It's enough to make even Rishi Sunak cry....

THERE is a mantra that may have been heard a lot in the corridors of Whitehall and Westminster this past year. And it is a mantra that has always cost the public purse dear.

It is the eternal cry of the embattled politician, administrator or legislator and it is music to the ears of Public Relations men the world over:

“We must be seen to be doing something...”

It may go a long way to explain why our dear government, backs to the wall in the Covid crisis, has been so busy throwing vast sums of taxpayers' money – this generation and the next two – into the corporate whirlpool run and controlled by their chums in the City and the Corporate headquarters of the world. The place where the politicians themselves hope to end up, guzzling greedily in their declining years.

What the mantra means is never mind what exists we need something new, bigger, shinier that we can “announce” to our public.

So, faced with the disaster that the stocks of PPE so willingly dumped during 'austerity' turned out fundamental when the chips were down, had to be resurrected by spewing dodgy contracts in the direction of any persuasive tycoon willing to swallow a few million of tax money.

So it was that faced with a similar and sudden realisation that actually having a few score spare ITC/HDU wards in mothballs was essential really not just extravagant that cash had to be hurled into the private sector to secure what should have been there already.

And when the shortage of what used to be called Iron Lungs, dumped due to 'austerity' became an issue yet more public money was found to persuade sharp eyed dealers to get busy. Or not very.

So it is that those pointless, unstaffable but hugely impressive and expensive and brilliantly mis-named Nightingale Hospitals came to be built, or at least 'created'. And then dumped, unused.

The list goes on and has now reached its zenith, although to be fair this time the effect has been impressive if arguably over priced.

I refer here to the the fact that, if you throw vast sums of money and promissory notes at organisations used to working in these difficult fields they will come up trumps in short order. I refer to 'Big Pharma' and its truly impressive ability to get brand new vaccines to jab-ready condition in a matter of months.

But there is more, for we have also witnessed the sudden development, construction and staffing of scores of vaccination hubs to deliver the inoculation that will, in the end drive coronavirus down to influenza status. When the job will be handed back to the systems already in place for the job, if tragically under-funded before the sudden need.

Exactly what all this will cost us, the taxpayer, down the line is a closely guarded secret just now. I have noticed that even Rishi Sunak's eyes appear to be watering at times. It will be a lot and take decades to amortise.

Yep, they sure have been seen to be doing something. When not justified by emergency as they are here many of these grand designs would be called vanity projects. Like HS2. What was needed was more investment in the northern transport services, especially east-west. What we have got is a more comfy ride for 20 minutes less for the London-Manchester brigade, usefully passing Birmingham en route. And a chance to charge a lot more for it.

The real problem is that after any period in which Government thinks it has to be able to announce big solutions to urgent problems the same old, same old cry goes up: Can't do that; no money, austerity... all is austerity.

What is wrong with this Government? Can it not get anything right?

I was writing this as Johnson announced further relaxations...

At the outset I have to confess a serious distrust of all Tories and a horror of corruption in high places. So there is no chance I shall be soft in my criticism of Johnson and co. Still less when they have committed the cardinal sin of allowing a special adviser to take such extraordinary control over governmental affairs.

And of course panic causes strange effects. And there has never been more reason for panic than the onset of a killer virus that is a global pandemic. And one for which there is no obvious treatment and as yet no real sign of a vaccine.

But frankly events of the past few months go much further than mere failure to come up to scratch in the extraordinarily tough environment of a global catastrophe.

It all started with the utterly insane idea of 'herd immunity'. For that you need 60-70% of your sample to have had the disease AND be guaranteed immune. That might be OK for the common cold but this things kills and leaves others virtually disabled for life. And while spread is uncomfortably fast it is also too slow to wait that long. The man who said it should have been removed as far from the levers of power as possible. The Isle of Rockall for example. But instead they invited him in... and he is still here!

At my age and with my experience of emergency planning I am utterly astonished at the mess we have got ourselves in. Until, that is, I consider the previous decade of austerity.

Emergencies are planned for. That is a given, or should be. They always happen. Usually at the worst possible time. But this is what you have a Civil Service for. Complete with scientific and medical and technological and logistical expertise to look into the future, judge the need, and provide the essentials.

But the Tories are notoriously bad at planning ahead. And even worse at spending in advance of need. And worse still at laying the foundations of a public and welfare state.

So in the years of austerity they have cut and cut again. And those cuts have more than decimated our levels of preparedness. Made far worse by an accountancy juggle called Just In Time. And another called Current Cost Accounting.

Let me explain a little. Under older regimes you bought in advance what you needed for say one year's production, generation, activity, emergency. And stockpiled it. This was, the bean counters considered too costly. Expensive warehouses, armies of men with clip boards checking date, lifetime etc.

How much better they said to make it when you need it. So empty the warehouses, sack the checkers. Calculate your costs on the real costs, not cost plus storage and maintenance. Prices will come down. Prices did not come down. You may have noticed a steady rise.

