Scrap HS2 to pay for furloughing

THE cost of funding furlough is high.

The Government should scrap immediately HS2 and cease paying CEO Mark Thurston’s wholly unjustified £625,000 salary.

We have seen through this crisis how pointless shaving a few minutes off a rail journey is. The estimated £100bn saving would go a long way to make up the cost of furlough.

Procrastinations?

In PMQs Keir Starmer asked the PM to respond to a government statement on Care Home preparedness; to comment on a concern expressed by a leading clinician on how elderly people were decanted from hospitals to care homes without adequate protections; and then he asked PM if he could account for the 10,000 above average deaths in a month that weren’t accounted for in either hospitals or care homes.

In replying the PM denied the existence of the government statement – he then avoided the comment from the clinician and in response to the very worrying question about 10,000 unaccounted-for deaths he ignored it completely and repeated his attempted Churchillian speech from his pre-recorded TV statement on Sunday. Sadly for the PM his attempt to be cast in the mould of Churchill the World War 2 hero has fallen flat.

He is actually much more like the Churchill from World War I who, as First Lord of the Admiralty, led the disaster at Gallipoli which cost tens of thousands of lives and it became known as “Churchill’s Folly”.

And, sadly for the tens of thousands of people who have died so far in this pandemic despite the heroic actions of millions of workers and volunteers , we are being led by a man who is being exposed every day as being so far out of his depth that if it wasn’t so deadly serious it would be a sell-out Whitehall farce.