THE TORY Party has launched a massive campaign to blame China to cover up their own culpability in the rapid spread of the coronavirus, which, by yesterday, has resulted in more than 48,000 people contracting the disease and 4,943 deaths in the UK.
A report from the Tory-controlled Commons Foreign Affairs Committee claims that China sought to ‘obfuscate’ over what was happening when the outbreak began and didn’t collect the data in the early stages back in December 2019.
Chair of the committee, Tory MP Tom Tugendhat, told the Daily Telegraph: ‘The government has modelled their response to the coronavirus based on information from across the world. That is impossible to do if a country is misleading you.’
Tugendhat went even further when he added: ‘China’s lies are costing British lives. Now, more than ever, Britain needs to think about resetting its relationship with China.’
After accusing China of deliberately ‘misleading’ the World Health Organisation (WHO) the Tories went on to call for the government to ‘work closely with allies to present a united front where possible, and help ensure that vital international research efforts are not compromised by propaganda and bad data.’
Another report yesterday, from the right-wing Henry Jackson Society, even called for Britain to demand through the courts £351 billion in compensation from China for ‘allowing’ the coronavirus outbreak to spread to Britain. Leading Tory minister Michael Gove took up the ‘blame China’ for everything – including the complete lack of any testing for the disease.
When asked at the weekend why Britain had such a pitiful number of tests – with even frontline medical staff still unable to get tested – Gove slyly put the blame on China saying: ‘The first case of coronavirus in China was established in December of last year, but it was also the case that some of the reporting from China was not clear about the scale, the nature, the infectiousness of this.’
This contrasted sharply when the same Gove thanked the Chinese government on Saturday when he announced: ‘Today 300 new ventilators arrived from China, I’d like to thank the Chinese government.’
In fact, China has been at the forefront of sending medical supplies and doctors throughout the world to help combat the spread of the virus and provide the equipment needed.
As for the WHO being misled, the Tories deliberately ignored the advice they gave back in February when Britain only had nine confirmed cases of COVID-19.
The WHO called for countries outside China with imported cases to ‘prioritise active, exhaustive case finding and immediate testing and isolation, painstaking contact tracing and rigorous quarantine of close contacts.’
This advice was ignored by Johnson and the Tories in favour of ‘herd immunity’ – let the virus rampage through the country and kill the old, the weak and the homeless rather than bear the expense of following the WHO advice or the example set by China and South Korea who have managed to control the virus.
As for China covering up and obfuscating about the epidemic, the editor of the medical journal Lancet wrote last month about Chinese scientists: ‘Under immense pressure, as the epidemic exploded around them, they took time to write up their findings in a foreign language and seek publication in a medical journal thousands of miles away. Their rapid and rigorous work was an urgent warning to the world. We owe those scientists enormous thanks.’
Their urgent warnings and those of the WHO were deliberately ignored by the Tories who are solely responsible for the growing number of deaths, and no amount of lies about China, Iran or Russia can hide this truth.
The working class will not be deceived by a government whose only concern is to keep a collapsing British capitalist system staggering on regardless of the cost in human life.
The way forward for the working class is to put an end to this bankrupt capitalist system and its Tory government with a socialist revolution by forcing the TUC to call a general strike to kick out the Tories and advance to a workers government and socialism.
