Billions lost to fraud and error during UK's pandemic spending spree UK government must figure out how to share spending data across departments after up to £59 billion ($74.4 billion) in expenditure was lost to fraud and error early in the pandemic. This is according to a report from the National Audit Office (NAO), which found levels of fraud in UK public spending grew sharply during the …
I wouldn't do to piss of the Tory pals and donors who participated in the fraud and gravy trains. Too many yachts would have to be returned, and definitely no talk of people actually going to jail.
No one will ever be prosecuted. No one will ever be held to account and we, the British public, will put up with it. If this were France there'd be burning tyres rolling up the Champs-Élysées.
Whilst that was true I think part of the issue is that some very large sums of money would be spent on finding people (criminals) where both the money and the people are long gone.
There was almost no hope of any convictions and zero possibility of recovering the money.
I don't like the outcome and it tends to send the wrong message but in terms of value for money, it is the best of a bad job.
And to the downvoters: Hanlon's razor breaks when incompetence serves malice.
Who benefited from this? Dodgy company owners, shareholders, directors. Principally tory voters. Not workers. (They did benefit from correctly-administered payments not included in this figure.)
The problem wasn't just that the system was broken, it was that the operators of the system knew it was broken and didn't care. They told their mates that the system was broken and that they could fraudulently claim free money from the magic money tree and they would get away with it. And they largely did.
"They did benefit from correctly-administered payments not included in this figure"
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/may/13/record-levels-benefit-fraud-universal-credit-first-year-pandemic-in-britain
Someone managed to claim nearly £1500 in my name over the summer of 2020. When I finally got through to someone who knew what was going on they admitted that no-one had spoken to the person who made the claim. It was all done on-line. There wasn't even a check to see if they were still paying NI and income tax. I eventually got a letter saying 'oops, sorry, our bad, you don't need to pay us back'.
Some people need to go to prison for the amount of fraud that was allowed to happen.
You can't blame a tiger for behaving like a tiger, but if zoo keeper let it eat the patrons, then zoo keeper should be in prison.
But this corrupt government and the three letter agencies that supposed to watch its greasy hands decided to maybe go after some tigers and have zoo keeper in the clear.
I mean how zoo keeper could possibly know that if they open the tiger's enclosure wide its going to maul and eat the patrons?
Who is the tiger and who is the zoo keeper in your analogy?
I wouldn't class criminal gangs who set up large scale identity frauds as 'innocent wild animals'. Especially not if any of them had any connection whatsoever to the government. Nor could I class the directors of corrupt companies as innocent animals, and some of them definitely DID have government contacts.
Nor would I class the government / police / HMRC as negligent zookeepers who absent-mindedly left the door of the tiger enclosure open.
There was deliberate profiteering at the very top here. The zoo keeper shot and robbed the patrons and blamed the tiger
There are several levels at play.
We have the direct fraud that you experienced, that has occurred because criminals found an opportunity and exploited it. Politician, the media & public were screaming for things to happen quickly. That leads to mistake, lack of oversight or compliance and errors.
Then we have the more difficult scenarios like PPE. Much of this was because the global supply system was broken and again companies (and people) could see opportunities. The Government then facilitated inappropriate contracts, many with people that had links to the Tories to buy stuff quickly. Again a lack of oversight combined with global shortages allowed things to happen that in normal times would not be possible. Should contracts have been given to people with direct links to MPs or the Government? Probably not and there needs to be restrictions in place to prevent this in the future.
It is only after the event that the scale of some of the abuse of power and size of contracts has surfaced. Where there has been deliberate fraud (Mone) then one hopes they will be brought to account.
Much like the tit that appears in the YouTube adverts about money in property. Can't remember his name but he just straight out came out with it. That people could claim Covid money, legally then use it to invest in property.
He really is a cunt. Yet YouTube continue to display his ads.
And what would have been your reaction (and that of the media) at the time, if the government had said: "Faced with a pandemic, we're procuring lots of PPE and other medical equipment, but we must go through all the necessary steps to prevent fraud, rigorous testing to ensure quality standards are met, getting three competitive tenders on each bid, validating DEI and anti-slavery policies of suppliers, etc, which will delay things by a few months."? Note that Starmer's Labour were supportive of all these purchases, except for demands for "harder and faster".