And then there was the cost of building stuff. Depreciation. Build a hospital for £100m and calculate that it would lose value at say £5m a year, reaching zero at 20 years when replacement needed to be considered. But wait. That might be OK for Government but businesses need assets. So value the hospital at the cost of replacement RIGHT NOW. That way the asset would grow year on year and you could borrow squillions against the assets. Privatise those state businesses and guess what? They all use CCA instead of Historic Cost Accounting. They all have inflated asset books and vast debts, protected by assets that are actually not worth much at all.

How does this affect Government and emergency planning? Well for emergencies you need hospitals bigger than you do for day by day activity. So some wards were maintained but kept empty against sudden need. Some Intensive Care Units (or HDUs or whatever) ditto. And a score or two of big stuff like ventilators. If you do not have them when the crisis comes you have to build Nightingale units Just In Time.. too late!

And PPE? Yes of course, millions of items in store, kept under review and replaced as time wore on. Hand it all to the private sector and guess what? They dump it, fail to replace, argue for Just in Time (while actually CCA-ing the stuff!). And yes they did. So no PPE when it is needed. And you are not in the buying club either so a scramble to find it when you need it. People die.

And arrangements to use private services? Not kept up to date so not available at time of need. And so thousands of elderly crisis patients are sent back to care home to make space in the hospitals for the crisis you failed to plan for. And thousands die in agony, killing many of their carers.

And now we read of vast millions of contracts placed with unqualified and even insolvent companies to supply critical equipment. And without any safeguarding procedures. And often with mates of cabinet members.

And the much-vaunted Civil Service, who know about all these things and have done for years? Retired, redundant, too costly, austerity.... replaced with unskilled, incompetent special advisers with agendas and secret deals.

You can only blame Johnson and his bunch of buffoons. They were picked for their enthusiasm for Brexit, not their intelligence, experience or proven skills. They are incompetent and inept. They listen too willingly to their backers and their special advisers, fooled into believing these people know best.

Meanwhile the relatively few Tories with real public service ethics have been sidelined or left to grow old and go fallow. There is no way back for a generation. This cadre of clowns has been given five years (FIVE YEARS) to govern by another crackpot decision. They are praying that two things will happen: 1 - we will all forget what utter idiots they were and 2 - that in time they will get the hang of it.

Meanwhile people die, people go hungry, children miss school, families collapse, suicides happen, jobs vanish, food fails to reach the shelves, prices soar, medicines disappear, prices soar, theatre and halls close, libraries vanish, museums get dusty, HS2 never appears but costs squillions, Trident gets replaced but still isn't any use...

Can we really let this go on for another four years?

Complacency at the heart of the process

The row that has erupted about Keir Starmer's attack on the PM over the care home situation has reduced to the level of a 'you did-I didn't' playground spat.
But however you view the quote that Starmer used, what it demonstrates utterly is that the Government was complacent at the time and has remained so since - and that they were not following the science.
It was first published on February 25 and remained in place until March 12.
By Feb 25 it was well known that Covid-19 was into France and appearing in Britain. Indeed current evidence suggest we may have at least one death in January. But leaving that aside. Everyone knows that care homes are rife with viral influenza during the flu season.
So how could anyone state that "it was very unlikely that anyone receiving care in a care home or the community will become infected (with coronavirus)".
But worse the incubation period for coronavirus was not established but it was quickly know that it was up to 14 days. So any advice given at that time needed to be updated daily.
The tragedy is that another two weeks passed without any attempt to ensure that major steps were taken at all levels and in all situations to build up reserves of testing kits, PPE, oxygen, oxygen delivery kit and ventilators.
It all smacks of a piece of guesswork by an adviser rather than anything scientifically based. Indeed one could be forgiven for fearing it has more to do with herd immunity theory. If so it must surely be time for a wholesale clear out of the special adviser dug out at Downing Street?

Out of confusion comes forth obvious guilt....

So my scepticism about the new coronavirus policy was justified. Confusion reigns. Clarity we do not have. And a spike in infection seems highly likely.
Let us start with who should be told first. After discussion and agreement in cabinet (did it happen?) it should be put to Parliament, where it will be further debated and the chance for clarifications can be met. This will be reported on. (This point will recur.) And the devolved nations should be consulted. Clearly they have not as they disagree vehemently with Johnson.
Then the PM or some chosen minister will tell the nation about it. If it warrants that. And they will make an address to the nation. Probably live. To be fair Churchill was often recorded but then his intake of brandy required it so we are told.

So why did Johnson choose to tell the nation first? It can only be for one of two reason or a combination of both.

• First he is not well enough to reliably deliver the message coherently in one take. To be honest he has not looked well since he came out of hospital.
• Second he wanted to ensure clarity and avoid the risk that reportage from a contentious House of Commons might be confusing.

