Vaccine minister @nadhimzahawi "doesn't want to speculate" why Britain has one of the worst Covid death rates in the world... and wants to wait for an inquiry. I'd rather take action based on knowledge not ignorance 1/ what we know...
2/ Johnson resisted scientific lockdown advice from the beginning, determined not to let Covid get in the way of Brexit... see Greenwich speech 3/2/20...
3/ Privatised test and trace was a fiasco... PPE shortages were avoidable... ministers dumped the pandemic into the care home sector... and Tories kept the airports open while other countries shut them down...
4/ Then schools/universities were allowed back in autumn with no realistic safety plan; then superspreader events were (again) allowed; then no English circuit breaker; then early lift of the November lockdown... and still test and trace a fiasco ...
5/ Not forgetting eat out to help out... then the Xmas lockdown fiasco combined with the UK variant boosted the death rate... so that only now do we start controlling the borders, 10 months too late...
6/ Meanwhile throughout the pandemic no adequate furlough schemes for 3m self employed, no crackdown on employers forcing workers to work unsafely, continued spurious construction work...
7/ So a responsible government would conduct an interim review now, in 14 days, and re-set the strategy - but @nadhimzahawi and co are simple ass covering now... as we move into a year of no foreign holidays and rolling lockdowns

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More from @paulmasonnews

12 Jan
The Chartwells/Compass free school meals package scandal is a teachable moment about capitalism. 1/ Why do so many families need free school meals? Because real wages have stagnated while profits soared...
2/ Why packages and not vouchers? Because the big outsourcers like Compass *lobbied the government* against vouchers, claiming they could use their scale to provide cheaper food...
3/ Here's the business model in a single graphic. Buy food as cheap as possible. Achieve growth by replacing/acquiring smaller, higher-quality providers, hire the cheapest possible labour...("we focus relentlessly on costs")... but it's not done to make huge bottom line profits
Read 13 tweets
10 Jan
From his well paid column in a highly circulated right-wing tabloid, Peter Hitchens "fears for his freedom of speech". As I'm the target of the bile today, let's be clear... nobody wants to censor the Mail on Sunday... dailymail.co.uk/debate/article…
... but we do have the right to lobby Twitter/Facebook/Youtube and the advertisers to label disinformation, deprioritise it in the algorithm and demonetise grifters making money from science denial...
... if you don't understand the relationship between the fascists and conspiraloons and their mainstream media enablers, read Arendt...
Read 5 tweets
9 Jan
1/ I predicted the Trump coup but not its form. I thought the militias/PBs would turn out to disrupt and suppress voting... now I understand why they didn't: the Trump strategists thought they would win Georgia/Arizona and contest the postal voting... this has implications...
2/ The Trumpers also understood better than the left that there was an anti-BLM/anti-socialist backlash building among minorities - eg Texas Rio Grande, parts of NY State... and their turnout numbers looked good...
3/ Once they decided to try to invalidate/overturn the result, the key was whether the GOP right would go along with it. Until this week they did. That's what rallied a fairly beleaguered and confused plebeian mass base: they were lost once SCOTUS ruled against Texas....
Read 17 tweets
8 Jan
A short thread on the Nazi/Trump parallels, drawn from research from How To Stop Fascism (see bio): 1/ The modern far right grows from the same ideological rootstock as Hitler/Mussolini - Nietzsche, Sorel, Chamberlain - it's the same crap... but...
2/ In the immediate aftermath of WW1 the German far right was splintered, with the biggest action - not words - being perpetrated by the Freikorps, first against the Spartakist uprising (exactly 102 years ago), then Baltic States...
3/ ... then the Bavarian Soviet. So when Hitlers NSDAP took off it was as a magnet for all paramilitaries, militias, aristocratic fascists etc... but there still remained Trump-style authoritarian conservatives, some even "populist"...
Read 22 tweets
8 Jan
Trump backs down - on transition, on prosecuting MAGA rioters, on links to far right. Why? Because a felony was committed somewhere in the chain of command that led to the security failures at Capitol, and it will be traceable 1/ And everyone is resigning...
2/ Politically - in terms of mainstream politics - this is now a damage limitation exercise for the Trump family and the inner circle. He can pardon himself but not them. In terms of mass politics however...
3/ As I pointed out yesterday, fascists need Sorelian myths: the Storm/Kraken was a Sorelian myth and it fell apart between the SCOTUS judgement and 6 January... now they need a new Sorelian myth...
Read 11 tweets
7 Jan
We are all Antifa now! One day on from the Capitol coup... 1/ This will create a Sorelian myth for the US right: "next time with a million people".... medium.com/mosquito-ridge…
2/ This was a core of fascists, some dedicated MAGA people, but the militias stayed away in numbers... the danger is not over because only now do the MAGA millions realise they lost control of both houses, Pence, the GOP right etc... medium.com/mosquito-ridge…
3/ The most important thing was not that they seized the Capitol but that Trump incited them and the cops manifestly failed... that pattern will define the next 4 years of an anti-Biden insurgency... medium.com/mosquito-ridge…
Read 11 tweets

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