Here is Gavin Williamson talking this afternoon about the decision on the evening of 14 December to force Greenwich to reopen Schools: "At that stage none of us were aware of the new variant."
And here is Matt Hancock earlier that day telling the House of Commons about the existence of the new variant. hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2020-1…
Matt Hancock also spoke of "the faster spread in the South of England" but Williamson claimed: "You'd seen authorities and schools right across the North of England and right across the Midlands... with case rates much higher than we'd seen in Greenwich."
Has Gavin Williamson just ceased to have any interest in whether what comes out of his mouth is true or not?
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Just been sent a screenshot by a contact in the PPE world offering him IIR facemasks at $0.039. The 150m masks we purchased from Liz Truss' adviser via Ayanda for £97.5m we could buy today for £4.5m.
What makes this even more obscene is that the Ayanda contract had this clause in it - a clause I believe to be unique to politically connected VIP lane Ayanda - which said Ayanda could deliver its IIR facemasks late.
Here's what the National Audit Office said about how much PPE the Government bought at those top of the market prices: five years worth.
In its Manifesto for the 2019 General Election, the Conservative Party promised to "raise standards in... workers' rights." And now we learn they plan to cut them.
Like you, we are concerned that private providers might be looking at pandemic food provision for the vulnerable as a chance to make supersize profits.
... we now have a (completely inadequate) response from Government about its design and management of the £200m foodboxes contract (given without any tender process) which we are considering with Counsel. We expect to make an announcement about next steps shortly.
Legal stuff aside, it's just deplorable that so many providers seem to have thrown away their moral compass and now see pound signs where they should see basic decency and civic responsibility.
Changes to Government guidelines prioritised managing its reputation above the health of vulnerable children.
(With a link to the 25 page pre-action protocol letter lawyers for @GoodLawProject sent to Gavin Williamson on Thursday.) rebrand.ly/edu-0901
And here's some coverage from @tes of our challenge, the second we have been forced to bring against Government to seek to compel it properly to prioritise the education of kids in struggling families during the pandemic. tes.com/news/coronavir…
One of the issues we raised in our letter was the fact that "children will be brought into school, thus heightening the risk of infection to them and their families, purely because of their socio economic status". goodlawproject.org/news/reputatio…
Has anyone worked out if it's a good thing that private capital gets to decide whether a democratically elected politician can speak directly to the people?
(Not an attack on Facebook or Twitter; not a defence of Trump. Just a genuine question, about governance and power.)
I don't know the answer, which is why I asked. My instinct is that the question should never arise. And it only arose here because the other governance and legal checks, checks within the power of the State, failed first.
Before we get too superior, our Prime Minister (chosen by fewer than 160,000 members of the Conservative Party) suspended the elected legislature when it became inconvenient to him.
He was stopped by our constitution but his Government is - at this very moment - considering whether to change our constitution so he can't be stopped should he want to do it again.
Our media - including in particular, the BBC - scrambled to justify his actions. And if you were paying attention you learned a shocking lesson: that there was meaningfully nothing a Government in the UK could do which our media would not defend.