Top aide claims women lost lives in pandemic as macho No10 focused on shooting and hunting

[IwantToRetire]

Helen MacNamara, who was Britain’s most senior female civil servant, said Boris Johnson let the country down by not tackling the "toxic" culture he presided over.

The Inquiry has been shown WhatsApp messages from Dominic Cummings to Boris Johnson in which he said he wanted Ms MacNamara "out of our hair" as he no longer wanted to dodge “stilettos from that c**t". As she appeared today, the former official said the messages were "horrible to read", but she was not surprised because of the culture in No10.

In an email to civil service colleagues in April 2020, Ms MacNamara raised concerns that the failure to include women in decision making had led to problems, including the lack of provision for domestic abuse victims during the first lockdown. "It is very difficult to draw any conclusion other than women have died as a result of this," she wrote. Ms MacNamara highlighted how most PPE was not designed for female bodies even though 77% of NHS are women.

In a written statement, Ms MacNamara said: “The exclusion of a female perspective led to significant negative consequences, including the lack of thought given to childcare in the context of school closures. There was a serious lack of thinking about domestic abuse and the vulnerable, about carers and informal networks of how people look after each other in families and communities. There was not enough thinking about the impact on single parents of some of the restrictions.”

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/top-aide-claims-women-lost-31337867

I have at no stage said I don't completely see how dreadful the effect of closing private nurseries was for women. I totally get that.

Nobody is being blinkered about that.

I'm glad this is being discussed by the enquiry. Hopefully it will stop people bleating on about hindsight whenever the issue is raised. It was bleeding obvious in March 2020 precisely what impact this was going to have on DV and women in general. If people think it was better than the alternative, fine, but the pretence is grotesque.

Exactly.

Those of us who said it would be this outcome got shouted down

I hope people look at how they behaved, but they probably won’t.

There are so many strands to this thread now!

But am surprised anyone thought there was pre-planning. There wasn't. The UK was one of the countries singles out for not carrying out regular doomsday scenarios responses. Switzerland does this regularly, and has some sort of central warehousing system that they regularly refresh etc.. You can imagine that in the UK, despite all the different Governments, they probably only have whatever was put in place during the Flu Epidemic are WWI ie will have rotted away.

The lockdowns happened because of pressure from Health Workers. Boris was not only happen that old people just die off but wanted to follow Sweden's route, but it wouldn't have worked here because we are a far more densely packed country and have more people living in poverty / on the bread line.

I think it was clear from what they then did try to put in place was clearly based on ideas about life that have little or no relationship to how most of us life. A lot of people survived because of mutal aid groups, not because of government, local or central.

And this again is where not having women involved is a huge negative, even leading aside the issue of domestic violence, child welfare etc., the fact is that still it is mainly women who know how things happen, get done on a daily basis.

But in terms of is it just the Tories, in the area I live, an inner city Labour for decades, apart from breaching democracy to implement LTNs (at a time none of us were meant to be going out) they promoted and allowed a very, very upmarket street market to go, and did not for instance allow a local market that catered to different minority communities and reasonably priced vegetables.

Part of the problem seemed to be white middle class people whining in public about not being able to carry on their normal live were more likely to be listened to than families on low incomes, single mothers etc.. ie no different from non covid times.

re how extreme was the misogyny in the Cabinet, has anyone read about what's being going on in the Red Arrows? Gross.

And in terms of what we are learning can you imagine that Matt Hancocl thought he should be the lone individual as to who would live or die should the NHS be overwhelmed.

That is just mind bobbling. But quite honestly I dont think I can think of one MP I would trust to take this decision, or issue guidelines on.

The inquiry is about blaming everyone else.

The problematic thing is that many officials did certain things knowing full well that there would be an inquiry. They made decisions at the time, not because it was right, but because they could avoid liability in the inevitable inquiry.

What is clear is that people are blaming the elected officials (and their employees), essentially blaming the public for voting for them and blaming the public for the pandemic, whilst stating how lovely the civil servants are because they aren't elected.

What would you have? A civil service that took decisions against the wishes of their ministers?

Civil servants are there to advise and deliver what the government of the day wants. As part of that, they give the pros and cons. If a minister wants to go ahead and the civil servant thinks it is a bad idea, so what.

The minister decides, civil servants advise. Who wants a bunch of unelected people making critical decisions.

This is why it matters who you elect. If those people aren't up to it, then the civil service will advise, but it leads to the minister to decide.

What is, however, unexpected is how unreservedly Johnson’s male team, a superlatively talentless group but not otherwise exceptional, threw themselves into the grubby, feet-on-desk, woman-hating realisation of all his boyhood dreams. Given no plague and a little longer, you feel confident the lead gang would, given Johnson’s infatuation with male competition, have devised an initiation ceremony featuring bodily fluids and a battle cry.

Horrifying one-off or a lesson from recent history? Should women conclude that ostensibly harmless male peers are similarly susceptible to abusive reversal? Could male colleagues who are educated, on nodding terms with diversity and without obvious excuses for pathological misogyny – public school, being raised by wolves after maternal rejection – lack only opportunity to, like the Johnsonites, turn the clock back, then turn it back some more, maybe to when Greer was rightly acclaimed?

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/nov/05/in-boris-johnson-lord-of-the-lies-fraternity-women-were-there-to-be-talked-over-or-banished

Poor people were generally more likely to chafe and be badly effected by restrictions than the middle classes. The people most happy with restrictions were people with their own homes and gardens who could work from home because they were in desk or admin type jobs.