Well the first is OK but frankly this tiny jiggering of the rules and wholesale loss of clarity could have seriously done with some testing in the House.
There is a third available explanation.  Johnson wanted to take credit for the first steps in lifting the lockdown; to be fully identified as the man who did it. Or, to put it another way, Johnson was still playing politics with the life and economy of the nation.

It is now clear that the Government accepts, albeit tacitly, that serious mistakes were made early on. Some even before the pandemic. Emergency stock of PPE was drastically low and under managed. Our capacity for testing, track and trace was similarly depleted, especially against our success in the past.
The NHS was under resourced and what little reserve capacity it had against major emergencies was hopelessly compromised.
But instead of responding rapidly to offset these failings they hesitated. Instead of following the science, as they claim, they delayed doing so. As a result, many things that might have been done as early as February were not done.

• Air travel continued unhindered and has done until now. 
• Major public events were not cancelled. 
• No steps were taken to guard against disaster in the care home. 
• A couple of headline grabbing hospital builds were begun. 

But as late as early March the science was saying lockdown now..They waited again to March 23. Thousands died.
And somewhere the care home situation was allowed to escalate out of control. One could be forgiven for taking the cynical view that I do. The elderly in care homes were NOT offered hospitalisation and thus no ventilators simply to save the NHS. That they could have gone to the Nightingale Hospitals (and still could have until last week) was not it seems considered.
Instead these old, frail people who had lived through the war we so recently lauded, were allowed to lie in their ordinary beds, tended by extraordinary people in less than adequate protective gear, to subside into gasping agony as the disease ate away at their lungs, their kidneys, their livers and finally their lives.
One day, good people of Britain, this man Johnson and his misbegotten gang of fools and rogues must be made to pay.

This is what we need right now to call Government to account

For many decades I have been an avid reader of Private Eye and right now it is doing a far better job of holding Government to account than either the mainstream, the digital or the social media.

Their medical writer(s?) under the pseudonym MD have (has?) this edition done the best job yet of examining the actions - and too many failures - of our national policy. And given I am no expert I am pleased to find that as I have said, following the science does not describe it at all.

From the moment this pandemic reached Britain (whenever that actually was!) errors of policy have followed. For a start of course the emergency supplies of PPE and the 'reserved spare' emergency capacity in the health service had been allowed to wither during ten years of Tory inspired austerity.

On that basis the knee-jerk herd immunity was a disaster. Then came the PPE problem and a devious downgrading of coronavirus to allow lesser protection to, apparently, be allowable.

Then there was the message to care homes – "you have nothing to worry about". In terms of Government intervention they were right. In terms of Covid-19 infection they were woefully wrong.

(MD does not say it but I believe it. That this decision was a cold-blooded means of protecting the weakened and ailing NHS to cope with what was coming. And it now appears to have continued with infected and allegedly recovering care home patients being sent from hospital to care home without testing or tested with a 30% fallible test.)

Testing started. Then stopped. Track and trace started. Then stopped. Yet we all know, from South Korea and others, that this was an essential step in protecting the NHS and saving lives.

Then 'stay home' came two weeks too late and after huge public gatherings. And was not rammed home hard enough to begin.

Now we come to loosen the lockdown. Am I confident we shall get that right? Don't even ask. But they cannot let the likes of me loose yet: too old, too complicated, too vulnerable, too much part of the 0.5%....

AND finally I'd like to share the Eye's leading article this edition. And this I shall quote at length:

LOSE-LOSE SCENARIO

PANDEMIC planning is the ultimate lose-lose scenario. The lives and livelihoods lost from the virus have to be balanced against the lives and livelihoods lost from the "treatment".

This virus is causing a surge of deaths particularly in the sick and elderly, whereas lockdown is causing a smaller surge in non-Covid deaths and a steady, sustained increase in harm to those who have their whole lives ahead of them.

Brutally put, 100 percent of us are making sacrifices to save 0.5 percent of us (or less).

Children are being harmed to save adults; the poor are being harmed more than the rich; and some people have become so conditioned to "stay at home" that not even a medical

emergency will tempt them to seek help.

Given such staggering complexity, the best one can hope for is an overall "harm minimisation" strategy. To get there, experts from all disciplines need to subject their models and data on the benefits and harms of any strategy to full public scrutiny. And politicians need to admit their errors in real time.

It has taken us more than three months to move from Patient Zero to mass testing and tracing. It would be churlish not to welcome Matt Hancock's 100,000 tests a day (even

though they included requests and promptly fell again), but thousands more lives might have been saved by earlier action. It is time for an apology.

Meanwhile, after the mothballing of the little-used Nightingale hospital in London, questions will be asked about the money and precious resources spent on the hospital — but it's worth noting that the NHS needs extra capacity in case it gets a second spike in infection.

To read it all go to this link in a day or two when it goes live (we subscribers get a bonus) : 
https://www.private-eye.co.uk/current-issue
 Or order your copy now...