THE government on Thursday defied the 4pm deadline for handing over Johnson’s unredacted messages and notebooks to the Covid inquiry. It now faces legal action over the issue, that could bring it down!
The Covid inquiry is demanding to see all the various messages between the then PM, Boris Johnson and his advisers during the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as his diaries and notebooks.
The government is however refusing to disclose the material, arguing it is not relevant to the inquiry’s work, despite ex-Tory leader Johnson’s willingness to collaborate. They have a lot to hide, while Johnson is willing to gamble that he can blag his way out of any crisis.
The inquiry, set up in May 2021, is investigating the government’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic and is due to begin public hearings in two weeks.
In fact, the issue of the hour is whether the Tory government is going to be brought down from the left by the trade unions taking general strike action, or from the right with ex-PM Johnson using the current crisis to clear the way for a Tory-led National Government, to save capitalism by making the working class pay the bill.
The Covid-19 pandemic weakened British capitalism to the extreme, and caused hundreds of thousands of deaths and diseases of all kinds – but it was not a complete surprise as it has been depicted.
In fact the dangers from pandemics were well known. A cross party ‘pandemic simulation’ was carried out just three years before Covid-19 struck. It ‘played-out’ a scenario in which the health minister was asked to turn off all the ventilators in the UK, which, if carried out in reality, would mean the deaths of thousands of people.
The incident was simulated during a mock Cobra meeting on the first day of Exercise Cygnus, the secret war game staged in October 2016 to test the NHS resilience to a viral pandemic.
The government, up until now, have refused to publish the results of Exercise Cygnus, which gave forewarning of the unpreparedness of the NHS to deal with any such epidemic crisis.
At the time, former Tory Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt ‘downed tools’ and ‘refused to play’ when asked to turn off ventilators in a pandemic dry run. He refused to co-operate with the game which asked him to test out the scenario where he would have to make the decisions about who would live and who would die.
The official publication of the secret report on Exercise Cygnus followed a lengthy battle under the terms of the Freedom of Information Act. Some of those involved in the exercise criticised Hunt’s refusal to take the ‘tough decisions necessary’ during the simulation.
Hunt, however, believes what he was asked to do during Cygnus was ‘morally repugnant’, and says that by ‘pausing’ the simulation he forced an ‘important rethinking’ that has proved valuable in managing the Covid-19 outbreak. The fictitious scenario that Exercise Cygnus was testing out has however been outlined: ‘The hospitals were full and Hunt was asked to make the call as part of the exercise. But instead of doing so he basically said “I’m not playing anymore”. People were very cross as it mucked up the exercise.’
A Hunt spokesman commented: ‘In the exercise, Jeremy was asked to make a decision to switch off all the life support machines in the country leading to an immediate 4,000 deaths. He believed that was morally repugnant so paused the exercise to explain that if ministers were being asked to make such decisions we were clearly not dealing with the issue in a sensible way.’
This document reveals the very real life and death decisions that were made at the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. During the exercise, the NHS was charged with modelling the impact of hospital closures to ‘identify lives saved or lost’. It was also asked to devise a ‘rapid discharge protocol’ so better decisions could be made on whether someone stays in hospital or is ‘discharged to residential care’.
When the pandemic first broke, it was openly discussed that there were not enough ventilators for everyone, and decisions would have to be made about who gets one and who doesn’t, based on age and ‘survival chances’.
It has since been well documented that elderly patients were then discharged from hospitals without being tested and sent back to care homes, to clear beds for younger patients.
The truth is that the British ruling class stood by and watched Covid-19 happen, and then sought to make the working class pay for it. The current inquiry may well be forced to shed some light on these issues. The major issue however is that capitalism is a backward out-of-date system that must be overthrown and replaced with socialism via a socialist revolution.
