50,000 people have died because of this Government yet Starmer Stays Silent
It’s not often that I
agree with George Osborne, the former Tory Chancellor of Exchequer, but it is
difficult to disagree with him when he gloats
that ‘Labour has nothing to
say’.
COVID-19 has already officially killed over twice the number of
civilians who died in the Blitz (43,000). If one takes excess deaths in the same period then
the figure is nearly three times.
Yet despite this the Tories have just taken
a lead in the opinion polls. And what is Starmer’s response? A devastating
indictment of the Tories record on COVID-19? No an appeal
to nationalism, the flag, war and patriotism. As Samuel
Johnson remarked patriotism is ‘the last refuge of the scoundrel.’ Of course it's easier than proposing a wealth tax or an end to privatisation.
Those 50,000 people represent people who could have survived. If a parent
was responsible for the negligence that this government is guilty of they would be prosecuted for gross negligence manslaughter.
Boris Johnson likes to compare himself with Winston Churchill, who for
all his many sins was nonetheless a rousing war leader. Johnson by contrast is
a puffed up buffoon.
Johnson is going to end up killing possibly 4 or more times the number of
civilians who died under Churchill, in a period of little over 1 not 5 years.
It is a comparison that this amoral Bunterish sociopath is quiet about.
Of course not all the 108,013 current deaths are
Johnson’s responsibility. On January 24th
98,000 had died in Britain compared to 52,087 in Germany, a country with 17
million more people than us. But Germany has
nearly 5 times as many critical care beds per 100,000 people as us (29.2 v
6.6).
Between 2010 and 2020 more
than 17,000 beds were
cut from the original total of 144,455. Between 1987/88 and 2019/20, the
total number of NHS hospital beds fell
by 53 per cent – from 299,4000 to 141,000. Yet at the same time the
population has grown from 47.3 million to 56 million.
If there was any justice, then Johnson and Matthew Hancock, to say
nothing of Mogg and the rest of the Cabinet, would be sharing a cell in
Belmarsh Prison whilst Julian Assange was being freed. It is no accident that Britain has the highest death toll in Europe:
On 30th January the World Health Organisation declared
that the outbreak constituted a Public Health Emergency of International
Concern. On 31 January Britain left the European Union.
On 3 February 2020 Johnson gave a major speech at the Royal Naval College
in Greenwich. It was a speech filled
with “supreme national self-confidence”, as he suggested that the
UK was “on the slipway” of global
economic dominance.
This was a full month
after the Coronavirus pandemic had been announced by the Chinese. It was the
first time Johnson had mentioned the subject. He was full of his normal
patriotic bombast about how Britain was a ‘world beater’.
“When [trade] barriers are going up, and when there
is a risk that new diseases such as coronavirus will trigger a panic and a
desire for market segregation that go beyond what is medically rational, to the
point of doing real and unnecessary economic damage, then at that moment
humanity needs some government, somewhere, that is willing at least to make the
case powerfully for freedom of exchange.”
Britain, the
prime minister cried, was
“ready to take off its Clark Kent spectacles, leap
into the phone booth and emerge with its cloak flowing as the supercharged
champion” of economic freedom in any stand-off with public health restriction.
In other words Johnson would not be deflected by a mere pandemic from keeping
the economy open. This was his first fatal mistake. He counterposed the economy
to eliminating the virus, whereas they are both complementary.
It was not that Johnson had no warning. In 2016 a government
pandemic drill took place which predicted that the NHS would be plunged into
crisis by an infectious and deadly disease. Codenamed Exercise
Cygnus, it highlighted shortages of intensive care beds, vital equipment
and even mortuary space. But its conclusions have never
been made public. See How
did Britain get its coronavirus response so wrong?
More than a quarter of all deaths have occurred in the last month.
Whatever excuses for the initial surge of deaths there can be no excuse for the
bloody slaughter that is now taking place with over 1,400 deaths today (3
February).
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When Boris Johnson announced
on 26 January that he was ‘deeply sorry’, with head bowed he explained that
“we truly did
everything that we could, and continue to do everything that we can, to
minimise [the] loss of life and to minimise suffering.”
