It’s time to stop all this Government bashing

I AM writing to thank Mr Charlesworth for his illuminating letter regarding the mechanics of the provision of PPE to the NHS.

The creation of one nationwide company (Supply Chain Coordination Ltd) to source, order and distribute PPE to the country’s NHS Trusts is clearly very sensible and stops unscrupulous manufacturers from ripping-off smaller trusts.

However despite his erudite exposition on the workings of the system, his conclusion that an apparent shortage of PPE is all the Government’s fault, for setting up the company in the first place, is sadly flawed.

In order to perform its function, SCCL needs to know from its customers (the NHS Trusts) what items and in what numbers supplies are required.

Acting on the information received from the NHS, one presumes that SCCL then proceeded to order what it was told was needed. The fact that the predictions made by the NHS appear to have been woefully wrong is the fault of the NHS in its instructions to the company, not the Government, who set up the company in the first place to exploit economies of scale.

At the beginning of this crisis exceptional demand led to a temporary shortage of toilet rolls.

At the other end of the scale lockdown drastically reduced demand for petrol and diesel leading to a worldwide glut in oil, causing petrol to plummet in price to less than £1 per litre.

These two simple examples show the difficulty in balancing financially responsible supply strategies against unpredictable demand.

Just as with PPE, the Government was not to blame for the volatility in demand for toiletrolls or the collapse in the price of petrol.

Finally Mr Charlesworth highlights the salary of the (underpaid in my view) CEO of SCCL and compares this with the

“exhausted” union members earning £10.24/hour at the PPE distribution depot, which brings me nicely back to the original point of my first letter asking the left wing to stop the incessant and mis-informed Government bashing.

Giving up control not taking it back

SO, according to Councillor McGuin, we must applaud Dominic Cummings for ‘helping win a Leave campaign against the odds.’

Really?

I imagine the odds were somewhat shifted in favour of Leave by Boris Johnson saying on three occasions that Turkey would soon be joining the EU (it wouldn’t) with the implied threat that many Turks would soon be coming here. Add to that the infamous Farage poster of the refugees and it is apparent how the vote was won.

And that’s without the overspend investigated by the Electoral Commission.

Cummings certainly came up with a good slogan – Take Back Control. It is brief and to the point and essentially meaningless.

Most people will continue to be denied any real control and the UK is about to surrender all manner of controls regarding food safety, from chlorinated chicken to use of pesticides that will suit US agri-business and end up damaging UK farmers.

‘Unfair’ to say that this government has ‘cost thousands of lives’? How else to describe the dubious achievement of the highest death rate in Europe?

If ‘Get Brexit Done‘ won the election (and the Tories repeated it often enough) and it was another Cummings slogan, then we know who to thank.

Pity poor Britain.