Monday 21 September 2020

COVID corruption and cuddly cronies

 I have now resorted to switching off the radio when government ministers appear with monotonous regularity on the Today programme to misrepresent everything to do with the Covid crisis.  A regular spokesman is Grant Shapps (Transport Minister!!) presumably because he is a master of deception. He founded a web marketing company that pushed books on how to become 'stinking rich', using the false name, Michael Green.

The really big corruption is not tackled by BBC and other media interviews. The emergency measures to deal with COVID suspended the need for competitive tendering for government contracts. This has allowed the assigning of millions of pounds to private companies like Serco and G4S (of Olympics infamy) which have direct links with the Tory party and  advisers, most notoriously Cummings. The head of the testing regime, Dido Harding, is a Tory peer and wife of former MP with no relevant experience of health administration. Now, as a cuddly crony, she is to rewarded for incompetence by being appointed to be head of the National Health Institute which replaces the falsely maligned Public Health England.

Where is the outcry? It seems to have become accepted that the political system is now corrupted by big money and a Johnsonian mode of nepotism. We have always faced vested interests, but this is something new and in excess of past excesses.