They should be ashamed
EFFECTIVE test and trace systems have been crucial in suppressing the virus round the world. New Zealand has kept deaths down to 25 – yes, just 25 – compared to the 50,000 deaths in Johnson’s Britain.
When the Government set up the British Test and Trace system in the spring, it claimed that it would be world-beating. Yet now we are in November and the reality is that the system has been so ineffective that it is now officially admitted to have negligible effect in reducing the ‘R’ value, the number of people infected by each person who catches the disease.
How have we gone from world-beating to failure in a few months, while spending vast amounts of money?
The Government put one of their cronies in charge, a Conservative peer married to a Conservative MP. She had previously run a mobile phone company which lost tens of thousands of subscribers’ personal details to hackers – and when a House of Commons select committee held an enquiry, it became embarrassingly obvious that she had little idea of what was going on in the company she was paid a fortune to run.
Then, as part of the Tory drive to privatisation, the system was given to companies with a track record of mistakes and failures, rather than local health teams with a much better record. But Tory hatred of the public sector is more important to Boris and his chums!
Thousands of operatives being paid by the taxpayer were sitting around playing games on their smartphones rather than phoning people who’d been in close contact with virus cases. They hadn’t been given anyone to phone.
Other operatives were made to do training courses on fire safety in office blocks even though they were working from home. So
50,000 have died in Britain while other countries have done better – this Government should be ashamed.
John Creswick
via email
OUR PM IS SO WEAK
WHILE Britain is the first European country to lose 50,000 people to the coronavirus – tragedies felt by families the length and breadth of Britain – Downing Street has been consumed by infighting instead of fighting the pandemic.
The PM has finally sacked Dominic Cummings, the unelected and toxic Rasputin figure who used Boris as his puppet for so long, treated elected MPs and even cabinet ministers with contempt, forced out senior civil servants for the crime of giving good advice, installed his own man as Government communications chief and briefed against Boris’s fiancée as ‘Princess Nut Nuts.’
He had even strong-armed Boris
Johnson into allowing him to stay on at Number Ten after he drove from London to Durham while suffering from coronavirus, and then went on a 60-mile round trip to Barnard Castle “to test his eyesight” in contravention of the lockdown rules.
Boris knew how damaging that escapade was to his Government’s standing, but he was too weak to sack the puppet master who pulled his strings.
But ultimately the fault lies with Boris, not Dominic Cummings. It was the Prime Minister’s weakness of character that allowed him to be manipulated for too long.
Now that Cummings and his sidekicks have gone, who will fill the vacuum which has been created by their departure? It certainly won’t be Boris who grows to fill the hole where a Prime Minister should be, that train left the station a long time ago.
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