Earlier this week we had the spectacle of new health secretary, Mr irreversible, there’s no going back Sajid Javid, a man with an attitude of ‘if you get covid just walk it off’, a chap with all the empathy & bedside manners of Skeletor, sat on a train to Cumbria saying he’s off to open one of 48 new hospitals. Except he wasn’t.
The whole opening new hospitals schtick that the Tories have been whittering about for a long time now has always failed to materialise and even the additional Nightingale Hospitals opened to deal with increases due to COVID were a scam with no additional staff to run them, they were a political stunt and nothing more. Sadly, PR is more important to the shambles running the country than actually running the country and so Javid’s stunt was readily exposed – by doctors at the very hospital Javid was heading for – a hospital that has very much existed for the last 20 years!
What Javid was off to open was a new unit, a new cancer unit. State of the art yes, a great thing for the hospital and if they’d been honest about it, would have reflected well on the Tories, but instead they went with the enormous fib that it’s a brand new hospital! Worse, when the lie got exposed people will naturally have dug down into the detail and it was quickly picked up on by left wing Labour MP Jon Trickett that the unit was actually ordered in 2017, so actually had nothing to do with Johnson or his team whatsoever.
Trouble is, this is just one example of a very dishonest set of claims regarding new hospitals. Hospitals who have had their layouts changed, had a unit replaced, had a refurb, been merged are all being called new hospitals when that is anything but the truth and most damningly, the government is demanding the NHS implicate itself in this lie by backing the government up and saying they are new hospitals too – they’ve issued guidance on it!
The guidance demands that, and I quote ‘the schemes named in the announcement are not all identical and vary across a number of factors, however they do all satisfy the criteria we set of what a new hospital is and so must always be referred to as a new hospital.’
Now there is a paragraph doing some exceptionally heavy lifting! They vary across a number of factors, yes they do, they are all changes to existing hospitals, but therefore still not new hospitals. ‘They satisfy the criteria we set of what a new hospital is’. Well what criteria is this then? The criteria of, we promised in our manifesto that we’d build 48 new hospitals by the end of the decade and of course we lied about that, we are Tories after all, so lets try and spin our way out of this one! That is essentially what this all is, an exercise in spin to make it look like they’re doing something they actually aren’t and as for the criteria?
Well here you are, here’s a box of plasters, lets call it a new hospital shall we? Here’s a tubular bandage, another brand new hospital, here’s some hearing aid batteries an other hospital there and look, I’ve got my very own NHS trust!
This is literally as honest as any of the claims the Tories have just made and the saddest part of it is, is they’re getting away with it because this story has been woefully underreported because most of our mainstream media, particularly the right-wing rags have not picked it up. Once more it is small, alternative media outlets that have exposed this.
The thing is, for all these supposed new hospitals, many have seen bed reductions, where mergers have taken place, services across the board have been reduced, our health service capacity has been reduced over 11 years of Tory rule and its all happened at the worst possible time. A report out today published via the Lancet Infectious Diseases Medical Journal – so not Tory spin, but proper scientific research, has shown you’re twice as likely to be hospitalised by the Delta COVID variant, than the original alpha strain. We’re already seeing cases of COVID rise, particularly in places where schools have already returned and where there have been large gatherings, Newquay for example here in Cornwall is riddled with COVID right now off the back of Boardmasters, Deaths are already back above 100 a day nationally and apparently Johnson considers 1000 deaths a week an acceptable number to keep the country open. How sick of him to put a value on human life – you can bet he wouldn’t value his own as such. If one of these 1000 a week was a member of your family would you consider their death to be for the good of the economy? The vast majority of schools haven’t gone back yet, the government has put no mitigations in place in them despite them being shut for weeks, so you know what is going to happen next.
If you voted for the Tories on the back of their promise to build 48 new hospitals, you were lied to. They want the NHS gone, the pandemic is giving them cover to do it since the additional strain its under excuses their claims that it is unfit for purpose. Fact is they’ve underfunded it, underequipped it and understaffed it for 11 years and just as we may all need it most, it’s at its lowest ebb. It’s what the Tories always do, the NHS has never and will never be safe in their hands, so stop voting for them.
