Right from the beginning of this pandemic, the Tory government has based its strategy on lies. It would have been impossible for the government to be honest with the people of the UK about shortages of staff, PPE and testing capacity, because that would have required an admission that the NHS had been driven to its knees by public expenditure cuts and private-sector looting over the past ten years, something the Tories would not be prepared to give.
Against all the evidence on the ground, and the constant chorus of complaints from professional health bodies and public sector trade unions, the spokespersons of the government, day-in and day-out, have blagged their way through one press briefing after another.
The most recent scandal has been the attempt by the government to cover up the thousands of unnecessary deaths of staff and residents in care homes. On May 15, Health Minister Matt Hancock gave us this: “Right from the start we’ve tried to throw a protective ring around our care homes. We set out our first advice in February… we’ve made sure care homes have the resources they need.”
“you will be held to account”
In fact, this is a blatant untruth. Palliative care doctor and author of the bestselling book, Dear Life, Your Life In My Hands, Rachel Clarke, tweeted this in response, “This is categorically untrue. Care homes were left without testing. Without contract tracing. Without PPE. Without support. You can deny it all you like, Matt Hancock, but we were witnesses – we ARE witnesses – and believe me you will be held to account.”
Rachel Clarke’s view will be supported by care home workers up and down the country who will have seen with their own eyes the lack of PPE and testing and the government policy – as a result of directives from the top of the NHS – of ‘seeding’ care homes with infected patients by shifting them from hospital Intensive Care units during March.
As of a week ago, the official UK death toll from Covid-19 has passed the 40,000, mark. Of these, there have been almost 10,000 care home deaths. It is likely, however, that this number is an underestimate, because of the fact that there are thousands of ‘collateral’ deaths that would not have occurred without the coronavirus crisis – patients suffering from heart disease, cancer and other conditions that would have been easily treatable had the NHS and care system not been so over-loaded by Covid-19. It is estimated that the total deaths in care homes is actually over 20,000
Everything is jam tomorrow
Everything the government has celebrated for months has been jam tomorrow and the right-wing press, always eager to minimise criticism of ‘their’ government, has gone along with happy headlines about ‘vaccines’ and new ‘tests’ that will soon make everything better again.
Even in its testing regime, the government has been found out. The UK Statistics Authority has raised its own concerns about the way the government reported on the number of tests it claims to be conducting when it claimed to have hit its target. This follows the Health Service Journal’s revelation at the beginning of this month that the Tories moved the goalposts.
Instead of just counting tests that had actually been done, in order to claim they had reached 100,000 tests a day they suddenly decided to count tests that were ‘in the post’. The government total for April 30, the HSJ explained, included “the 27,497 home kits distributed by Amazon and the Royal Mail on behalf of the government”. In total, the HSJ explained, out of the apparent 100,000 tests ‘done’ as many as 40,000 were in the post.
It even needed a letter from the head of the UK Statistics Authority to Matt Hancock, asking for clarification. “We urge government,” Sir David Norgrove wrote, “to update the covid-19 national testing strategy to show more clearly how targets are being defined, measured and reported”, adding that the data published was of “limited detail about the nature and types of testing and it [was] hard to navigate to the best source of information”.
Aggressive interviewing
What makes the constant lying of the government even more difficult to stomach is the apparent unwillingness of Labour politicians to shout about it. Some of the aggressive interviewing of Tory ministers by Piers Morgan on Good Morning Britain have circulated on social media. They have circulated precisely because he has seemed at times to be the only political commentator or interviewer to articulate the indignation felt by front-line workers. Morgan is no radical; far from it, he is an out-and-out reactionary on most issues. But it comes to something when comments on social media describe him as the ‘leader of the opposition’.
Labour leader Keir Starmer might be ‘forensic’ in his cross-examinations during Prime Minister’s Question Time, but that cuts no ice with millions of workers who are suffering hardship and worries over the pandemic. Starmer’s deliberate contrast with Corbyn’s style of leadership –repeatedly emphasising the need to be a ‘responsible’ opposition – makes him look weak and ineffectual alongside a Tory strategy of conscious lies and bluster. Millions of workers are demanding that someone in authority should articulate their anger and outrage at Johnson’s bumbling handling of the pandemic – bumbling, that is, except when it comes to handing lucrative contracts to the private sector, in which case it is as ‘forensic’ as anything Starmer might manage.
Good impersonation of the Invisible Man
But what we are getting from the Leader of the Opposition, most of the time, is at best a half-hearted admonishment of Johnson, and at worst, a good impersonation of the Invisible Man. There will indeed be a reckoning for the Tories’ mishandling of Covid-19. But it will not come because of anything the Labour leaders does or says; it will be despite the record of the Labour leader. It will be because of the experience that millions of people have gone through. It will be a reckoning that will have implications for the long-term viability of the Tory government but implications, too, for the viability of the right-wing’s currently in control at the top of the Labour Party.
May 18, 2020
