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28 Oct, 7 tweets, 2 min read
If you can bear it, please read these four articles, published across 5 months, in sequence. They show how and why the total fiasco of the government's Covid-19 response unfolded.
First: how the government deliberately stood down the system.
theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
Second: how the government bypassed not only the NHS, but all reasonable standards of accountability and transparency in awarding contracts to bizarre corporations: theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
Third: how it completely trashed the test and trace system by replacing professional civil servants with an incompetent chumocracy:
theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
Fourth: how it finished the job by replacing experienced NHS clinicians with unqualified 18-year-olds working for Serco: theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
This isn't your common or garden incompetence. It's the shock doctrine, as explained by @NaomiAKlein. Or, to put it another way, it's the playing out of Steve Bannon's script: using a crisis to "deconstruct the administrative state".
And now we're all suffering the consequences.
I wonder whether there's anyone at @BBCNews asking themselves "why aren't we covering these stories?".

After all, they're only the biggest scandal in England at the moment.
If anyone at the BBC can let me know what's happening there, I guarantee total anonymity and source protection. Please write to george at monbiot dot info
Thank you.

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More from @GeorgeMonbiot

George Monbiot Profile picture
28 Oct
I hope you’re sitting down, because this week’s column should make you very, very angry.
It shows how professional clinicians employed by the NHS in crucial test and trace jobs have been secretly replaced by teenaged call centre workers employed by Serco
theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
Last week's column covered a major test and trace scandal. But this, in my view, is much worse. Just as we urgently need to improve the failing system and make it accountable, it is deskilled and further privatised.

How the hell are we going to escape the pandemic?
Aside from the fact that this makes the £12bn programme even less likely to succeed, the effect on the young people forced to take on the jobs of health professionals is devastating. No qualifications, no proper training, thrust into roles for which they're entirely unprepared.
Read 8 tweets
George Monbiot Profile picture
21 Oct
A massive scandal.
How the govt's obsession with privatisation destroyed Test and Trace.
How this caused the resurgence of Covid-19.
How the official "Anti-Corruption Champion" is in the thick of the disaster he should be investigating.
This week's column
theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
This is such an extraordinary story, and so outrageous when you draw all the threads together, that the Guardian let me have almost twice the usual word count.

I defy you to read to the end of it without gasping with rage and grief.
One thing that wasn't clear to me before is the role of the horse racing industry as an entrepot of power. Dominated by immensely rich and influential people, it seems to have fingers everywhere. I suspect more high level deals are done at the race course than the golf course.
Read 9 tweets
George Monbiot Profile picture
19 Oct
This is how the left dies.

So many battles to fight. So many massive, powerful forces to contest: offshore finance, oil and mining companies, the billionaire press, corrupt political funding, Trump, Johnson, Bolsonaro ....

Instead we rip into each other.
We might not agree on everything. But effective solidarity means overlooking small differences to unite on big projects.
Cue this exchange, on repeat for 10 months now:
-You were anti-Corbyn
No I wasn’t.
-Yes you were
See my articles and videos.
- In 2017 you wrote a negative tweet about him
Yes, sometimes he drove me nuts.
- That proves it
I don’t give unconditional support to any pol.
-Traitor!
Read 4 tweets
George Monbiot Profile picture
15 Oct
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.
Read 9 tweets
George Monbiot Profile picture
13 Oct
Taxes, like rules, are for little people.

There's no end to the contempt Cummings and his circle show for ordinary mortals.
Yet somehow, these privileged parasites managed to convince millions of people that they are heroically battling against "the elite": by which they appear to mean anyone with a degree.
All the while, they work on behalf of the true elite: the billionaire proprietors of the newspapers, the hedge fund managers, the private equity companies, the multimillionaire funders of the Conservative Party.

It's the most effective con in recent British political history.
Read 6 tweets
George Monbiot Profile picture
12 Oct
If the passion and energy that some on the left invest in attacking other people on the left were directed instead at the Conservatives, they might never win another election.

Please everyone: less infighting, more perspective.
All I know is this:

Despite supporting Jeremy Corbyn, and devoting most of a year (unpaid) to his Land for the Many report,

and despite trying, in all the work I do, to hold power to account

I get more flak from the left than the right.

It's such a waste of time and energy.
It seems to me like classic displacement activity.

The government has an 80-seat majority

It is grabbing power with both fists

There is little we can do to stop it

So let's attack each other instead

I understand the grief and anger. But let's not turn it on each other.
Read 4 tweets

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