Questions We Seriously Need To Reflect Upon

Ricky D. Hale writes:

How did we end up with a man like Matt Hancock in charge of our healthcare system during a global health crisis? A man as incompetent as he is sinister.

Why do we keep electing people to office who kill the masses with a smile on their face? Why are they allowed to rehabilitate their characters on national television when our few good politicians are forever vilified?

Why do we passively accept the most serious of crimes until the damage is done? Why do we then moan for a while and just forget about everything?

These are questions we seriously need to reflect upon as a society because until we do, our own people will continue to suffer.

A scandalous 20,000 care home deaths were registered in the first three months of the Covid pandemic. The second wave told a similar story - and to think many of the dead would have been among the last of our World War Two veterans.

The men who survived conscription when their peers were not so fortunate, who were prepared to sacrifice everything so idiots like Hancock could have a future, found themselves sacrificed by the generation they saved and more specifically by Hancock himself.

Imagine braving bullets and bombs in Dunkirk, only to be denied basic dignity in the later stages of your life and then discarded like rubbish the moment your existence became too much of an inconvenience to your government.

The generation who chose Attlee after the war and gave us the NHS because they understood the importance of solidarity, who turned their backs on austerity to rebuild a nation in ruins, they gave us the greatest of gifts and we seem determined to throw those gifts away. These people defeated the Nazis only to be defeated by the party we elected to power. We should cry tears of shame.

It’s undeniable that Hancock discarded care home residents like rubbish when he ignored expert advice to send Covid patients into care homes. We already knew this, but now we have the proof in the form of his leaked Whatsapp messages.

Hancock knew exactly what he was doing and the risks were emphasised to him, but he went ahead anyway because he did not want to “muddy the waters”. If this does not make your blood boil, you are not human.

Now I, and I’m sure most of you, believe every human life matters, regardless of age or health, regardless of whether the person is a disabled child or a 99-year-old who is bedridden with dementia, but clearly, the government thinks differently. Remember all the screeching of “they would have died soon anyway” when the death toll became apparent? How incredibly ghoulish.

I read a story about a 76-year-old man who was reasonably fit and went out walking every day. He came down with a cough and the care home refused to admit him to hospital, telling his family he would only die anyway. A week later he was dead. Would he have survived? Perhaps he might have lived another twenty years. We will never know, but we do know the government did not want to give him that chance.

As grim and horrifying as this saga is, there is one element of dark humour to the whole affair (not that I’m laughing). Matt Hancock was gullible enough to share his Whatsapp messages with journalist Isabel Oakeshott (his co-author of The Pandemic Diaries) after making her sign a non-disclosure agreement. Oakeshott then broke that non-disclosure agreement, insisting it was “not a personal thing” like the scorpion stinging the frog as they crossed the river together.

By revealing what she knew all along, Oakeshott also revealed what she had been keeping from the public, not just about the pandemic but links between Brexit and Russian officials. Oakeshott says she is publishing the information because it’s in the public interest, but a cynical person might suggest it’s to boost her career.

Matt Hancock’s friends (unbelievably he does have friends) have defended him by saying the story has been “spun” but it’s unclear how it could’ve been spun when Oakeshott revealed his exact words.

They accuse the Telegraph of doctoring his messages by excluding some lines, but this is not what doctoring means. The simplest solution would be to publish all 100,000 messages in full, but I’m guessing Hancock would not be so keen on that.

Chris Witty told Hancock way back in April 2020 that all people who were admitted to care homes needed to be tested, but Hancock was concerned this would cause him to miss his 100,000-a-day testing target and get him bad headlines. The result was the UK experienced care home deaths at 13 times the rate of Germany during the same period.

Hancock now claims he was told we did not have the capacity to complete these tests, but that seems to be false because we had massively upgraded our testing capability at this point. And even if we could not test everyone, this does not explain why we did not even try. The public would be more willing to forgive a failed effort than no effort at all.

Care homes accounted for a third of covid deaths at the start of the pandemic. The man who promised a “protective ring” and insisted he was “following the science” was snogging his girlfriend during Skype funerals while other couples were forced apart.

The government discharged 25,000 infected patients from hospitals into care homes four days after the WHO declared a pandemic, leaving staff without PPE, guidance or access to tests. Many care homes had zero cases of Covid-19 prior to the discharges.

The government insisted negative tests were not required even after the WHO announced the existence of pre-symptomatic Covid on 2nd April 2020. Doctors and nurses were not visiting care homes across the country and Do Not Attempt Resuscitation orders were put into residents’ care plans. They were not admitted to hospital, even when they were relatively fit and there were thousands of empty beds. Let’s not forget about the unused Nightingale hospitals.

The effects of isolation on care home residents were devastating, such as impaired movement and cognitive functions, loss of appetite, severe depression and lack of will to live. Despite all this, Hancock was more concerned about his public image than doing the right thing and even enlisted the help of newspaper editor George Osborne to do some PR for him.

The messages reveal a self-serving attitude to the whole thing, such as making major decisions because he couldn’t be arsed to argue with Nicola Sturgeon. He helped Jacob Rees-Mogg’s family jump the testing queue when other families had to drive across the country to get their Covid tests. He blamed NHS workers for his failures and baselessly accused them of misusing PPE. He showed contempt for public safety and contempt for the people who risked their lives to save others.

It’s beyond belief that such an individual was our health minister during a pandemic and it’s deeply sinister that he thought he could eat bugs on I’m a Celeb and everyone would forget about his actions. His victims left this world in agony with no one to hold their hand and yet he wanted a new career doing magazine photoshoots and TV appearances.

As well as pocketing £320,000 from ITV, he had the nerve to cash in by releasing his book (that hardly anyone bought) and here’s me thinking it was illegal to profit from a crime. This poisonous little twerp should be in prison as should many of his colleagues.

But it’s not just about the care home deaths. It’s not even about the overall Covid death toll. This monstrous government has shown contempt for human life since it was elected to power in 2010 and the death toll from their cost-cutting must be approaching half a million now.

The UK voted for people who were willing to sacrifice the vulnerable because the rich did not want to sacrifice money - and that is the root of all the problems in this country.

Until we stop letting the media tell us how to vote, this problem is going to continue and all of us will suffer. Surely Tory voters now realise poor people are not the only victims of a Tory vote, they are too.