It wasn't just PPE and other urgent covid related things though, it was all kinds of stuff going through the VIP lane. Multimillion pound IT contracts. Services for prison and probation. Schools contracts.
To hell with all of this anti-corruption malarkey. That's why we left the EU, right?
I've no love for Starmer and his neo-Blairites either, by the way. He just parrots anything the tories say
You conspiracy theorists twist everything to fit your view.
Back in realityland, the law was changed, and with it the system of contracting: anything that was not at arms-length prices can be clawed back after the fact, which is the stage in the process we're currently at. But, there just wasn't that much which was dodgy, rather than wasteful, other than the outright fraud by criminal gangs, who have now scarpered with the money. All the government cronies either made money supplying things at the same prices as everyone else, or have ended up - or will soon end up - losing the entire sum paid, rather than just the profits.
It's typical tinfoilhat behaviour to conflate completely different things; in this case, wastage, fraud, and crony deals. The latter is a tiny proportion of the total.
Er, seriously!?
What did we get for the £37 Billion (or slightly less?)
How many lives were saved, and how much does that work out per person?
If it saved 37 people's lives, that's probably not great value for money.
If it saved 37 million, it would have been worth it.
I suspect it was much much closer to the former.
I'm not suggesting that losing 37b is good or bad..but put into perspective, it's around 2% of total tax receipts...less than 1% the total size of the UK economy annually. It's a large sum of money for sure, but in the grand scheme of things...relatively speaking...it's not that massive. It's basically a rounding error.
It works out to be approximately 10% of the NHS annual budget...£131bn a year is spent on benefits. £134bn a year on pensions.
If all the £37bn went into one persons pocket, then it's a large sum of money to lose and clearly some fraud went on...however, if it just ended up everywhere, as it probably did through incompetence...then the sum total is large, and the scale is noteworthy, but it's not a massive loss.
I prefer to think of the Tories as incompetent rather than scheming...because the latter gives them undue credit...I don't think any of them are smart enough to get away with a £37bn fiddle.
It's highly likely that chasing down this £37bn would take a large amount of time and would probably cost more than the £37bn is worth.
NICE reckons value of medical interventions as "quality-adjusted life year" and allows £20,000 to £30,000 so any health issues prevented need also be included in the calculation
Government use “value of a prevented fatality" for reckoning an indivdual's 'worth'. At about £2 million (though some think that an undervalue) T&T would only have to save 18,500 lives by my reckoning
> How much was the test and trace contract? And how well did it work?
About 22 Billion wasn't it? Of which about 1 billion went to Randox. More billions to other dodgy companies that barely existed pre-pandemic (eyes passim)
Work? It collected a lot of data about us all.. Did it do anything to stop the pandemic though?
And what would have been your reaction (and that of the media) at the time, if the government had said: "Faced with a pandemic, we're procuring lots of PPE and other medical equipment, but we must go through all the necessary steps to prevent fraud, rigorous testing to ensure quality standards are met, getting three competitive tenders on each bid, validating DEI and anti-slavery policies of suppliers, etc, which will delay things by a few months."?
Well, people might not have been happy at the time to hear that standards would be retained, but one definite outcome would have been that we weren't left with mountains of unfit for purpose PPE and billions being pissed up the wall top dodgy suppliers (including minister's mates), and the probable outcome of getting effective volumes of compliant PPE to the frontline, probably about the same as was eventually the case.
But the root cause of the whole PPE mess was because Jeremy *unt as minister for health ignored the various exercises run by his own officials that predicted (eg Exercise Cygnus in 2016) and indeed had that work kept secret. It was known years before 2019 that a pandemic would see us run out of PPE in minutes, result in impact on health professionals, and result in an explosion in care home cases, but just like RAAC and Horizon, this sleazy, incompetent government just oozed on, doing what suited it's agenda of infighting and selecting imbeciles as leaders and ministers. If *unt had not been such a useless oxygen thief, there would have been ample time to go through proper procurement processes, ensure that standards were being complied with, and to consider contingency planning for the higher volumes of PPE that a pandemic would require.
With all due respect, I'm still of the opinion that we witnessed a staggering combination of "this time it's different" with the headess chicken syndrome, determined above all to be seen doing something.
Countries should have plans for epidemics and they need to communicate quickly and clearly the dangers, the home truths that potentially millions will die, and the rules for the first 8 to 12 weeks (doens't really matter after then).