Johnson was lying and not for the first time. Yet quite amazingly Keir Starmer
had nothing to say. Literally nothing.
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| Clueless - no politics, no personality |
Throughout the crisis Starmer has echoed Johnson, urging the opening of
schools at the earliest possible moment. He didn't criticise the 'back to work' message still less the return to schools. That is the real reason he sacked
Rebecca Long Bailey from the Shadow Cabinet, as she had supported the teachers union,
the NEU, which refused to put their members at risk. Starmer preferred unity
with Johnson in the ‘national interest’.
Starmer had weightier matters on his mind. The campaign to eradicate another
virus, Labour’s non-existent ‘anti-Semitism’ was what concerned him. Dancing to
the tune of the Board
of Deputies and the Jewish
Labour Movement (for which read the Israeli Embassy) was his pastime.
 |
| Labour is not now about policy but the cult of the personality - except that Starmer doesn't have one |
Suspending and expelling Labour members, in
their thousands if necessary, was considered of far greater import than a
mere pandemic. The protection of the Apartheid State of Israel was
a higher priority by someone who described
himself as a ‘Zionist’ i.e. racist, ‘without
qualification.’.
Starmer has failed to lay a glove on Johnson for the simple reason that
they both share the same pro-capitalist neo-liberal ideas around the benefits
of privatisation in the NHS. It is no accident that Starmer has failed to
mention the corruption in government procurement or the appointment of cronies
like Dido Harding as Head of the National Institute of Health Protection.
The real leaders
of the Opposition over COVID have been Marcus Rashford and Piers Morgan. 56%
and 32% of people think
that they have done a better job of challenging Johnson than Starmer (29%). Yet
the Labour Left – Momentum, the Campaign Group of MPs, CLPD and LRC – have refused
to call for Starmer to quit still less ensure that he is challenged for the
leadership this year.
It is not as if Starmer and the Labour Opposition, if that is what it can
be called, has lacked advice. Professor Stephen Griffin, a virologist at the
University of Leeds said:
“This
was absolutely avoidable,. You can't be reactive in a pandemic, you have to be
proactive and act ahead of the curve. … The
fact we've had three lockdowns is the ultimate expression of failure, I’m
afraid, because you should not need to have more than one.”
Likewise Professor Tang said
that:
All
this bouncing backwards between lockdown, relaxation, lockdown, relaxation –
we're in the third one now – it just fuels the epidemic. You're always chasing
the virus, and if you're chasing it, you'll never catch it.”
How
is it that China was able to get a grip on the virus despite having been at the
centre of it? China sealed off
Wuhan. It clamped down and tested every
single person.
The
key failure was the lack of any strategy. After all our neo-liberal rulers
believe that the market will take care of everything. There is no need for planning
which smacks of socialism. If Johnson had taken care to study the economic strategy
of Churchill during the war he would have known that the economy was centrally
controlled with nothing being produced without government approval. That is
what Joe Biden is beginning to do in America with the commandeering of factories to produce the vaccine.
If
the war against the Nazis had been left to private enterprise to finance then
we would have lost. Likewise contracting
out PPE, test and trace and social care to the market was always going to be a
disaster. Without a plan it was inevitable that we would lurch from one crisis
to another, one wave to another, one ad-hoc measure to another.
On March 16th, a
week before the British lockdown and when Italy was already in the grip of the
pandemic, WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus had a simple message ‘ test, test, test” calling
the pandemic “the defining global health
crisis of our time”.
“All countries should be
able to test all suspected cases, they cannot fight this pandemic blindfolded.”
Without
testing, cases cannot be isolated and the chain of infection will not be
broken, he said. He was of course ignored as Britain had no plan for mass
testing of the population, without which it was impossible to get on top of the
pandemic.
Below
are just some of the things that helped make Britain Europe’ COVID capital.
These are just some of the fatal mistakes that Johnson made and on which
Starmer was silent.
i.
There was never any zero covid strategy. The attempt was
to contain COVID-19, not eliminate it.
ii.
