Boris Johnson

WORSE THAN USELESS BORIS AND HIS NASTY TORY PARTY SCUM :: Mishandling Covid-19 :: Meetings Held By Test And Trace Chief Dido Harding Kept Secret – On Cost Grounds

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What’s this about? Meetings held by chief of UK’s worse than useless test and trace ‘system’ Dido Harding are censored but why? The cost grounds as a very poor excuse – there should be an easily accessible record of the meetings she’s attended. Has she not attended any meetings? Has she attended meetings at ridiculous, expensive locations breaking lockdown rules? There’s something embarrassing being hidden and any mate of Boris’s is likely to be seriously insane. I would guess at no meetings so that there was no effective leadership of UK’s chaotic test and trace ‘system’. It makes sense that it was(is) anarchic with nobody in charge.

UK government running ‘Orwellian’ unit to block release of ‘sensitive’ information

The British government has been accused of running an ‘Orwellian’ unit in Michael Gove’s office that instructs Whitehall departments on how to respond to Freedom of Information requests and shares personal information about journalists, openDemocracy can reveal today.

Experts warn that the practice could be breaking the law – and openDemocracy is now working with the law firm Leigh Day on a legal bid to force Gove’s Cabinet Office to reveal full details of how its secretive ‘Clearing House’ unit operates. 

Freedom of Information (FOI) requests are supposed to be ‘applicant-blind’: meaning who makes the request should not matter. But it now emerges that government departments and non-departmental public bodies have been referring ‘sensitive’ FOI requests from journalists and researchers to the Clearing House in Gove’s department in a move described by a shadow cabinet minister as “blacklisting”.

This secretive FOI unit gives advice to other departments “to protect sensitive information”, and collates lists of journalists with details about their work. These lists have included journalists from openDemocracy, The Guardian, The Times, the BBC, and many more, as well as researchers from Privacy International and Big Brother Watch and elsewhere.

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Art of Darkness: How the government is undermining freedom of information. Lucas Amin. OpenDemocracy

Continue ReadingWORSE THAN USELESS BORIS AND HIS NASTY TORY PARTY SCUM :: Mishandling Covid-19 :: Meetings Held By Test And Trace Chief Dido Harding Kept Secret – On Cost Grounds

WORSE THAN USELESS BORIS AND HIS NASTY TORY PARTY SCUM :: Mishandling Covid-19 :: Following Politics not Science

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An interview (and part two) with David King, former government chief scientific adviser (2000-2007) and founder and chair of Independent SAGE (Scientific Advisory Group on Emergencies) about SAGE and following the evidence. The articles are from September 2000 while the main criticisms remain valid.

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HW: How many civil servants are on the official SAGE, relative to independent scientists?

SDK: Not counting sub-committees, out of the main group of 23, 13 are civil servants

HW: So SAGE is not a body of independent scientists? It’s a body that is controlled by government, given the dominance of civil servants in it?

SDK: I’m afraid I think that’s right [although] I have enormous respect for Sir Patrick Vallance [the current chief scientific adviser].

HW: Was this anything to do with this government’s view of the public – that the public must simply be told what to do, so the debate about the science can’t be open?

SDK: Yes. The government want to be able to say, ‘We are following the science.’ If the public doesn’t know what the science advice is, the public has no means of knowing whether or not the government is being honest. But it’s going further than that. If it goes pear-shaped, it’s the scientists’ fault.

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(part 2)

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SDK: The prime minister believed in the herd immunity programme. In other words, if there are enough of us who have had the disease, we’ve got the antibodies and the disease can no longer spread. Enough means about 70 per cent. It’s like a vaccine. You’ve got the antibodies and the disease is just wiped out. That, of course, was how the plagues were eventually wiped out, but the human cost was enormous. Now the chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, did say in one of his press briefings, with the approval of the prime minister standing on his right, ’With herd immunity, it is likely to take a while but we will eventually come out of it.’

HW: Did he admit that it would be at the cost of tens of thousands of deaths?

SDK: The prime minister said, ‘We have to be prepared for losing some of our loved ones, every one of us has to be prepared.’ So, there was that expectation. They consciously allowed the disease to spread.

There was the football match up in Liverpool in early March against a team from Spain. Spain had the epidemic, massively, and we allowed the crowds into Liverpool to attend that match, British and Spanish crowds. It was the best possible way to make sure that it was spread in the country at large. Then we had the Cheltenham races on 10-13 March with a quarter of a million people there – another wonderful way for an epidemic to spread. That was a formula for us to all quickly get immunity by having the disease.

The problem was a delay period before they actually pushed the lockdown button. In that period of time, we all knew that the epidemic was doubling every three to four days. So, in one week it was quadrupling. My analysis was that if they had just gone into lockdown one week earlier – when they began discussing the Ferguson paper [predicting that around 250,000 people would die if we didn’t go into lockdown] we would have a quarter of the number of deaths that we have today. It’s going to turn out to be 40-50,000 unnecessary deaths in this country – unwarranted, a complete cock-up by government.

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Continue ReadingWORSE THAN USELESS BORIS AND HIS NASTY TORY PARTY SCUM :: Mishandling Covid-19 :: Following Politics not Science

WORSE THAN USELESS BORIS AND HIS NASTY TORY PARTY SCUM :: 7 Things The Government Spent Money On Instead Of A Pay Rise For NHS Staff

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7 Things The Government Spent Money On Instead Of A Pay Rise For NHS Staff

£2.6m: Refurbishment for White House-style press briefings

Downing Street has spent more than £2.6 million on renovations in order to hold White House-style press briefings, it was revealed on Saturday.