Unfortunately, many countries quietly shelved their plans, because maintaining the inventory costs money and we need to make some budgetary savings… We can always reactivate it when we need it…
Beware —for clarification— this 2015 paper in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine is published by Sage Journals, part of Sage Publishing, which is an independent publishing company and has nothing to do with the UK government's SAGE —the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies.
"the home truths that potentially millions will die"
Unfortunately they'd be up against unverified loudmouths on social media, and "opinion pieces" in sectors of the press not normally known for anything resembling accuracy.
I've had arguments discussions with people who think I'm a twat to have had my vaccinations. To my knowledge, I never had Covid. Luck, or helped by the vaccine? Many of them, on the other hand, have had it multiple times. But, you know, there's this bloke on Facebook, says he's a doctor......
<sigh>
People are still arguing over whether or not it was useful to wear face masks. Was it really that much of a hardship to dangle a bit of fuzzy plastic stuff from each lughole for a while? If it was pointless, no big. If it potentially saved somebody's life, that's a big big. But most of us will never know and so the debates continue.
Actually there is data on the effectiveness of face masks and the answer is yes, it was pointless; any benefits are indistinguishable from noise. More than that, face masks are not free from side effects either so quite probably caused more harm than good (including to the emotional development of millions of children worldwide.) Personally I'm fine with you wearing a face nappy if it makes you feel good about yourself; I might quietly judge you to be a bit of an idiot but wouldn't say anything. On the other hand, I massively resent being ordered to do something which I am convinced is at best pointless just to make you feel good about yourself.
PS - re: the vaccines you're fortunate; both my in-laws were not and both are now on long term treatment for vaccine-induced heart issues.
PPS - you almost certainly have had covid. For many people it was barely noticeable or virtually symptomless, just as for some it was fatal... your genes and other health factors are far more likely to have helped you than the vaccines. Again... if vaccines made you feel good about yourself, I'm quite happy with that - I object however to people losing their jobs, being turned into social outcasts etc for not wanting them.
You are talking utter shit frankly, let me guess you watch any or all of the following - fox "news", GB News, RT, Sputnik, OANN, Newsmax
That your also subscribed to various anti vaxxer groups
You read "news" from the Telegraph, Mail, Express or other crud
Funny then how colds, flus and COVID cases dropped heavily when people wore masks and soared when the requirement to do so was removed.
Conspiracy theorists and useful idiots like yourself should have either been jailed or committed To have your delusions treated......
"Countries should have plans for epidemics and they need to communicate quickly and clearly the dangers, the home truths that potentially millions will die, and the rules for the first 8 to 12 weeks (doens't really matter after then)."
And they have. But whats the best plan when the collision with reality isnt considered to be a reason to adapt it ? And whats the best plan if nobody cares to know it exists ? Whats any plan if panic preaching and "models" (lies) instead of reality dictate the "protective" insaneness ?
Whats the best plan if some pseudovaccine/mRNA bioweapon is politically enforced and vector vaccines and other better working and less risky vaccines are effectively prohibited (which means they dont count as politically accepted vaccination so if you dont like repression and factical incarceration at home better get your jab of snake oil) ? Surely it has nothing to do with von der Leyen being married to a high ranking pfizer guy or that the useless PCR "test" financially benefits the most prominent panic preacher besides Lauterbach, Christian Drosten, who is not only a bioweapons designer ("gain of function "research"") but also did profit during swine flu with another dodgy vaccine that had a lot of ill effects like neurolepsy.
Concerning corruption, germany has had its share with several parliament guys being involved in overexpensive procurement of useless PPE, then minister of health Jens Spahn being involved in donors meetings in high class restaurants while preaching to the plebs not to go to restaurents and designing a PPE contract so corruption friendly that the useless stuff was deemed unfit for purpose even before delivery.
Next minister of health, panic preacher Lauterbach closed more than 20 hospitals during a oh so dreadful panicdemic and let over 6000 "corona heroes" AKA nurses, doctors, those guys actually manning the closed hospitals get sacked, also devalued the "Pflegeschlüssel" (minimum mandatory amount of nurse per count of patients) so the profits for his long time "investor" friends with benefits could keep up. He also paid for emergency beds that either did not exist at all or did exist in a warehouse with no medicinic personnel to actually man them, should a patient be in need.
