Oversight and scrutiny

Yesterday, Parliament "debated" and approved the five and a half week old SI that the Minister for Health passed, which had the effect of removing many basic rights; freedom of movement, assembly, work and so on.

I put debate in quotation marks, as it seems the system used by Parliament don't allow for interventions, so Ministers and MPs conducted one rambling speech after another.

Not that the lockdown wasn't needed, but the removal of fundamental rights, and their continuing suspension is a cause for concern. A cause for concern, because as we have seen through the Brexit process, and now this pandemic, Parliament is apparently viewed by large parts of the Conservative Party and Government as an inconvenience, something to be avoided and circumvented if possible.

Even now, with hundreds dying a day, most oversight is via the daily press briefing, where the Minister presenting gets to choose who he takes questions from, and no follow up question to any mealy-mouthed answers is allowed.

The decision not to continue with mass testing in the middle of March means that since then the Government and health officials literally have to guess at how the virus is spreading through the country. Mass testing is critical if and when the restrictions are lifted, so that region be region, city by city, town by town, any increase in infections can be identified as soon as possible and restrictions reimposed.

So that 8,500 officials to trace contacts is now being sourced, hoping to be active by the middle of the month. This should have been in place already, and indicates piss poor planning by the Government, with no clear plan on how to exit the current lockdown.

The Government has been more concerned with "grand gesture" politics, rather than policies for the good of public health.

Take the "Nightingale" "hospitals": the London one is to be mothballed, with it only ever using a tiny fraction of its capacity of 4,000 beds. Others have had no patients at all.

Really.

Because, it seems, there is more to a hospital than beds in a building; it needs staff and equipment. The London Nightingale might have had 4,000 beds, but if there was only staff for 50 patients or less, then it is an empty gesture. Headlines today, and the news cycle moves on and gets forgotten. Rather than ask where the staff to run the hospitals came from; an ICU bedded patient needs 1:1 care from a specialist nurse. No extra nurses, no extra capacity! If only the compliant media had thought to ask!

Rather than participate in a pan-European PPE and ventilator purchasing program, why not get companies that had never made medical equipment design and make them? Great headlines as the contracts announced, and when they are approved and save lives, more Great British headlines. But the Government sent the wrong specifications out to the manufacturers, took so long to make and could not get approval. The scheme was quietly dropped. But the Government got great headlines for a week, and meanwhile people died in their thousands.

Johnson lauds his Government's apparent success. Yes, the word "apparent" doing a huge amount of work, possibly the hardest working thing in the UK now, except frontline NHS staff, and the rest of the underpaid and undervalued people who have kept the country running, red and clapping at eight on Thursday.

Releasing the restrictions too early, or without mass testing and tracing will just result in a second, larger wave. And more deaths. So the very same people who screwed up so badly in January, February and the beginning of March, that made the 50,000 deaths inevitable, will be the same that decide how and when the lockdown ends.

Be very afraid.