Cummings evidence today

[Dirtystreetpie]

Anyone listening?

I freely admit the EU mucked up their vaccine roll out BUT that is not to say that as a sovereign state and part of the EU we could not have rolled out the same vaccine programme devised by the task force that our NHS did. The EU isn’t perfect but the advantages it gave us in terms of trade particularly for the services sector I work in, and the beneficial networks it provided for science, medicine etc etc etc and the increased weight it gave us on the geopolitical stage far outweighs the problems. I don’t know where we will be in ten years time but the handling of the pandemic is probably a clue to what to expect in terms of a populist incompetent government and certainly all of us in the services sector know that the golden age we enjoyed with the competitive advantages EU membership gave us in international markets is over. And the barriers to our activities in EU markets are now a big threat to our business. We still have strengths, it won’t be an overnight contraction but the EU countries are individually building their capabilities to exploit the competitive advantage we have thrown away. In ten years time services will not account for 80% of our economy. Let’s hope that this government gets its act together to put something in its place other than electric car batteries. Ditto for the fishing and agriculture sectors

As to the EU behaving badly, what do you expect? It is there to act in the interests of its member states not pander to the illusions of entitlement rooted in a rose tinted view of our past “glories” that our government is displaying. Brexit was always an emotional project arising from a national sense of entitlement. It was always going to be a car crash when it came up against the economic and political reality....

The European union offered the UK PPE which the UK refused. The UK had no ventilators awarded a contract to Tory donor brexiteer
Dyson( operation relocated to Singapore ) waste of time as the venitalors unfit for purpose..you cannot possibly say the Tory government did well......ironically you can decry Cummings and hancock everyone needs to focus on the one supposedly in charge

Emilyontmoor
If that means that by acting in their own interests, might cause death to you and your family, after all the fault was of their own making

Sirius99 As I say upthread they cocked up on that but then member states having sovereignty could and have embarked on their own vaccine roll outs now. Some EU countries have now given almost as many doses as the U.K. albeit having a large population and some are at 20% when the U.K. was at 35% per head of population. There is also even more vaccine scepticism holding up some of their programmes.

And of course vaccine nationalism is of debatable value. The Australian government at saying it will be 2024 before I see the newest member of my family because they don’t expect he world to have vaccinated enough people to enable safe travel and the economic normality that depends on our connectivity to the rest of the world before then. I suppose that will be just fine for the little Englander Brexiteers but of no use to the Brexiteer like Mark Francis and Boris who see themselves as the dick swinging buccaneers of global piracy, I mean free trade.

Emilyontmoor
"Brexit was always an emotional project arising from a national sense of entitlement. It was always going to be a car crash when it came up against the economic and political reality.."

Exactly this.

Why it’s it with some people the EU can do no wrong, it will not hurt you to admit that they do get things wrong,

I think most people who are pro-EU are very aware that the EU get things wrong - this is because they realise that the EU is made up of fallible people! It seems that the Brexiteers want to split everything along the lines of good or evil. However, a lot of criticisms of the EU that I see on MN as being "mean old EU picking on us" were actually perfectly predictable as they are just the pre-Brexit regulations regarding non-EU countries (which we also wrote) kicking in.

It is not the EU's fault that a good proportion of the UK somehow thought that the EU would make exceptions to all of its preexisting laws to accommodate Brexiteers' fantasies!

I hate Cummings - but he is the only one telling the truth - this govt should be sued for the deaths of thousands of older people whose lives they showed no care for

@Bertiebiscuit I disagree with suing the government, it should be criminal charges including corporate manslaughter. I wish Dominic Cummings had said something along these lines, or that the Labour Party led by a lawyer would start being an opposition and say so.

'I hate Cummings - but he is the only one telling the truth - this govt should be sued for the deaths of thousands of older people whose lives they showed no care for'

And yet a year ago mumsnetters would not believe a word he said.

Are we going to sue Sturgeon too who had a higher care home death rate and compared to other small countries has had a terrible death rate overall.

I tell you who should be sued, The Chinese communist party. They shouldve been transparent back in Nov 2018 and does anyone still actually believe the bat in a grim market story?

2019*

I tell you who should be sued, The Chinese communist party. They shouldve been transparent back in Nov 2018 and does anyone still actually believe the bat in a grim market story?

No, the scientists agree that the virus crossed species, probably from a bat, with an intermediary, possibly a pangolin. The live wild animal market may or may not have played a role and the CCP are certainly culpable for keeping the markets open even after SARS was shown to have originated in one.

However if you are hinting at the made in a lab rubbish, the English and Australian scientists involved in the collaborative work with the Wuhan lab being carried out on coronaviruses (a likely suspect for a pandemic post SARS and therefore the subject of international research have discounted that this coronavirus is related to the ones they were studying which had been sampled from caves in Yunnan (thousands of miles from Wuhan) by the eminent and internationally respected scientist in the Wuhan lab. Covid 19 has an entirely different RNA , basically they backed the wrong horse.

The virus could have originated anywhere with that cross species interaction, perhaps not even within China’s borders.