So yeah nobody actually knows how severe it would have been, which might be due to the fact that not enough reliable data to actually assess this mess afterwards was ever collected.
Situation in other countries does vary, i know, but in germany that was a pure panic terror glutton feast for totalitarians and corrupts of any kind.
And less than a year into the pandemic and most of the safeguards that had it contained have been dismantled, conspiracy theories allowed to fester and amplified by politicians mates and benefactors.
Colds, influenza and COVID are all spread by aerosol transmission - masks mean we keep each other safe, anti maskers would have been fewer in number if plod had done their job and the penalty wasn't financial but instead being hauled in front of the beak to be castigated for selfish and unacceptable disregard for the lives of others.
However oh no we can't do something that sensible....no let's pretend we've won and it's all over ......this world is as thick as shit and proves the old adage, those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it and next time might have a much much higher fatality rate..
I.e. closer to ebola or Marburg than COVID..
Well didn't they have an exercise is 2016 to see just what they should do if a pandemic were to happen? (Or was that project fear?)
They cannot say they didn't know, and are guilty as hell. From the link:
A key section reads: “There was a general consensus on the need to identify capacity and capability of assets within the health system.
“Assets in this context would be all resources that would be required to effectively respond to a Mers-CoV outbreak such as trained personnel, appropriate PPE in sufficient quantities and the requisite beds with suitable clinical equipment.”
Don't worry! We are going to pay everything back in higher taxes while ensuring mental health of fraudsters is not affected by pesky investigations.
Imagine how much influence those billions can buy now. It's probably enough to send any three letter agency to wild goose chases until the end of time.
Those suppliers were out of stock because they could not cope with the sudden surge in demand.
That was a large part of the problem, everyone was competing to get the same resources and the only thing that made something happen was money.
Look at the reports of US teams taking PPE destined for other countries.
"...the processes in place for sharing data, both between and within departmental groups, are often slow and burdensome, often resulting in incomplete or time-lagged data being shared"
And that, I can only assume, is entirely by design. The people responsible for setting these policies and processes would really rather that there wasn't a clear trail that would expose all the other incompetent decisions they made.
Wasted money is bad. Harming lots of citizens by a dangerous medicine is even worse. A crime on humanity, in fact.
See
1.) CDC VAERS https://wonder.cdc.gov/controller/datarequest/D8
10000 times more heavy side effects than e.g. measels vaccine.
2.) Outright fraud in the approval trials: https://rumble.com/vqwdp6-how-many-more-adverse-effects-have-been-covered-up-during-the-trials-maddie.html
Welcome to the dark times of the Rule Of MAMMON.
I remain skeptical of both sides of the anti vax debate tbh.
The virus had some clear autoimmune effects that may or may not have been engineered. The same antibodies produced in reaction to the vaccine instead of the virus may have had the same effect, worse in people who had bad inflammatory reactions to covid in the first place.
That does NOT mean that any vaccine was ever deliberately harmful.
The virus, on the other hand, has a lot of respectable people (including the i newspaper for example) questioning its origins and suggesting it may have been created deliberately.
But all the 5G microchips nonsense i personally believe was counter-propaganda designed to further discredit and demonise anybody wearing a tinfoil hat suspicious of the government. It may not have started as such, it could have come from 4chan. But big companies like facebook control what goes er, viral.
The stories about wireless transmitters inside the C-vaccine were designed to either discredit any disapproval, or they came from a hostile power in order to stir up dissent.
I never wrote about them here or quoted something of the like.
In my circle of friends one man almost died from heart inflammation after the C-vaccincation. It was clearly a quick+dirty medical product.
All vaccines have side effects, with a few they are serious:
My daughter was hospitalised after the first dose of the MMR vaccine, I still see the benefit as being greater than the risk, so she still had the second dose (markedly less severe reaction) and subsequent childhood/teenage vaccination's, my son also had the MMR (mild reaction) et al.
Are they?
Remember the system for (normally) reporting vaccine adverse effects isn’t particularly robust. I have no idea whether my daughter’s reaction was reported or not, through the largely informal system used in the UK.