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Freedom day looms, but its more Free-doom day in the eyes of many and its not just rotten lefties like me saying it, though sadly the ones you want to be saying it, the ones you want to be calling it out for what it is, our own leaders are failing us. It doesn’t matter what party it is, there’s no concerted pushback against opening up. You might’ve guessed Keir Starmer wouldn’t, too busy with yet another relaunch of himself as he is, still oblivious to the fact Labour’s biggest problem is him and the fact nobody can stand his forensic nothingness, but besides that his track record of supporting the government over repeated Covid mistakes, no ifs, no buts, no equivocation makes him little better than the ruling party, particularly when he’s refused to put forward alternatives, bereft of any ideas that he is. He’s a seat warmer and its maddening that he cannot formulate an idea or a position as more and more people have repeatedly fallen ill or worse since this pandemic began.
As bad as government handling has been though, they’re set to make their biggest mistake of all, tearing up most of the COVID restrictions, reopening the last businesses and venues still closed even though we’re seeing cases rise across the country. Yesterday there were 51,870 new cases and 49 fatalities. That’s the highest since January 11th, when we were a week into the lockdown at the beginning of this year. No sign that they’re going to take that route again now, not with the new Health Secretary sajid Javid and his opinion on opening up being ‘irreversible’. Mr Irreversible, despite being double jabbed, tested positive for COVID himself just today.
Yesterday 1,220 scientists condemned the move. Some convened an emergency summit over the issue of Freedom Day just yesterday, from India, to Italy, France to the US and this has been covered by the Financial Times and Independent to their credit, demonstrating the seriousness of this and their response is chilling even in the middle of a heatwave.
It has been variously described as a ’danger to the world’, on the basis that we act as an international travel hub and a virus outbreak here, particularly of a new variant, of which all the conditions for developing are now in place, will readily spread to the rest of the globe. It has been described by these scientists as ‘unscientific and unethical’, by US scientist William Haseltine, renowned for his work on HIV and AIDS who said ‘It is leading to disaster as we can see in the numbers. I follow the numbers daily in the UK and I am extremely dismayed to see the very rapid rate of increase in infections in a population which is vaccinated like we are. I believe that the strategy of herd immunity is actually murderous: I think that’s a word we should use, because that is what it is; it is knowledge that you are doing something that will result in thousands, and in some cases tens of thousands of people dying. It is a disastrous policy, it’s been clear that that’s been the case for some time, and to continue to espouse that policy is unconscionable.”
Most tellingly I felt came the message from Prof. Michael Baker of New Zealand’s COVID advisory group, who has called out the UK government’s real response from the start – an approach of herd immunity rapidly identified as unacceptable. It’s very hard to argue with the New Zealand experts when they’ve called it right from the start, their government has acted accordingly from the start and their death toll is in double figures as a result instead of 6 figures and climbing as ours is. Why will our government not see reason or listen to reason? Why is the public still apparently backing Johnson right now?
For a start, Johnson is still for the most part shielded by the media, but the continued presence of Professors Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance continue to lend credibility to Johnson’s plans. Whitty is on record as saying recently that with the number of people doubling in hospitals every three weeks we could get into quite scary numbers soon and that we shouldn’t underestimate the fact we could get into trouble again surprisingly fast. Well WHY for the love of God man, do you still stand next to Johnson at those pressers? WHY do you still help him carry out his plans by lending credibility to what he’s doing, by appearing with him? I have to say I’m heartily sick and tired of Whitty’s warnings, when he still turns up to support the government, when he will also trot out lines like there’s ‘no clear evidence’ that delaying opening up would make a difference. Constantly giving contradictory instruction. 1,220 scientists around the world would disagree with that, the stats taken over the last 18 months of this nightmare and the resulting lockdowns combined with vaccinations would suggest there IS clear evidence!
I’m not the only one laying into him, The Lancet’s editor in chief Prof. Richard Horton has gone so far as to say Whitty was ‘wilfully misrepresenting public opinion’ with claims that the Prime Minister’s approach is supported by public opinion – he’s right and Whitty standing in support at all those public announcements is helping to drive public opinion. Stop turning up to them, then lets see what happens to public opinion!
If over 1000 scientists unanimously condemning Johnson isn’t enough for you, if Independent SAGE, if the most eminent peer-reviewed general medical journal, The Lancet condemning our government isn’t enough, the British Medical Journal have also weighed in. Upon opening up they expect record breaking case numbers and most worryingly we’re expected to see our hospitals struggle. Over the last 18 months we’ve lost a lot of medical staff, between getting burnt out during this pandemic or due to Brexit, with so many foreign nationals working in the NHS leaving. We’ve already seen hospitals on black alert, queues of ambulances waiting to get into A&E and planned ops being cancelled & now ever increasing COVID cases too. Hospitalisations are up 621%, ventilator cases are up 338% since the end of May and we haven’t hit Freedom Day yet, when things will get so, so much worse.
