Some righteous fury from @KamranAbbasi on the "state corruption on a grand scale" of this Government's response to the pandemic. bmj.com/content/371/bm…
So many of the outrages Kamran identifies we at @GoodLawProject are challenging by judicial review.
The disgraceful £100bn Moonshot project, embarked on without the consent of Parliament or consulting its own expert body, the NSC (crowdjustice.com/case/operation…).
The Government's disgraceful attempt to suppress research proving it was wrong to spend £75m on the basis of biased research (crowdjustice.com/case/abingdon-…).
Johnson's transparent cronyism - appointing his friends and relatives to key public health positions without open competition (crowdjustice.com/case/time-to-e…).
We are also bringing proceedings in relation to the grant of lucrative contracts to friends or associates without any competition: crowdjustice.com/case/a-river-t…
And in relation to Government's flagrant breach of the law requiring that it be transparent about to whom it is giving contracts. crowdjustice.com/case/fight-for…
And in relation to the inexplicable choice of counterparties with whom to spend billions on (often duff) PPE, again without any competition. crowdjustice.com/case/108millio…
The BBC has not asked anyone from @GoodLawProject to appear on a single piece of broadcast media in connection with any of this litigation. (It carried a brief pre-recorded clip back in August.) And indeed when it broadcasts stories about our work it omits mention of our name.
Nevertheless, despite the dominant position it occupies in our media, and its feeble stance on these issues, we are hugely proud to have helped push them (rightly) to the forefront of public attention.
As @KamranAbbasi says: "When good science is suppressed, people die."
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Lots of chatter about Lord Faulks' forthcoming report on judicial review.
It's fine to ask - and of course we do - questions about the proper limits to the judicial role. But we need to talk enough about the political context in which we come to ask those questions. THREAD.
I can't think of another democracy that is as vulnerable as ours to autocratic power. We don't have in any meaningful sense a constitution. Instead we have a five-yearly event that gives unconstrained power to the Commons.
The power is unconstrained because we lack a second Chamber that can constrain the Commons. We lack staged intakes of MPs that might offer checks to the absolute power flowing from that five yearly event.
Here's Julia Lopez, a Cabinet Office Minister, promising an "internal review" into private contracts awarded during the pandemic. theguardian.com/world/2020/nov…
So if we carried on using PPE at the same rate as at the height of the first wave we would use about 6.8bn items in a year. gov.uk/government/pub…
Which makes it rather odd that Government itself says we have purchased 36.7bn items - well over *five years* supply assuming we continue to use it at the highest rates we ever have.
Indeed we bought so much that we don't have warehouse space for it and eleven thousand containers of it are clogging up Felixstowe. theguardian.com/business/2020/…
An FOI request of the Health and Safety Executive in relation to PPE supplied to the Department of Health by Pestfix has turned up some quite extraordinary material. THREAD
The first is that, although the DHSC has refused in the litigation to release price data for the £32m coverall contract (or at all), the HSE has released that price data further to the FOI request. It shows we paid Crisp Websites £14.02 per coverall (plus shipping).
A comparison price today from Unicef (supply.unicef.org/s0305117.html) for type 6B coveralls is $8.12 (i.e. less than half what we paid Crisp Websites).
So the Government spent £75m on tests on the basis of a 'preprint' study which was not peer reviewed, was funded by some of the consortium developing and producing the test, and which wrongly suggested that the test gave no false positive results. bmj.com/content/371/bm…
"If the test is used in the community as intended, and assuming that 10% of recipients have previously been infected, around one in five positive AbC-19 tests would be a false positive, the findings suggest."
We also know from this report from @sarahboseley
yesterday that the Government tried to supress publication of the study that exposed the flaws in the non-peer-reviewed "pre-print". theguardian.com/world/2020/nov…
Absolutely staggering. After @GoodLawProject sued DHSC for unlawfully procuring PPE from Pestfix, DHSC put pressure on the Health and Safety Executive to lie and say that Pestfix PPE had passed safety checks. bbc.co.uk/news/uk-548977…
Government entered into 11 contracts with tiny pest control specialist Pestfix. Government has (unlawfully) failed to publish five. The six we can see sum to about a third of a billion pounds. At least one was bought on the basis of fake documents.
We will, of course, be drawing this email correspondence to the attention of the High Court urgently. And we need to see the entirety of it but there is at the very least a suspicion that DHSC has sought to conjure up false evidence to put before the High Court.