That Boris Johnson and Matt Hancock should be prosecuted for the avoidable Covid deaths

[LlynTegid]

The part 2 report of the Covid inquiry finds that at least 20,000 deaths were avoidable, had restrictions come in a week earlier.

Various other findings confirming the failures of Mr Johnson and Mr Hancock.

I think they should face criminal charges, such as corporate manslaughter given government is an employer. AIBU

But it won't change anything.

@lazyarse123, do you suggest no accountability at all, because "what's the point"?
I totally disagree with that.

... and I forgot to say, around me there was little moaning and a lot of compliance.
I had one neighbour who died early on. When lockdown was announced both my neighbours on either side of me were very ill with Covid.
I also came across an old man who tried to go shopping but was obviously very weak and trembled. I offered to go shopping for him, and bring his shopping to his house and told him to just go home and rest. On my way to the shop I turned round and saw that he had slumped down on the pavement. I called for an ambulance and waited with him until they arrived.
I always wonder what happened to him whenever I pass the spot. I assume he died.

To be fair it's is sort of related

Two leaders making hugely powerful decisions which both resulted in unnecessary deaths. Both deserve to be held accountable irrespective of which corner they stand in.

It's not like I tried changing the subject to brands of washing machine

I don't disagree about Blair.

The difference is that Blair’s actions were endorsed by a majority vote in Parliament.

... around me there was little moaning and a lot of compliance

I think it very much depended on the area, @viktoria

The longer lockdowns in Leicester and Oldham were mentioned upthread, and while I can't speak for the second we had a Leicester based poster at the time who reported whole areas where shops, community facilities and places of worship remained open with no enforcement measures taken at all

The same happened in my own east midlands city, so it's hard not to wonder if extended lockdowns were at least partly caused by infection spread which might not otherwise have happened

For goodness sake! It might have been a novel virus but there have been pandemics in the past and governments all around the world have plans in place for future pandemics. I'm not in the UK but when my late DF was at secondary school the schools closed due to a polio epidemic - this was in the 1940s. The basic rules can be applied to any pandemic, you don't just throw them out because it's something new.

There won't be any accountability. The inquiry was a waste of 200 million pounds.
I worked in a shop through all the lockdowns and compliance was variable.
It was a pretty terrifying time to be working with people coming shopping every day just because they could.

Lockdown was generally taken seriously in SE Cornwall. We did the prepping before it was announced, and bought in groceries, and thereafter we topped up once a week at the supermarket. I also continued to buy most veg direct from the growers, as I always do in summer. We live in market gardener central; small holders grow one or two crops really well, and everybody buys what's available. Our valley grows strawberries, raspberries, green beans, runner beans, tomatoes, onions, potatoes and a few more at small commercial scale. We also still pay cash and leave the money in an honesty box. My car always has a few pounds in the ashtray to pay for eggs or cauliflowers.

Nothing surprises me on Mumsnet these days.

Shops worked out how to deliver very sensible socially distanced shopping within weeks. Our local butcher improved their website so customers could order their meat online and live in real time, get it packed and weighed, pay online and collect it 45 minutes later from a window handover.

As far as I can make out, locking down even one week earlier than we did would have saved 23,000 lies. In the next breath though, it says lock down was extremely harmful and we needn't have locked down at all if things to prevent a fast spread of COVID had been implemented faster. It also goes on to say that saving 23,000 lives in the first wave, doesn't mean that there would have still been the same number of deaths as there were in the end anyway? Sounds muddled to me.

For most people, the politics of the pandemic are secondary to their experience. Was it horrible because you were stuck with two toddlers in a city flat and still expected to WFH? Nightmare. If you had outdoor space and a degree of employment autonomy, it wasn't anything like as bad. If you were essential to keeping supermarket shelves stocked or patients clean and fed, you probably felt very pressured and underpaid.

The first people to be prosecuted should be Chris Whitty, Patrick Vallance and all those supposed experts who did a shitty job, robbed a wage off the taxpayer, and now have cushy government jobs ripping off the taxpayer even more.

Didnt one of them even break Covid rules to go see his mistress or something.

These people are an absolute disaster and should be nowhere near government.

China's denial that there was any problem at all, and the refusal to close air travel out of China transferred the virus to Italy, where much of the design work for brands like Shein and Temu happens. In my uninformed opinion, this was probably the main transfer vector. Northern Italy to ski slopes at February half term.... circulation of virus across Europe.

@AlertGoldDeer Matt Hancock having an intimate 121 with his new squeeze was never a spreader event. You have to separate the personal from the policy making here. The policy makers must have agonised about the effects of the rules they were imposing on all of us.

FFS, everything was wrong INCLUDING the vaccine, even for Mumsnet that's bonkers, you people are hatstand.

Good heavens, you really are dense aren't you? Whitty, Vallance and co did their very best without much solid scientific evidence on which to base decisions for 70 million people. No, they didn't get it all right and it all cost too much but you would have been the person wanting another month or two with grandma-- whatever it cost, which I read earlier today on MN.

Fortunately, I think we still expect a bit more intellect from even the junior high flying civil servants.

Are you a brilliant vaccine developer @user1484264563 ? Unless you are, and had a better alternative with the ability to produce it in quantity at speed, then I think you are talking out of turn, and well above your pay grade.

Didnt one of them even break Covid rules to go see his mistress or something

If you mean among the "advisers" rather than tthe politicians I think that was Neil Ferguson, @AlertGoldDeer

At the time I couldn't decide whether to be disgusted or amazed that he'd actually got a girlfriend to go to ...

Corbyn broke Covid rules multiple times:

https://metro.co.uk/2020/10/02/jeremy-corbyn-wont-be-fined-for-breaking-rule-of-six-at-dinner-party-13360046/
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8849075/Now-Jeremy-Corbyn-breaks-rules-memorial.html
https://metro.co.uk/2020/12/29/jeremy-corbyn-broke-tier-four-rules-meeting-anti-lockdown-brother-13819885/
https://metro.co.uk/2021/02/26/jeremy-corbyn-seen-breaking-lockdown-rules-again-14149007/

I also don't believe any other party would have run down pandemic stocks

The French government ran down pandemic stocks;

2020 - As coronavirus arrived in France this winter, staff at an army base in the east of the country were dutifully burning hundreds of thousands of facemasks.
The incinerations were part of a money-saving programme to run down the state’s stock of 1.7 billion protective masks that had reached a peak in 2011.
France discovered to its horror that it had run down its stocks to 117 million masks [no more than our stockpile];

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/coronavirus-frances-facemask-fiasco-burns-deep-for-macron-kfkbdsd

Awwww, cute. Must be nice to live in a bubble be so naive and gullible.

There is that, too.

Normally you can see if woman is choosing brains over looks. In this case, there were no brains either.

You really do swallow everything the authorities tell you, don’t you? This is not Soviet Russia. You won’t be thrown in a Gulag for thinking for yourself. Not yet anyway. It’s dangerous to be so naive.

I meant Neil Ferguson as as PP pointed out. But anyone defending Matt Hancock really discredits themselves.