So, we own something called the British Business Bank.
And through British Business Bank we own British Patient Capital.
And British Patient Capital invested $65m in the for-profit SV Health Investors' Impact Medicine Fund.
The MD of SV Health Investors is Kate Bingham, wife of Tory MP and Treasury Minister, Jesse Norman and cousin by marriage of Rachel Johnson.
Kate Bingham was brought in by Boris Johnson to invest billions of pounds of our money in Covid-19 vaccines.
So the Government has invested taxpayers' money in a for-profit health tech investment company run by the Tory crony we also put in charge in spending billions of public money on health tech. #EverywhereYouLook
Just worth reminding ourselves, as we look at how the likes of Kate Bingham and Dido Harding are delivering for the nation, what's actually happening on the ground. /1
We've invested vast sums in (at least) two pieces of unproven testing technology. The first is a kind of LAMP test by a company called Optigene. We've spent £323m on Optigene technology - how is it performing? /2
Ummm. Not so good, to be honest.
As this Guardian report discloses it failed to pick up more than half of all people who actually had Coronavirus. I'd say that's pretty sub-optimal. /3 theguardian.com/world/2020/nov…
"By 50% to 27% Britons believe that people should be allowed to self-identify as a gender different to the one they were assigned at birth... women and younger people, are likelier to hold more trans-friendly views": YouGov. yougov.co.uk/topics/politic…
Here's what Kantar found about differing attitudes to trans people between men and women: kantar.com/inspiration/so…
"A gender difference in attitudes also emerges, with women more
likely than men to say that prejudice towards transgender people is
'always wrong'": the British Social Attitudes Survey. bsa.natcen.ac.uk/media/39358/5_….
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.