Why Truth Matters Part 2

October 2020 - Covid-19 is still hanging over us all, death numbers are going up daily and lock downs are becoming more and more plausibe. It is also now threatening all of us coming together for the festive season.

In this dire situation we have a government which has failed in every single stage from the messaging in March to test and tracing in September. One could wonder if it is possible for a government to be this incapable and I would recommend reading Naomi Klein’s ‘The Shock Doctrine’ to further one’s thoughts.

As to prove their ineptitude still further, rather than putting the job of test and trace into the hands of the most natural and knowledgeable, i.e. the NHS, the government has instead given a £45.8 million contract to Serco. The Chief Executive is Rupert Soames, brother of former Conservative MP Nicholas Soames.

One of Serco’s most noteworthy business ventures resulted in the ‘tagging’ scandal where Serco, together with G4S, continued to charge the state for the tagging of dead convicts.

Instead of the ‘world beating’ system the PM says we have it’s actually one in which people are being sent 150 miles away from home for a test and teenagers and 20 somethings are running it. This can only be called a success if you consider the continued privatisation of the NHS a wanted outcome.

We should ask ourselves why we as taxpayers are paying this kind of money to a privately owned company with an appalling track record. Do we want to continue down the road of an ever more nepotistic society?

I was pleased to see Ed Miliband yesterday putting succinctly in Parliament that it is under the Conservatives that we have chaos on every level of society rather than under than the chaos David Cameron promised if Ed Miliband would have won the GE 2010.

I wonder if it wouldn’t be better for all of us if political journalists were less interested in clever quips and more in informative political reporting. Politics is not a game show after all – it is peoples’ lives.

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In case you missed it:

Part 1 - June 2020

We welcomed the new leadership, Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner, and looked forward to working with them to achieve a Labour government as soon as it is humanly possible.

However, we were worried by the leadership’s weak reactions to the Covid-crisis. We understand Starmer’s well thought out strategy of ‘Got you!’ in Parliament. Very few people watch PMQs though and so we question how effective it really is. Johnson has disappeared from scrutiny, Johnson has lied about his tactics, Johnson and his government tell us that we have a world beating test and trace system, which we blatantly do not have. Our PM has ignored the scientific advice and he has through all of this effectively killed people that need not have died. Our media does not report on this in any depth, which leads to an uninformed public. This in turn makes it easy for the “Establishment” to divide people; resources are scarce they tell us and it becomes a “us against them” society. We know where this can lead. We have been here before.

The City branch urges the leadership to stop appeasing the government and start to really challenge all of these lies, and so much more. Truth matters. It changes peoples minds.