With CoViD we had billions of doses administered in a relatively short space of time to billions of people, probably in more controlled environments. With CoViD we had to go specific centres and wait in a supervised environment for 15 minutes afterwards for initial reactions, then were told to lookout for reactions in the following days and weeks and to contact doctor/111/999, so much more data was captured.
Yes, there is a significant increase in the numbers of people dying of certain heart conditions, since the vaccination programme, which is causing some to ask questions.
What is clear, as far as the UK is concerned, thanks to Andrew Wakefield (MMR) and now CoViD, the way vaccines are handled, administered and adverse reactions reported upon, has massively improved.
"Anti-vaxxers are the criminals.
I have a zero tolerance for these unthinking Neanderthals."
Karl ? Is that you ?
I do approve working and reliable vaccines like smallpox, tetanus, rabies, measles but i do not approve enforced mRNA substances, much less if the stuff that got this questionable emergency certification was produced in vitro ("process 1") while the stuff injected into people was produced much messier and cheaper by genetically engineered bacteria ("process 2"), resulting in contamination and a severely reduced integrity rate of the mRNA.
As watchdogs are, this was ignored by germanys institutes PEI (which still refuses to do any independant testing of pfizers mRNA substance) and RKI . It did make the european medicinal watchdog EMA do something very important: lower the quality standards so the new stuff could be sold on and "forget" to tell anyone until the pfizer files were court opened in the USA and quite a lot of unpleasant information came to light.
While a normal vaccination practically gives your whole immune system "illness light" to teach it to cope when the full version comes around (or in case of vector vaccines, a sequence of the illness inserted onto a carrier virus, typically an adenovirus strain) with some additional substances mixed in so that your body takes the vaccination/pseudo infection a lot more serious than it is to augment the learning effect, the mRNA stuff enters an undefined amount of undefined types of body cells and reprograms them to produce a toxin ("spike protein") in an undefinable amount for an undefinable amount of time. At least if what pfizer and biontech claim is true. They produce this stuff, they should know.
If the mRNA integrity is sufficient. If its not, anything might happen.
So basically, real vaccinations aiding and immunizing are something i do approve. If the politicians hadnt changed the rules every few days and hadnt fetishized the mRNA substances, i would have gone with the single jab of J&J or the british vector vaccine that was valid as vaccination for a few weeks. Second choice - had it ever been approved - would have been sinovac or sputnik.
Then again, since a thrice mRNAed individual infected the whole company, i had my three day flu AKA natural immunisation which was also politically invalidated.
Experimental former cancer medicines like the mRNA stuff with questionable effect and principle are something i dont want. Tetanus and rabies vaccinations are refreshed regularly. Measles is unneeded, i had every child illness in its time.
Sorry to pop your aggro bubble but i deliberately did not read the extreme sides but the EMA report, biontechs own product description and correlated this to the ever changing "THIS is the ONLY truth" coming from above.
If you missed the ever changing "facts" like "one vaccination is enough to immunize for life" going over "one "booster" every 6 months" to the actual version "well it doesnt do shit to immunize but we have a mathematical model that "proves" it reduces the chance of severe outcome" then i understand why you agressively defend the official "truth".
Measles cases are rising in the UK so obviously the "I do my own research" halfwits aren't any more receptive to that vaccine than the COVID vaccine.
Dying of a preventable disease is a hell of a side effect.
There were many billions more lost here in the states. It is just another example of the inefficiency and incompetence of government. Whenever programs are run by political appointees instead of actually competent people, there will always be failures such as this. More money = more failure.
Anything that can be done by private enterprise should be done by private enterprise.
Government can have highly successful and efficient large scale programmes. See: NASA, CERN, CEGB
Private companies can have efficient and successful programmes too, though I fail to see how they can serve anything but self-interest.
The real problem comes when government does business with private companies and lets them influence its decision making.
"Anything that can be done by private enterprise should be done by private enterprise."
As seen by the success stories from deutsche bahn /german railroad, the german health system, the german pension system, deutsche Post/Telekom, the german "autobahn GmbH" (autobahn limited) the airport fiasco BER, the railway station fiasco Stuttgart 21.......
Private industry is good at and interested in maximising profit for management and shareholders. The actual function for the customer is only an afterthought and neglected and ignored as much as possible as long as the profits are not affected.