February 2020 was the
missing month. Johnson was taking
a break at the 3,500 acre government retreat Chevening in Kent. At the New
Year he had stayed
on the private island of Mustique, at someone else’s expense. We had 7 weeks
from the WHO announcement on January 30 to March 23 to stock up on PPE, create
more intensive care beds and make preparations for mass hospitalisation.
Nothing was done.
iii. The original lockdown, on
March 23 2020 was one week too late. Research from Imperial College showed
that up to 26,800 deaths could have been prevented.
iv.
Johnson and his ministers,
under the influence of Dominic Cummings,who argued against
strict measures even “if that means some
pensioners die, too bad” pursued a ‘herd immunity’
strategy before abruptly changing course as the implications of a million+
deaths began to dawn on them. For the first 3 weeks of March 2020 the
government had pursued a herd immunity strategy. Chief Scientific Advisor Sir
Patrick Vallance said it
was ‘desirable’.
v.
You can read the genesis of
the Tories’ ‘herd
immunity’ strategy and their retreat from it in the letter
(below) that Michael Rosen, who himself contracted COVID-19, sent to the
Guardian. The Guardian refused to
publish it because it undercut Jonathan Freedland’s narrative that anti-vaxxers
rather than the government were to blame for the massive death toll.
vi.
Johnson missed 5 meetings of
Cobra called to discuss the crisis as his attention focussed on his next
holiday with Carrie Symmonds.
vii.
The early crisis of a lack
of PPE was directly caused
by the outsourcing of PPE, like so much of the NHS to private contractors. Instead
of a 3 months stock of PPE the cupboard was bare. ‘Just in time’ was their
business model, oblivious to the fact that hospitals are not car factories.
As the Deputy Chair of the BMA David Wrigley said:
‘Since the passing of the
Health and Social Care Act in 2012 the NHS in England has been forced down a
route of increased marketisation and privatisation – and the Government has
accelerated its aggressive outsourcing to private firms during the COVID-19
pandemic,’.
viii.
Between mid-March and
mid-April 25,000 elderly patients were shunted
from hospital to care homes, in order to free up critical care capacity without
their being tested for the virus. To this day the government defends this. The
result was that care homes became incubators for the virus with what amounted
to a cull of the elderly.
If the government had used
February and early March to plan then the Nightingale hospital and similar
facilities could have been readied to take in this 25,000.
ix.
Of course if Britain had not
engaged in 10 years of austerity and privatisation, the effect of which was to
reduce the NHS’s capacity, then we would have been better prepared.
x.
The UK came out of lockdown
too soon. Professor
Julian Tang, a virologist at Leicester University told
how
“The lockdown did bring cases right down, but the
problem is that the virus wasn’t completely gone. If you relax all the restrictions as they did
in summer, with Eat Out to Help Out and allowing domestic and international,
you're going to let the virus grow – and it did.”
xi.
Throughout the summer
workers were being urged to return to work.
Travel on public transport was encouraged.
xii.
At the beginning of
September Johnson ignored calls from SAGE for a ‘circuit breaker’ of 2 weeks.
Having caught the virus himself, Johnson clearly knew better than the
scientists.
xiii.
Schools were kept open thus
contributing to the spread of the virus. Children may not easily get the virus
but they can infect others.
xiv.
Johnson’s ‘world beating’
track and trace system has proved an utter
disaster. Johnson promised last June to provide a 24-hour turnaround for all
in-person tests by the end of the month – but even now that has not happened.
And without providing financial support for those forced to isolate no track and
trace system will work.
xv.
There was no attempt to introduce quarantining at airports. I
flew out with my children to Italy in mid-July and came back two weeks later.
Apart from a temperature test when we departed there was no attempt to test us
for the virus. We entered Heathrow without any difficulties apart from getting the
automatic gates to open!
What is Starmer For?
Throughout the COVID crisis
Starmer has played ‘follow my leader’, Boris Johnson. Far from mapping out a
strategy of his own, Starmer has been content to applaud Johnson from the
sidelines. Any Opposition leader worth their salt would have greeted the announcement of
100,000 deaths with a call for Johnson’s resignation and the hapless Hancock
with him.
