Johnson gov’t losing the Covid battle on the frontlines and headlines

When the Daily Mail finally admits the government it helped foist into power is nothing more than a veneer of populist slogans – you know as a government, you’ve been unveiled as a worthless profligate band of spurious frauds. The Boris Johnson government has been tested in a crisis and emphatically failed the nation in its entirety. This is what the DM came out with on Wednesday:

 

“By a country mile, the greatest misstep has been the shambles over mass testing. If Britain is to emerge from this nightmare (relatively) quickly, it is vital we ramp up an expansive screening programme. The failure to order enough testing kits is simply unforgiveable. Let’s not beat about the bush: It has left the NHS with one hand tied behind its back. Early last month, ministers said 10,000 a day would be checked, rising swiftly to 25,000. In fact, the figure stands at a paltry 8,000. One in five doctors and nurses must sit idle because they or a family member have displayed symptoms – even if they’re fit as a fiddle.”

 

Germany is competently managing 50,000 Covid tests a day.

When this crisis is over, Britain faces another – charging straight at Brexit when British companies have had no time to repair their businesses from Covid-19 and no time to prepare for the transition – even if they could afford to do so. It is anticipated that 60 per cent of British firms will run out of money is just twelve weeks time. The Daily Mail should remember this when it gets back on its high horse using immigration (people who helped us through C19) and the EU (who offered PPE and ventilation equipment) as their whipping boys.

The Independent went for the lack of PPE for frontline medics as its headline, so did the ‘I’, The Guardian (plus lack of ventilators), The Telegraph, The Times and the Mirror. The Dail Mail though, wishing to cash in on the crisis has decided that it and it alone has pressured Boris Johnson into getting more equipment to the frontline.

 

 

Even the Daily Star had a go at Johnson. Only The Sun stood with the government by wanting a ‘clap of honour’ every Thursday night – and an article about making home brew beer!

Unlike every newspaper in Britain, TruePublica has taken two positions throughout this coronavirus crisis. The first is that the government will fail to handle it properly and professionally with its primary role in mind – to protect the people from harm  – and second that the mainstream media would use the crisis to clickbait the entire nation and flood the public narrative by scaremongering. Sadly, both of those predictions has come true.

Because of that, the Covid-19 crisis – a battle of people trying to protect the vulnerable is being lost. Both those medics (not forgetting the entire support network of ambulance drivers, porters, cleaners, carers and so on) on the frontlines and the vulnerable will die in greater numbers than necessary. The Boris Johnson government is culpable for those deaths. If the government was a company, it would be guilty of corporate manslaughter and those responsible would be facing jail.

Testing for CV19 has more than one benefit as the government well knows. Not only does it identify those that need isolating, it creates a track and trace system for those who have been in contact – but it also means that those who have tested positive and recovered mean they can get back in the fight on the frontlines. It also means that about 50 per cent of the working population (as that is what is thought to be the case) could go back to work and keep the wheels on the economy moving albeit slower. Germany, as a number of other countries are doing went in that direction – Britain is still going the ‘herd immunity’ route.

We now know the Conservative government were given warnings about this inevitable crisis in four separate reports spanning back to 2011. We know the government carried out operation Cygnus in 2016 – a three-day exercise to test the NHS for a flu pandemic and we know what the report’s findings were;  that the health service would not have enough intensive care beds and most crucially the NHS would be woefully ill-equipped to deal with it without ventilators. That report was binned and disregarded in both 2016 and 2018 despite the severe warnings of the Chief Medical Officer of the day, Sally Davies.

The government downgraded this coronavirus as late as 21st March this year from a ‘High Consequence Infectious Disease‘ to one that is not considered a danger to public health. There has been no explanation from the government as to why. Speculation would lead anyone to think that they are attempting, in advance, to defend themselves from legal action.

In the meantime, Boris Johnson has hired, no doubt at public expense, the spin doctor who masterminded his election victory in December to slogan up their failings. No doubt they will attempt to shift the blame onto the EU, the Chinese or indeed may scapegoat one of their own to save their skins.

The Covid-19 crisis has tested the adequacy of this government and its leadership from top to bottom. It has kicked the tyres of its competence and found it to be managerially deficient, ill-prepared, uncaring and sitting in a blame-gaming culture. It has reacted to newspaper headlines and public opinion far more than leading us through troubled times. Johnson is not Churchill, his government not unified, no matter how much he fantasises about it.

How on earth anyone could think that this level of incompetence would have the skillsets to manage the greatest crisis of our economic future as Brexit will do is frankly, beyond me.

Lastly, for all those people collecting their pensions who overwhelmingly voted (demographically) for Boris Johnson to Get Brexit Done – don’t forget he was prepared to sacrifice you all because you’re not part of his herd are you? To him and his team – you are expendable fodder in his failing plan.

 

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