I would not recommend a mix of both, though, as proven by the protection racket media AKA "öffentlich-rechtliche Medien" some pseudoprivatised frankenstein mixture of state privilege and pseudoprivate goebbels media, definitely not like the BBC (i wouldnt taint the still visible quality of the BBC by comparing it with the self serving corruption infested propaganda cesspit of its german counterpart).
This is an interesting problem. People complaining the money went missing but it needs to be looked at in context-
The UK wasnt locking down and buggering its economy, until suddenly it was. At that point people needed money because the government was ruining/saving their lives. Is it better for the people who need the money to get it or should it be slower and more rigorous shutting people out of money they need?
Of course not buggering the economy would have meant not splurging like a drunken sailor, but the other option was taken instead.
A large amount of the fraud was trivial to detect.
For example, there were a large number of companies that were registered as "defunct" or didn't even exist until the day they put in the claim to support nonexistent employees or contacted their friendly local Tory Minister claiming they could supply PPE from the beer cellar.
@Richard 12
"For example, there were a large number of companies that were registered as "defunct" or didn't even exist until the day they put in the claim to support nonexistent employees or contacted their friendly local Tory Minister claiming they could supply PPE from the beer cellar."
Ok. So run through the bureaucracy to try and do something you would hope was simple and easy while the masses call for your head because you aint locked down and giving away money for nothing. These are politicians we are talking about.
As with PPE contracts and such. The world wanted this stuff and the gov wanted to be in first. You remember the crying of Europe when Trump wanted the vaccine first for the US and would do whatever to get it? You remember the crying of Europe when teh US, UK and Israel got the vaccine while their gov was further behind in the queue.
My opinion is that this could have been easily resolved by not caving to the hysteria and being sensible. But when the race is to be first, all thought be damned, then its a rush job not a good job. I doubt you would be happy without a job, without pay and awaiting the approval of some gov clipboard guy sitting pretty to eventually decide you are eligible.
If you think being registered at Companies House is relevant to whether the firm is a scam or not, I have some bad news for you:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-nottinghamshire-67053586
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-essex-66810106
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-65205520
Yes there was the outdated practices of Companies House - interestingly “The Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act” (the ECCTA) received Royal Assent on 26 October 2023, it requires mandatory proof of id for all company directors, both new and for currently listed companies. It will be interesting g to see what that uncovers, although the timetable which directors need to comply with is a little unclear.
However, the issue was that the government department that handed out the monies did no checks, so can’t even point the finger at Companies House…
Aside: The ECCTA is interesting in that it creates new bar to Corporate Criminal Liability, it would seem under the act, the actions of the senior Post Office management over Horizon are sufficient for their actions to be attributed to the company… what isn’t clear is whether there is any backdating, but certainly any new PO attempts to prosecute Post Masters will be impacted by this act…
@Roland6
"Well in the big picture CoVID cost the government significantly less than it spent bailing out the banks from the 2008 financial crisis…"
I 2008 it was to keep the economy from nosediving into depression (agree or disagree with it or would have happened). The covid splurge was to prop people up while tanking the economy. In both cases some people thought it was worth it and others not.
Well 2008 was a crisis manufactured by the banks… so some parallels with Covid…
What is notable is with 2008 the government decided to throw money directly at the banks, rather than taking to potentially cheaper option of simply underwriting the repayments of the sub-prime loans, which the evidence shows cost significantly more than the book value of the sub-prime loans, whilst also doing nothing to help the victims who lost their homes etc..
With Covid the government bypassed the banks and directly subsidised people’s wages and thus companies. This approach seems to have cost significantly less and maintained a level of capacity in the economy to more quickly pickup (whether it did or did not is a separate discussion point).
@Roland6
"What is notable is with 2008 the government decided to throw money directly at the banks"
The last equivalent situation was the 1930s. I wasnt a fan of dumping money on the banks at the time but it was about saving the currency and avoiding another great depression.
"With Covid the government bypassed the banks and directly subsidised people’s wages and thus companies. This approach seems to have cost significantly less and maintained a level of capacity in the economy to more quickly pickup (whether it did or did not is a separate discussion point)."
With covid the gov caused the crisis by abandoning science and the preprepared plans to trash the economy. Initially nobody knew anything about the virus and the assumption was a new black death. I am not sure how you think it costs less although maybe there was a hope it would. Instead its inflicted long term harm we will be paying for the foreseeable future.