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£37bn: Spending on troubled Test and Trace system 

HuffPost UK revealed on Thursday that the small print of Sunak’s budget showed the Test and Trace system is to get another £15bn, bringing its total cost to £37bn. The funding for 2021/22 comes on top of this year’s spending allocation of £22bn.

MPs said that the “eye-watering” sums should prompt ministers to do more to prove that the system, run by Tory peer Dido Harding, was giving taxpayers real value for money. 

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£340,000: Payout to Home Office official after Priti Patel bullying claims 

On Thursday, it emerged the government agreed a “substantial” payout to settle a top civil servant’s employment tribunal claim after he quit amid allegations of home secretary Priti Patel’s bullying.

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£4.4bn: Additional costs of Brexit preparations

Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union cost the taxpayer more than £4 billion in additional government costs, according to the Whitehall spending watchdog last March.

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£150m: Millions of unusable face masks

During the early days of the pandemic, the government scrambled to secure deals with suppliers for precious personal protective equipment (PPE). Questions have been raised about many of the contracts, among the most notorious being a deal for 50 million face masks that did not work.

The masks were bought for NHS England from investment firm Ayanda Capital as part of a £252 million contract. But the government said because they used ear-loop fastenings rather than head loops, they may not have fit tightly enough for clinical use. It confirmed in court papers that the masks would not be used in the NHS.

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£60m: Falling short of supplying computers to disadvantaged schools

A £60m contract was awarded for the education department to provide laptops to teachers and disadvantaged children during the lockdown.

But in August, HuffPost UK revealed the scale of the failure to deliver the computers to the poorest communities. Figures obtained by the Children’s Commissioner for England showed 27 academy trusts were left with just one device each.

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£1m: Boris Johnson’s ‘Brexit plane’ gets a red, white and blue makeover 

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Conservative donor Lord Ashcroft gets lucrative chumocracy contract

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https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/dark-money-investigations/revealed-tory-donor-lord-ashcrofts-outsourcing-firm-given-350m-vaccination-contract/

A healthcare company ultimately controlled by leading Tory donor and former party chairman, Lord Ashcroft, has received a £350m contract as part of the government’s COVID-19 vaccination roll-out, openDemocracy has learned.

Last month the Department of Health and Social Care gave the lucrative contract to Medacs Healthcare plc. In recent weeks, the outsourcing company, which specialises in providing staff to the NHS, social care services and private healthcare providers, has been advertising for staff to work on the huge vaccination project.

Medacs is a subsidiary of Impellam Group, a FTSE-listed firm whose largest shareholder is Michael Ashcroft, the Belize-based Conservative peer who has donated millions to the party, including more than £175,000 in the past year.

The award of a major COVID contract to a firm with close ties to the Tories has sparked further questions about politically connected firms benefiting financially from the UK’s pandemic response.

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Medacs was criticised in 2019 when a Care Quality Commission report on a homecare service run by the firm was rated “inadequate”.

The regulator found “that the care people received was not safe. The majority of people’s care calls were not delivered at the time they were expected and people gave examples of where this had impacted significantly upon them and the safety of the care that they received.”

Furthermore the report noted that: “medicines records were not kept up to date and CQC identified instances where medicines records showed a potential overdose”.

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Continue ReadingConservative donor Lord Ashcroft gets lucrative chumocracy contract

UK govt attributing blame for Covid-19 on the general public

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Nishat Siddiqi is a consultant cardiologist based in South Wales. He discusses the UK government under Boris Johnson’s lamentable response to the Coronavirus crisis. Boris ‘the falaffel’ Johnson neglected to attend 5 consecutive Cobra meetings addressing the UK’s response to Coronavirus.

Shifting the Blame

By Nishat Siddiqi

As Britain’s Covid death toll exceeds 100,000, the government has set out to blame the public – but from the very beginning its recklessness, ineptitude and cronyism have paved the way for this tragedy.

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Because reality showed Boris to be wrong, the government has firmly decided that we, the supposedly feckless general public, are primarily to blame. During one of her rare public briefings on the coronavirus, Priti Patel proudly declared that the police have issued 45,000 fines to people who have flouted the rules, saying that a minority of people were putting the health of the nation at risk. Scrolling through Twitter feeds of my fellow doctors, I often see remarks on how the flow of traffic has not reduced, unlike the first lockdown. They ask: “where are all these people going and why aren’t they staying home?”

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Meanwhile, contracts for PPE were awarded to firms with no experience in this field, but with close links to the Conservative Party, often leading to delays, substandard equipment and the waste of millions of pounds. Since 11 March, at least 216 frontline health and social care workers have died from Covid-19, with many complaining about inadequate PPE before succumbing to the virus. The British Medical Association is now calling for all healthcare workers to be given face masks identical to the ones used in ICUs.

Johnson promised a “world beating” test and trace system. But like so many of his promises, the reality was a source of national shame more than pride. The outsourcing to companies with next-to-no experience led to an overwhelmed system with poor communication between private companies and the NHS. The initial policy of discharging elderly patients from hospital back to care homes without testing for the virus was an unforgivable move that led to the virus spreading among some of our most vulnerable people; the fact that this coincided with strict lockdown measures, meaning that many care home residents were denied visits from loved ones, only added to the tragedy.

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As Johnson finally condemns Trump, Britain should examine its own shift to the right

Continue ReadingUK govt attributing blame for Covid-19 on the general public