Thread by @GeorgeMonbiot

We're going into partial lockdown partly because of the failure of test and trace.
It has failed because instead of using the vast pool of expertise in the public sector (local and national), the government handed the contracts to incompetent profiteers.

It put someone in charge whose sole qualification appears to be that she moves in the same social circle as government ministers. In other words, she's "one of us".
Then, when Dido Harding failed catastrophically, it gave her an even bigger job.

The Tory mantra, repeated for 40 years like a stuck record, is that the public sector is wasteful and inefficient, while the private sector is lean and competitive.

Yet the waste and inefficiency caused by privatising essential public health functions is off the scale.

In the name of competition, the government has eliminated competition. It has granted private monopolies, without advertisement or tendering, to supply services and equipment at grossly inflated prices.
The companies receiving these contracts have failed, repeatedly, to deliver.

Yet they receive still more public money, racking up vast profits, while tests are not conducted and unusable PPE piles up in warehouses.
The waste is measured not just in pounds, but in human lives.

This is what happens when a government

a. is ideologically committed to a failed model

b. sees HM Treasury as a giant kitty for its chums.

That's our money it's throwing around. Money we earned, and paid in taxes in the hope that it would be used for public benefit. Instead it is channelled into the hands of people whose sole area of expertise appears to be fleecing the public.

In any other country, they would know what to call it.

#Corruption.

If you are not incandescent with rage about this, you haven't grasped the scale of what's been done to us.