Starmer was more focussed on
removing Scottish Labour leader Richard Leonard, at
the behest of wealthy donors.
Yet the vigour that Starmer
and his glove puppet David Evans have shown in using ‘anti-Semitism’ to attack
anti-racists and anti-Zionists, Jewish and non-Jewish, is in marked contrast to
his inability to lay a glove on Johnson.
The time has come for groups
like Momentum, to shake off their lethargy and languor and campaign for the
removal of Starmer. When Corbyn was elected the Right immediately organised to
replace him. Yet the Campaign Group of Labour MPs are content to say nothing
and do nothing. Unlike Corbyn, who won against Owen Smith with an enhanced
majority Starmer and Rayner could well lose such is the level of
dissatisfaction with them. The question is whether they have the guts to do so.
We even had the appeaser-in-chief, John McDonnell, saying that "Keir's got this exactly right.' Such are the lengths that Labour's 'left' will go to avoid confronting the obvious. The only thing that McDonnell and the Campaign Group lack are some placards they can hang around their necks saying 'please walk all over me'.
Tony Greenstein
Michael Rosen’s Unpublished
Letter to the Guardian on Covid-19 and the Tories Herd Immunity Strategy
Dear Sir/Madam
Jonathan Freedland’s comment ‘Lies about Covid,
insisting that it was a hoax cooked up by the deep state, led millions of
people to drop their guard and get infected’ (‘Trump may be gone but his big
lie will linger’ Guardian, Jan 15) misses the point. If we look closely at what
was being said in official circles in March 2020, we can see quite clearly
there was a plan to create ‘herd immunity’ without vaccination.
Robert Peston had his usual inside story on March 12
in ‘The Spectator’ with a headline “Herd immunity’ will be vital to stopping
Coronavirus’ and wrote of this desirable outcome without mentioning the
inevitable huge loss of life involved nor the high chance of it being
unachievable.
A day later, 3 government scientists sang the same
tune: Graham Medley told BBC Newsnight, ‘We’re going to have to generate herd
immunity…the only way of developing that in the absence of a vaccine is for the
majority of the population to become infected…’
Sir Patrick Vallance said that morning on the Today programme, ‘Our aim is to try and reduce the peak, broaden the peak, not suppress it completely; also because the vast majority of people get a mild illness, to build up some kind of herd immunity.’ Same day, John Edmunds said, ‘The only way to stop this epidemic is indeed to achieve herd immunity’.
These people were talking of engineering mass death. It’s not as if science is
unaware of the Black Death, Myxomatosis, or Dutch Elm Disease. At the time,
Boris Johnson was appearing on TV telling us that he was shaking hands with
Covid patients.
The extraordinary fact is that this idea of ‘herd
immunity’ without vaccination is lousy biology. No one knew then how long or
short nor how strong or weak the body’s immune response would be to this virus.
No one knew how often it would mutate nor how different the mutations would be
from the original virus. These scientists were gambling with ‘known unknowns’
some of which would result in no ‘herd immunity’.
What’s more, the limited ‘herd immunity’ without
vaccination that occurs naturally usually involves the evolutionary process of
‘breeding out’ (through death, before they reproduce) of those individuals who
are susceptible to the virus and the ‘breeding in’ of those who are resistant,
assuming the resistance is inheritable. This takes generations to effect – if
ever. The problem for this scenario is that the section of the population most
affected by the virus is above ‘breeding’ age! This negates the process by
which evolution favours resistant individuals.
It seems to me horrific that top scientists were able
to put forward their proposals to enact mass killing without being challenged,
either on ethical or biological grounds. If you want to find out why or how
this government has been lax, chaotic, incompetent and cruel in its approach to
Covid-19, it starts here. The consequence is that there have been tens of thousands
of deaths, and there are tens of thousands of us with long term or lifetime
debilitating consequences.
They must never be let off the hook.
Yours faithfully
Michael Rosen
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