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

They even did the enquiry quickly. Ffs not this drawn out blow out.

I'd like a report into how China got away with it and when they'll pay reparations.

Absolutely right and course they shouldn’t be prosecuted … that’s ridiculous. I recall other politicians complaining they should have locked down earlier!

I would like to know exactly how they’ve come to that figure of extra people who died

Probably another "model", @Pricelessadvice - enter the right parameters and they can be made to produce whatever answer you want

I know what youre saying and I agree on hearing much repeated “lessons will be learned” in terrible crimes.

But the government has a duty of care towards citizens in emergency situations which is why plans are set and tested. Businesses do similarly, they have things like disaster plans. Even basic evacuation plans. Any plan worth its salt is tested periodically, and findings from that test are implemented. And if there is an actual event, what better opportunity to review for next time. So “lessons learned” is basic when considering emergency response.

Any government that fails to implement recommended emergency response is failing its citizens. Just like a business fails its shareholders and others if it fails to plan.

I can’t comment on the cost of this enquiry but if it hadn’t happened I doubt the money would have been diverted to good causes.

Lockdown caused many more ongoing issues for many young people than Covid ever did.
I have a friend who is in a medical research type profession, they say the danger is that if we have another pandemic while people still remember Covid lockdowns public compliance will be much reduced. I can’t say I’ll do as I’m told again, it was all a bit of a farce.

Johnson, aside from being a charlatan, was completely the wrong PM for a pandemic.

His strengths are optimism and charisma; his weaknesses are focus and details. In addition, his scientific knowledge is sub GCSE level. I still remember him looking at an exponential graph and trying to explain it, pointing at the steep bit and saying ‘this is where it goes exponential’!

We did lock down a week too late, for no good reason, and that probably cost lives. But there were a lot of unknowns at the time and it certainly wasn’t criminal. No one would be PM if they were prosecuted over a poor judgement call.

I guess a question for the future is who should make the decisions in the next pandemic, a panel of unelected yet knowledgeable scientists of a politician who doesn’t understand in detail his briefing.

Or maybe we should have an obligation to have a health secretary who is at least a qualified doctor.

@millymollymoomoo ;

Whether Starmer would have done better or not, I highly doubt he’d have been having boozy knees ups in Downing Street, breaking the rules his govt were making and basically laughing in the face of thousands of people dying while thousands other NHS staff were working their arses off.

'Or maybe we should have an obligation to have a health secretary who is at least a qualified doctor.'

They take advice from qualified Doctors?

This is certainly something that has to be considered, albeit I'm not sure how much it's possible to separate lockdown per se with the impact of Partygate. Though it's moot, since we in the UK got both.

But yeah, this is why it's important to be aware of restrictions fatigue. It wouldn't be possible to have a lockdown now, and it could be a long time until we can play that card again.

@Janiie ,

A qualified doctor would be able to understand the expert medical advice and balance it with the other risks.

Good luck with that.

You'll need to find MH as he's vanished , and BJ is as slippery as a balloon smothered in baby oil.

Hmm. Well. The first part is true. Not sure how they'd be any better at balancing it with all the other risks than anyone else, though. No one specialism offers the knowledge to do that all by itself.

This is what makes it so difficult, there are more things to consider than just the medical side. We need to have all the expertise around the table, and it's pretty clear we didn't in March 2020. So for example specialists in domestic violence weren't really part of the public discourse.

It was so obvious to so many ordinary people though during those couple of weeks before lockdown began that something needed to be done. I personally remember feeling so frustrated that nothing seemed to be being done and feeling so scared and powerless. I pulled my dd out of school two weeks before they shut as I had a vulnerable dh with severe asthma. I remember the attendance officer calling me and asking me whey she wasn't attending school and I said she could make up schoolwork but couldn't replace her dad. I remember feeling so shocked that I had done this and yet my mate was going out partying for St Patrick's day on a pub crawl and hadn't even considered there was anything amiss about that. I appreciate hindsight is great and all that but it was so bloody obvious to so many ordinary people yet they just delayed taking action.

This. For quite a while they were dealing with an unknown quantity. Who else remembers all that ‘don’t touch your face’ business? It wasn’t spread by touch.

Does anyone really think Starmer et al would have handled it much better?

They won’t suffer an ounce of consequence, certainly not more than they have already. But I do think they’re culpable - I remember the scenes coming out of Italy at the time; meanwhile, over here the races could go ahead with not a care. I don’t quite know what they were hearing that was saying it was such a good idea, other than their rich, powerful mates wanting to keep their income streams open for a while longer. Public school hubris, and a disregard for solid, rigorous experts killed people.

(And Labour are shit and probably wouldn’t do any better now either, granted).

You are one of the 'it was only cake' posters?

Remind us who were fined and who wasn't

I don’t know if he would necessarily have handled lockdowns any better but he would have been much more serious in his approach, more inclined to listen to expert advice and less arrogant.

It's not about who would have handled it better or whether covid was an unknown quantity.

It's about the fact that the government did have information available to them that they failed to act upon alongside the fact that they repeatedly managed their responses.

I recommend reading the report if you haven't already, it sets out exactly what they did and didn't do. None of what they got wrong is impacted by hindsight, it's all things that there was contemporary evidence for and that would have been obvious at the time.

Ikr and people rush towards handing over that control. Foolish. Fear campaigns were bad enough, they wouldn’t be needed.

I think the way the government mismanaged COVID is beyond shameful. My first thoughts, when it became obvious what was coming our way, were:

1. Close the borders
2. Form a coalition government.

What we got was idiotic politicians making terrible decisions, lining their friends' pockets and completely failing to lead by example. And they got away with it.

That and he likes being popular. He won’t do the right thing if there is a danger it makes people dislike him. He was the worst possible Prime Minister at the worst possible time.

I’m not sure how much people have been following the inquiry so far but there’s a bit more to it than ‘it was a judgement call’ or being a difficult decision. It would be a terrible precedent to set but it would be surprising if there wasn’t enough to consider something along the lines of a corporate manslaughter charge to Johnson given the advice and information he had and the decisions he made with it .

They certainly will do because its not going to change a damn thing.

There isn’t a country in the world where mistakes weren’t made. Not one.

The fact is that this whole situation was unprecedented. Oh yes, we can all say “they should have been prepared, should have known what to do,” but it’s like a lot of situations, at the time you’re preparing it’s a hypothetical, it’s far different when you’re in the space and it’s real.

And it’s all very well saying that 23000 lives might not have been lost, but A, you can never know that for sure, and B, this was about so much more than just the loss of life. It was about life having to continue at the same time, and the implications of that.

No-one here seems to be acknowledging the negatives of the lockdowns, the effects on children, on teenagers and their mental health, the increase in domestic violence, the loss of livelihoods

As a grieving relative you are of course going to look at what you’ve lost, and ask yourself what if. But as a leader you unfortunately have to be more pragmatic and not let emotions. Cloud your judgement for the right decision.