>” am not sure how you think it costs less although maybe there was a hope it would”
Need to separate costs:
Total QE monies 2009~2012 £375bn
Total furlough monies 2020-2022 £70bn
Neither of these figures allow for inflation etc.
>” it was about saving the currency and avoiding another great depression.”
Yes, it was flagged back in the mid to late 1990s that the UK economy was overly exposed to the health of the global financial market; from looking at the balance of trade figures, it would seem we still are…
> the preprepared plans
I thought that was part of the problem, there were no real plans as the plans that existed were based on assumptions CoViD invalidated. Also, preparation cost money, hence why there was a scramble for PPE…
The biggest issue I had was the lack of preparation in the NHS in the acute wards: patients were dying from an unknown illness for several months before CoViD-19 was finally isolated, yet they didn’t implement strict biohazard containment procedures; I had cousins who were working these wards during this time…
@Roland6
"Yes, it was flagged back in the mid to late 1990s that the UK economy was overly exposed to the health of the global financial market; from looking at the balance of trade figures, it would seem we still are…"
That really isnt a shock. For all the hare brained schemes of government I dont see much changing either.
"I thought that was part of the problem, there were no real plans as the plans that existed were based on assumptions CoViD invalidated"
Unfortunately not. There were plans, Before Boris caught it and was then fell into the same panic as other countries we were following it. Unfortunately even though Covid was bad it was still gonna infect everyone and was also nowhere near as deadly as initially suspected. The severe FUD and confused policies were a knee-jerk reaction to following peoples cries instead of leading through the pandemic.
"I had cousins who were working these wards during this time…"
I can sympathise. The NHS tried to kill my family member during covid by not treating them but dumping them on a covid ward (she had a stroke). The procedures to visit her were so incompetent it could easily be the cause of more infections and even deaths.
The best method to avoid waste is to ensure that we have a government of technocrats rather than a kakistocracy of greedy populist blow hards who dance to the tune of far right influencers like Nigel Farage and Rupert Murdoch.
More broadly, it is necessary to shy away from the woolly thinking that requires all view points to be 'balanced' by an opposing view point. Value the experts. If 99 economists say that Brexit is a bad idea, and 1 disagrees, there is no need to give the 1 equal air time - I'm not saying that they should have no air-time, but they don't deserve half of the air time (1% would be about right). Ditto if 99% of climate scientists believe that global warming is anthropogenic then there's no need to give the dissenter more than 1% of the time.
One has to remember that most people are not very good at thinking critically (look at the popularity of the tabloids) and they will see this balance as confirmation that all points of view are equivalent. By extension, it will also be necessary to limit the ability of media outlets to promulgate lies. Freedom of speech demands that they should be allowed to say what they like. Democracy demands that if they're caught bullshitting then they need to broadcast a full retraction and apology at least as loudly as the original offending article (and, this is the difficult bit, taking into account how vigorously the lie has been spread on social media.) No, I don't have a solution (sorry), but failure to grasp this nettle will result in the sort of government that we currently 'enjoy'.
As long as the views of experts are denigrated, it's very difficult to get to a technocracy. Technocracies are almost by definition boring. Serious people doing serious things. And that isn't relatable. But it does result in less wastage and a better quality of life for all but a greedy few.
Damn, I never thought a comment could look just like someone repeatedly bashing their head against a brick wall and thinking its a miracle cure for a head ache, but you also managed to do so on a topic unrelated to doing so. You may not wanna look across the channel, you might get upset.
Re-reading what I wrote, I'm not surprised that it looked like "bashing their head against a brick wall and thinking it's(sic) a miracle cure for a head ache" to you. I used too many long words. Probably also explains why you split the word headache into two - reduces the syllable* count.
*whoops, did it again.
Brexit has failed.
Even the IEA is readying for a reverse ferret. Why Brexit was a mistake
Nope - that's not what I said is it? I said that the population should be given the facts in a digestible manner. It is not unreasonable that the majority, who have not had the education necessary to interpret scientific (or mathematical, or other complex topic) information should attribute volume to validity. We saw this happen with Brexit - where whataboutism ensured that both sides were given equal weight. Result? Vast swaths of the population couldn't decide which way to vote, because they weren't given the information in a way they could use. We see this now with Brexit regret, and a majority in favour of rejoin - and an even larger majority wishing that we hadn't left in the first place, even if some of those aren't quite at the rejoin stage yet.
