Can I ask, please, whether these terms, in the £252m contract with Ayanda, brokered by a Board of Trade adviser, were standard, please: /2
If you accept they were not standard, can you say who provided the further approval for them? /3
Moreover, in order to attempt to restore public confidence, can you provide the explanation given for the variation to the standard terms and conditions in the Ayanda contract? /4
If, on the other hand, you still maintain that the terms in the Ayanda contract were standard, will you undertake to apologise to the Lords for misleading them if I provide you with fifty other PPE contracts which do not contain one or both of those terms? /ENDS
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Test and Trace isn't delivering for the nation and we think there are questions about whether it was right to give that job to Dido Harding without competition. We're suing to find out whether that decision was lawful. goodlawproject.org/news/cronyism/
Worth noting that Purple Medical's Chief Exec boasted elsewhere: "We are a long-term partner of the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) as well as the NHS. Purple Surgical was therefore able to access central procurement within the Cabinet Office." theguardian.com/society/2020/n…
@GoodLawProject is bringing some litigation to protect the rights and dignities of trans people; we've hired the legal team and sent the formal letter before action and we're just waiting for the right time to launch.
Anyway, we recorded an interview I did with a trans woman in her late fifties. She talks about how as a child - she was brought up Catholic - she would say her prayers at night that she might wake up fully as a girl. She's in tears, I'm in tears. It's totally heartbreaking.
She goes on to talk about what her relatively late transition has meant for her sense of self and how immeasurably better her life would have been had she been able to transition earlier.
One of the many extraordinary things about the world the Government is creating is the institutionalisation of political patronage. Lucrative public contracts - and jobs too - for their mates.
There is also Dido Harding who was appointed as Head of the National Institute for Health Protection. She is the wife of a Conservative MP and friend of former Prime Minister David Cameron.
Boris Johnson has just talked about a massive expansion of rapid result home testing kits which seem to be the saliva tests made by Innova. theguardian.com/world/2020/oct…
The evidence supporting this test is really weak. The Government study reported here has meaningfully no detail at all. gov.uk/government/pub…
You can see the CE Marking for the Innova Test here. A few comments on it follow. 1drv.ms/b/s!AgDubbkGwE…
Embedded in this decision is an assertion that the question 'should one discriminate on the basis of ethnicity, or sexual preference, or gender identity?' is one that requires balance, one on which reasonable people can disagree. theguardian.com/media/2020/oct…
Decisions like this - which implicitly legitimise racism or homophobia or transphobia - are one reason why I hope the Labour Party finds its focus, and quickly. The country is changing before our eyes, and not for the better.
Personal take. The BBC (in common with much of our media, including, shamefully, the Guardian) has a number of transphobes in its editorial structure. The efforts of those transphobes to institutionalise their prejudice is landing the BBC in all sorts of legal hot water.