The Chinese are certainly lacking transparacy but Taiwan were calling the pandemic In mid December and all my Asian networks were full of the details (which also was published by Wuhan doctors in the Lancet in mid Jan) but nobody was listening

And actually when the virus was bought to Xi’s attention he did order transparency. It was just nobody dared tell him, particularly as he was preoccupied with Trump’s trade war. So the local Wuhan leaders cleaned up the market (destroying any chance of establishing if it was the source) and tried to suppress it. Heaven is high and the Emperor far away has always been an
Issue in the way China is governed. He may be a hard man arsehole who covers up genocide and ethnic cleansing but on viruses Confucian ethics (he models himself on the Confucian Emperors) dictate that you act in the interests of your people.

I hate Cummings - but he is the only one telling the truth The parts of the truth that he wants told, not the parts he is culpable for. It was strange listening to it, ever since last February I have wanted the government held accountable for their appalling and lethal incompetence, exceptionalism, corruption and lack of care and respect for the people they govern. There was nothing he said I didn’t already know apart from the extent of Boris’s obnoxious rhetoric. However it will be far more gratifying when the full extent of the truth is exposed when the experts and witnesses tell the truth from a place of objectivity and integrity, not in the cause of one inadequate s narcissist’s need from revenge on those who challenged his illusions of genius and superiority

or that the Labour Party led by a lawyer would start being an opposition

Yup.

@Emilyontmoor

I hate Cummings - but he is the only one telling the truth The parts of the truth that he wants told, not the parts he is culpable for. It was strange listening to it, ever since last February I have wanted the government held accountable for their appalling and lethal incompetence, exceptionalism, corruption and lack of care and respect for the people they govern. There was nothing he said I didn’t already know apart from the extent of Boris’s obnoxious rhetoric. However it will be far more gratifying when the full extent of the truth is exposed when the experts and witnesses tell the truth from a place of objectivity and integrity, not in the cause of one inadequate s narcissist’s need from revenge on those who challenged his illusions of genius and superiority

@Emilyontmoor You'll be waiting along time!

imho there will never be a public inquiry, there is a wedding next year, followed by a GE in 2023 and another tory win.

Even if there was one, it would need to be held mainly in secret & would take many years to report.
The Iraq one took 7 years and that had to deal with a relatively simple question.

Absolutely Jasjas1973, all the incompetence, which led to 100,000 plus unnecessary deaths, will be kicked into the long grass 😞

jasjas I know, it feels like we are in the grip of some sort of groupthink where the Boris fan club have thrown us into some sort of parallel universe where old fashioned values of duty to public service, honesty and integrity (ok there was never much honesty but never the tsunami of lying we have now) have been replaced with Boris’s sense of entitlement and amorality. I wonder if he decided to make Scotland the new Xinjiang if his fans would still say “Oh Boris he is a one. What a legend”. My friend a lifelong Labour activist who achieved much that was good in the local community died recently and during her last illness I kept thinking it was sad to leave the world and country in such a mess but of course it just gets worse and worse.

Hancock broke ministerial code over stake in firm but
But Lord Geidt concluded that Mr Hancock's "earlier failure to declare the interest was as a result of his lack of knowledge and in no way deliberate, and therefore, in technical terms, a minor breach of the ministerial code".

In a reply to Mr Hancock, the prime minister said he agreed the incident should in no way "impugn" Mr Hancock's good character and he would not be taking "any further action".

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-57272252

[quote DuncinToffee]Hancock broke ministerial code over stake in firm but
But Lord Geidt concluded that Mr Hancock's "earlier failure to declare the interest was as a result of his lack of knowledge and in no way deliberate, and therefore, in technical terms, a minor breach of the ministerial code".

In a reply to Mr Hancock, the prime minister said he agreed the incident should in no way "impugn" Mr Hancock's good character and he would not be taking "any further action".

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-57272252[/quote]
Just goes to demonstrate what a joke the ministerial code is, although of course breaking it doesn't matter anyway with this mob.

[quote vera99][/quote]
Superb.

'However if you are hinting at the made in a lab rubbish'

meaww.com/angus-dalgleish-birger-sorensen-china-create-covid-19-wuhan-lab-reverse-engineer

Lots of different opinions can be said to be rubbish, however clearly there are many different opinions all worth listening to. I'm no expert but we do know the ccp aren't transparent and to have a lab actually researching coronavirus and working with live virus in the very place the outbreak started would seem more than a little fishy.

I suppose there’s a difference between:
“wild virus that accidentally escaped from a lab that was doing some research on it”
“virus that was altered in a lab as part of legitimate non-evil research, and then accidentally escaped”
and
“virus that was deliberately altered and released to cause a pandemic”.

Third one seems massively unlikely. First two, though? Not so sure. Maybe we’ll never know.

'it feels like we are in the grip of some sort of groupthink where the Boris fan club have thrown us into some sort of parallel universe where old fashioned values of duty to public service, honesty and integrity (ok there was never much honesty but never the tsunami of lying we have now) have been replaced with Boris’s sense of entitlement and amorality'

You sound very naive. I don't recall any 'honesty and integrity' in the last popular Labour government 20 odd years ago. The Iraq war, PFIs and the ridiculous GP 'op out of ooh' contracts springs to mind. I know we aren't allowed to mention corbyn on mn as he's such an irrelevance but not sure he has any 'old fashioned values' unless you count supporting terrorism and anti semitism. Which brings us to Sir Keith and his rag tag bunch of misfits who would have had us in greater dire straits in the pandemic than we already were.