Johnson ramps up the death toll – he should resign

In Britain the Covid-19 pandemic remains out of control, with hospital deaths topping 16,000 and with, scandalously, an unknown number of deaths in care homes and in the community that have yet to be counted. The Johnson government was and is conducting a totally unacceptable herd immunity policy but were denying it by lies, bluff and a compliant media.

Meanwhile those countries that followed the Chinese approach – that is hitting the virus hard early and chasing it down with extensive testing – are to varying degrees, starting to reopen their economies.

The global economy is falling off a cliff. Millions of companies have either collapsed or are about to do so. Airlines globally are grounded and Richard Branson is pleading for government aid on the basis that Virgin Atlantic is on the verge of liquidation.

On 19 April, the Johnson government was shaken to its foundations by an article in the Sunday Times, which ripped its strategy to pieces. The article entitled “Coronavirus: 38 days when Britain sleepwalked into disaster” is in my view one of the most devastating critiques for many years of a governmental strategy on a major issue of life and death. 

It reveals a government in chaos. It points out how Johnson had skipped the first five Cobra meetings on the virus, how appeals to order protective gear were ignored and how scientist’s warnings fell on deaf ears. Failings, the article says, that may have cost thousands of lives. In reality there is no doubt that it did.

The government’s disastrous herd immunity policy emerged: “because the modelling they were working to was not for Corona virus at all but for flu.” All of the government’s planning was therefore for a flu pandemic not coronavirus. There has basically been, the article says, “a divide between scientists in Asia who saw this as a horrible, deadly disease on the lines of Sars, which requires immediate lockdown, and those in the West, particularly in the US and UK, who saw this as flu.”

The Sunday Times was also told that contrary to the official line, “Britain was in a poor state of readiness for a pandemic. Emergency stockpiles of PPE had severely dwindled and gone out of date after becoming a low priority in the years of austerity cuts. The training to prepare key workers for a pandemic had been put on hold for two years while contingency planning was diverted to deal with a possible no-deal Brexit.”

A Cobra meeting on the virus was eventually held on 24 January. But, the paper says, it took just an hour to brush aside the coronavirus threat: “Matt Hancock, the health secretary bounced out of Whitehall after chairing the meeting and breezily told reporters the risk to the UK public was “low”.”

The response of the government was unprecedented. They not only fielded a string of Ministers to refute the article, but also issued a point-by-point official governmental rebuttal of the article. It has had little effect. The Johnson government has lost the initiative and has been reeling from it ever since.

The reason for the panic was clear enough, the indictment was devastating and the only rational conclusion at the end of it was that Johnson, by any standards, is completely unfit for office in such a situation and should resign forthwith.

Alan Davies, 23 April 2020