.
He said a cautious step-by-step process, with pauses of four or five weeks between each to monitor the impact, was the right way to go.
It seems strange, then, that the Johnson plan will reopen all English schools on March 8.
Scientific modellers predict that this will drive the infection rate up by between 10 and 50 per cent – negating the reductions of the current lockdown and vaccinations.
They said a limited reopening, possibly starting with primary schools, was a far better option and would allow scientists to assess the impact on infections within the community.
Johnson has ignored this good advice and intends to steamroll his easements through – as he did last year.
We all know how that turned out. Why are you letting him do it to you again?
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If it is, it’s exactly the kick up the backside that the people of the UK need.
Admittedly, it uses an expletive for which I would prefer to see a less offensive word substituted; many people are put off by such language.
But it does confront us with the big failure of Boris Johnson’s tenure at 10 Downing Street: his decision to make it easy for people in the UK to catch Covid-19 (and it was a conscious decision, let’s not forget) has cost at least 120,000 lives.
I don’t know the prognosis for Lorna – the woman in the image – but the mere fact that Covid-19 has been allowed to infect her has clearly caused her huge discomfort (as it does to anybody who has it).
And the long-term effects – known as “long Covid” can be life-altering.
Millions of people are likely to be affected by the disease in the long term, and the blame for this can be attributed entirely to Johnson and his government of imbeciles.
And they would not have been allowed to inflict it on us if they had not been voted back in as the government in December 2019.
So this poster makes a good point, wouldn’t you agree?
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