What we’re also seeing amongst these positive cases too is that a large percentage of them are amongst the young, just take a look at this graph from Test and Trace on primary schools:
Kids don’t get as ill they keep saying, well I’ve had 4 of them test positive and all have been ill with it. Fatalities will be down though because of vaccination some of you will say, well take a look at this from the ONS:
You can see on the left there infections and you can clearly see schools are driving it once again. We already knew they did, Johnson called them vectors of transmission, yet still they won’t be closed and they even removed the need for masks! Fortunately some schools, my own childrens included, ignored this and reinstated mandatory mask-wearing. Supermarkets have done likewise, they can see the writing on the wall. Then look at the other graphs, hospitalisations and deaths and which groups are most susceptible? The elderly. Again. The double-jabbed elderly. The vaccines are not 100%, people can still catch it if double jabbed, people are still dying despite being double jabbed. The vaccines are not in and of themselves the panacea Boris Johnson and his regime promised they would be and that’s because they had no way of knowing, they keep making shit up. Do they mitigate spread and levels of illness? Of course, but with each variant springing up that becomes less and less the case and when Freedom Day looks set to turn us into a giant petri dish of an island, a plague island, with measures designed not in any way to save lives, but to put economic interests first, all we’ll end up doing is developing another variant, more vaccine resistant variants, more cases of long covid, the long term effects of which are not known, but which are now showing to cause organ damage. What shape will our economy end up in if we end up with more of the workforce being left unable to work? It is economic as well as societal self-harm.
On top of all of this, the Tories got their second reading of their NHS Privatisation Bill through this week which will increase privatisation of our NHS, as well as remove the duty of care to us it has. How dangerous is this? Imagine having treatment refused because you’re too expensive to treat? What if that’s as a result of your having COVID? Labour has been pathetically weak on this as well, but when Starmer’s recently former chief advisor was a healthcare lobbyist and some of their current biggest donors stem from private healthcare, this should come as little surprise. They’re failing us as usual these days, but on the NHS its unforgivable.
In situations where both main parties are shit, the Lib Dems tend to start picking up votes, but that isn’t really happening either, which implies the Tories still enjoy support for what they’re doing.
What they are doing is presiding over an utterly irresponsible, world threatening act of violence against their own people, other nations and combining that with undermining our strained NHS at the same time, pushing policies to wilfully collapse it. Even the Tories who came in after Attlee and Bevan appreciated the value of the NHS, keeping it going, its still going to this day, but the Tories of today view it as a cash cow opportunity for their rich mates, particularly in American Healthcare.
Our leaders are failing us here on all fronts. Boris Johnson is an abscess of a Prime Minister who needs to be excised. To achieve a realistic, lasting end to this pandemic, we need rid of him. His idea of Freedom is Herd Immunity for all of us and it doesn’t work. 150,000 people have already lost their lives to demonstrate that and that’s set to rise because that isn’t enough death to preside over for Bozo. More of us will get ill, more of us will die, more of us will be on the sick, more of us will become financially more stressed, but there will be no mitigation, no support. You can ditch your mask, but at what cost to others? Already out of fear of being told to isolate people are deleting the app designed to keep us informed and keep us safe so they can keep working and that is only going to help the virus spread even more.
The blame for this MUST be landed squarely on the Tories. They have the majority, they’re driving this, it’s Johnson doing what he likes rather than putting our needs first and the best bit for him is that when it all goes to hell, he can blame us for not exercising the caution he told us to. When you change rules to guidelines, it’s setting up a blame game. This has gone on too long, there’s no end in sight still and the buck has to stop with him not us. If scientists around the world are so alarmed, then they need to have a word with their leaders. Ours are failing us. They’re the real pandemic. We’re infected by right-wing politicians acting for themselves and nobody else.
Cornish Damo provides this site and its content free of charge, but in order to continue doing so, to continue to rant and write and tell it like it is, impartially, independently and free of outside influence, your donations are essential. If you can afford to do so without hardship, please consider supporting my work via one of the options on the support us page.
Thank you for your solidarity and for supporting alternative media holding power and the mainstream media to account.
Kernow Damo 