This is the front cover of The Lancet this week:
The article from which the quotation comes is by noted health journalist, Richard Horton. He says:
A former minister for health in England wrote to me that “The COVID-19 inquiry will make us the laughing stock in the eyes of the world.” But it is worse than that. The level of criminal incompetence exposed by recent witnesses to the UK COVID-19 Inquiry, chaired by Baroness Heather Hallett, has proven that many, if not most, of over 230 000 deaths were preventable. Amid the claims of extreme misogyny, profanity, and chaos that litter the evidence is a story of complete government breakdown.
His conclusion is:
The lies, deceptions, and callous conceit that characterised the UK's initial response to COVID-19 must surely bring some kind of reckoning.
But will it? The decision will be for Labour to take. And will they prosecute their predecessors knowing that they too will completely compromise themselves for the sake of the false god of balancing the books? I really can't see it. And so, the corruption will continue.
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Starmer is the Establishment’s man in the Labour party.
I fear that you are right.
What chance then of a civil case against all those who have been seen to be profoundly negligent, not to mention corrupt and incompetent? Decisions being made that would knowingly lead to more deaths. I would have thought that there are 10s if not 100s of thousands of family and friends who have lost loved ones who would support such a case.
Relying on a future government to take such an action sets a questionable political precedent, of one party seeking to take revenge on another, however justified it might seem.
There seems much more chance of that
Yes indeed to Robin Stafford’s prosecution of a civil case against the deliberate decisions to ignore the science and cull the old and infirm – which is still going on in the non-strategy of ‘living with’ . People are still catching it in hospitals, schools, workplaces which have no mitigation such as clean air or mask wearing it’.
Richard – where to start some kind of class action?
https://uk.practicallaw.thomsonreuters.com/6-618-0351?contextData=(sc.Default)&transitionType=Default&firstPage=true
I wonder if it’s one for Good Law Project?
Sadly, I suspect this level of incompetence is par for the course in government. Certainly government knowledge of economics seems almost entirely absent (despite your best endeavours).
“Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence”.
Over the last forty years the Tories have invented a new principle of Government.
The best way to cover-up catastrophic decisions is to keep producing them at such a rate that the later ones obliterate all memory of the earlier disasters.
Prior to Covid it was discovered that the Tories had succeeded in actually stopping the Century old trend of British people living longer. Excessive deaths were said to be in the hundreds of thousands, particularly concentrated in poorer areas where age at death was actually declining.
Somehow this appears to have all been swept under the carpet. Recently, unchallenged Tory journalists and Tory politicians have once again started lying that many of Britain’s problems are caused by people living longer.
I think I might settle for prosecutions for all the fraud, grift, corruption, VIP lane, backhanders. It’s at least possible that might collect some of the real criminals as bycatch.
The Lancet article was also covered this morning in the talkingupscotlandtwo.com blogsite. The gist of it:
The WHO declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern on 30 January 2020, but the absence of any UK-wide pandemic strategy, the disappearance of Johnson for 10 days on holiday, the resultant lack of leadership and dithering by the Cabinet were catastrophic for all UK citizens, but it had a disproportionate impact in Scotland. It took Westminster until 1st April to pass the Coronavirus (Scotland) bill into law in order to transfer necessary powers to Holyrood, but it took until 6th April before royal assent was given (i.e. 67 days after the WHO decaration). It’s therefore no surprise that Nicola Sturgeon was raging: https://twitter.com/i/status/1271449299721883649 Her submissions to the UK Covid enquiry will be interesting, to put it mildly.
The separate Scottish Covid Enquiry will no doubt cover all this in due course, but in the meantime a civil case would undoubtedly get strong support in Scotland.
https://www.thenational.scot/news/19205022.covid-update-scotland-nicola-sturgeon-says-pandemic-inquiry-begin-year/
https://www.independentsage.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Schools-reopening.pdf
Interesting that the third piece of evidence to the people’s covid inquiry from Scotland was put in the International section, but it was the same as the first one here.
Missing from the 230,000 is the +/- 130,000 deaths caused by a quite unnecessary austerity.
Thus 360,000 deaths over circa 10 years (2012 to 2022). Expressed another way: 36,000 deaths per year is more than 50% of the total civilian death for the whole of WW2.
I used 2012 because that was when austerity started to bite.
Add to the above assorted other scandals (rise in destitution, rise in chid poverty/hunger) and one wonders how the current gov has the temerity to even turn up in the HoC.
Maybe the tories should rename themselves: The party of death?
The comments calling for prosections are quite right – but this will never happen – or if it does it will be a token – Cummings or some such.
The real gulity people will, as always in nice polite civilised England, get away scot free -…………… well slap on the wrist stuff – they lose an election.
As Baldwin remarked in the 1920s “power without responsibility, the perogative of the harlot throughout the ages” – he applied it to newspaper owners – but it could equally apply to those that think themselves fit to rule.
https://www.peoplescovidinquiry.com/inquiry-report
Michael Mansfield chaired the People’s Covid Inquiry. It’s titled Misconduct in Public Office.
Both Johnson and Hancock have been charged with it, and Mansfield has sent letters to the MET and the government.
https://36085122-5b58-481e-afa4-a0eb0aaf80ca.usrfiles.com/ugd/360851_d941f7d066c84b82a1c183cf49edd4c7.pdf
The government has just put off the inevitable, in the hope that most of those giving evidence will have forgotten what happened sufficiently for their evidence to be queried.
The Good Law Project gave evidence to the inquiry.
On three occasions since WW2 the Tories have been power for more than 10 consecutive years [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_British_governments]. On each occasion their last years have been mired in scandal and corruption of one sort or another. Labour have only once been in power for a decade or more once in that time. The cash for honours at the end of that reign showed they were no better.
It seems that we need to change ruling parties more often. The trouble is, doing so forcibly means having a dictatorship at worst, or a minority government at best. Parliamentary reform is the only way forward.
200 years ago people campaigned to change that parliament and finally succeeded in 1834, but not without a lot of protest and some bloodshed. The parliament that they got was nothing like what we could call democratic but it was a huge step in the right direction.
Do we have any sort of momentum behind change as they did? Yes. Lots of people are willing to take to the streets. Will that be enough? What else could be done? I hope there will be some sense coming to the fore. I suspect there will be none. If there is no change, what will the consequences be?
You appear to be talking about the Chartists.
The only one of the reforms they called for that has not been adopted worldwide as the basis for Democratic government is the demand for yearly General Elections.
They argued that any MP assured of spending more than a year in London would become hopelessly corrupted by the system and cease listening to the people that had elected them.
I used to think that they were probably right but that such short periods of government were simply impractical and counter-productive.
But as the years go by I think that the balance of argument for achieving genuine modern democratic government is now strongly weighted in their favour.