On 6/5, @MattHancock told @KayBurley he remembers thinking at PMQs: “Nobody is asking about the single biggest issue that's about to hit us.”
So why wasn’t he shouting about it from the rooftops?
Did he even tell the PM?
“I told him right at the start.”
Journalists have had difficulty getting clear answers over the past 2 months but here’s your chance to have ago.
In a effort to demonstrate this government’s “unparalleled transparency” he is answering questions on Instagram here 👉instagram.com/stories/highli…
Perhaps you could ask to how he can talk about “putting a protective ring around care homes” when the govt had instructed hospitals to send people with #coronavirus back to care homes?
When asked this week, @MattHancock kept misunderstanding the question.
Perhaps you could ask why the recommendations of #ExerciseCygnus weren’t implemented.
@MattHancock says he was assured by his officials that “everything that was recommended was done”.
It wasn’t done.
So either the officials “got it wrong”, or he did.
@MattHancock says “the app has the highest level of privacy” but struggles to address concerns that it could be used as a mass-surveillance tool, processing users’ data centrally & creating a database that could be de-anonymized.
In January, @MattHancock said we were “completely prepared” & has continued to claim this.
The BBC revealed the PPE stockpile was woefully inadequate & the govt had ignored a warning from its own advisers to buy missing equipment. #askthehealthsecretary
Why does @MattHancock continue to deny that herd immunity was govt strategy?
@Peston was briefed & wrote about it on 13/3 & the govt never challenged his article.
Julian Assange is scheduled to appear in a federal court in Saipan, a US commonwealth in the Pacific, where he’s expected to plead guilty to one charge under the Espionage Act & be sentenced to 5yrs
Given he’s already served this time, he should walk free
The public have a right to know what their govts do in their name
Julian #Assange’s prosecution represented a grave threat to press freedom, undermining the key role of journalists & publishers in scrutinizing govts misdeeds & creating a chilling effect
2/. From the start of the pandemic the govt had given #Palantir, a US spyware company with reported links to #CambridgeAnalytica, access to NHS health data
3/. Palantir worked on the NHS data store with #FacultyAI - a company with ties to Cummings
In 2020, @amnesty warned that Big Tech firms might use the COVID crisis to hoover up genomic data, obliterating the last frontier of privacy: our biological selves
1/. “It is the greatest mass-killing in recorded history; & it goes on daily, hourly, as regularly as the ticking of your watch”
Arthur Koestler’s 1944 essay expressing frustration at the failure of the world to acknowledge Nazi atrocities resonates today wethescreamers.com
2/ “There are a few of us…yelling at you in newspapers…Now & then we reach your ear…But it only lasts a minute. You shake yourself like puppies who’ve got their fur wet; then the screen again descends & you walk on, protected by the dream-barrier which stifles all sound”
#Gaza
3/ Koestler notes maniacs lose contact with reality so “perhaps it’s we, the screamers, who react in a sound & healthy way to the reality which surrounds us, whereas you are the neurotics who totter about in a screened fantasy world because you lack the faculty to face the facts”
“They got me!” Liz Truss tells far-right kingpin, Steve Bannon, before going on to explain that, to have effectively tackled “the deep state” that runs Britain & its institutions, she would have “needed a bigger bazooka”! #LizTruss #BritanniaUnchained
"I was just saying it like it is & that’s what people respect me for"(!)
Liz Truss’ compares her premiership to a one night stand & says she was just “fattening the pig” for slaughter & that she should have gaslit the public like Rishi Sunak is doing (!)
"I faced the most almighty backlash...from the usual suspects in the media” Liz Truss
“Truss's decline is simultaneously tragic & horrifying but the claim that the media conspired against her can't go unchallenged. There are front pages praising her to the rafters” @mrjamesob
2/. It’s clear that the bomb blasts in Kerman on the 4th anniversary of #Soleimani's assassination by the US, could lead to a quick ratcheting up of dangerous tensions
After Oct 7, the US sent two aircraft carrier groups to the region
3/. Three US soldiers were killed & two dozen injured in an unmanned aerial drone attack on US forces stationed in northeastern #Jordan near the Syrian border, President @JoeBiden said