How much more democratic if they'd been presented this information honestly in the first place, with retractions for falsehoods prominently advertised when necessary.
Nope, that isn't what you said at all. You pretty much said that if the majority opinion is x then the dissenting opinion should not get equal or balanced coverage. And you've reiterated this by saying the plebs would have voted remain if they'd only been given information that you approve of.
If 95% of the people thought a certain way would you agree that the remaining 5% should only get a 5% say and that they should just accept the decisions of the 95%?
Analogy. If, on a day that it's raining, 9 people were involved in a discussion on how long the rain will last and what to do on a wet day, would you want to include the one person who thinks it's a bright sunny day and who wants to go sunbathing (this despite the fact that they're soaking wet from the rain)? By your argument, they should have equal airtime despite the fact that a) the evidence is against them and b) there are 9 other people who might want their fare share of the discussion time (i.e. 90% of it).
Or maybe we have 100 people on a bus. 99 people want the bus to stop before it goes over the inconvenient cliff at the end of the lane, but one person is suicidal and wants to drive over the edge. Should their opinion be given equal weight (again, by your argument, yes they should.)
By my argument they should be given no more than their share - and maybe none at all, depending on how bonkers their view is. If, in the first analogy, another person came along claiming the sky was made of spaghetti and answered to the name fishy-mcfish-face then, yeah. No air-time. You'd grant them exact equivalence.
Incidentally, I don't need to "approve of the information". I might vehemently disagree with it. But it should at least be accurately reported and honest. For example, you might say that there's a really cold winter coming, and we should burn lots of oil to stay warm. If there was a really cold winter coming then I might disagree with you (I'd argue in favour of renewable energy sources to stay warm), but I couldn't accuse you of lying - so we'd be able to have a reasoned debate on what course of action we should take to heat our homes, weighing the pros and cons of both ideas. If one side bases their entire argument on a tissue of lies then it impossible to have a reasoned debate, to the detriment of democracy. So no. Exact equivalency is not a good thing.
"Should their opinion be given equal weight (again, by your argument, yes they should.)"
Never said that. You are now pretty much advocating not just for majority rule but also only people you agree with. This ISN'T democracy. This is tyranny.
One of the features of the political system in the UK is that the bar for entry is really quite low. You don't need billions and insanely rich friends like you do in the USA.
Many times in the history of the world there has been a lone dissenting voice who turned out to be correct.
We live in a world where the 9 people will read something on the internet that tells them its raining and they will believe that without question. The one person who looks out the window then gets ridiculed for having a differing opinion. 'I don't need to look out the window, these experts told me its raining and we must trust them'.
And in your analogy, what has it got to do with the 9 other people if one person wants to go sunbathe in the rain? We don't all have to think the same way. Again history has taught us that diversity of thought resulted in some of the greatest achievements.
I think you’ve gotten yourself so knotted up in your fallacious argument that you’re able to see the back of your own tonsils.
The nine who get their information from the internet are the general public. They aren’t likely to be asked for their opinion. The one person who looks out of the window is the expert. In real life there will be more than one. We should listen to them more. Expertise is not something to be ashamed of. But we shouldn’t be trying to gin up some false equivalency with pigshit ignorance.
And if the one wants to sunbathe in the rain then good on em I say. But they shouldn’t be allowed to pull the roof off the building and force everyone else to.
The problem with "Experts" is that they often are not or are selected for politically compatible views.
What i have seen in the media, be it in the panicdemic where medicinal economist Lauterbach suddenly was proclaimed an epidemy expert (he is not) or in the current frenetic propaganda war against anyone not sharing the current governments attitude that economic suicide is a good idea where "experts" suddenly appear out of thin air who never studied but have a history with certain political organisations from parties to government cozy "N"GOs.
Buy yourself a loudmouth with or without a title, and you have your expert of the current ages.
Just take that bullshit word "renewable energy" and ask someone who knows about irrelevant things like laws of thermodynamics if energy can be renewed. If the questioned person says no, they know physics.
Show me one "Expert" who has taken the ill effects of the "renewables" into account, just the obvious things like 3000+ tons concrete foundation which messes with ground water levels and soil density, the infrasonics that permeate soil and water (for offshore) for the inefficient birdshredders, the compensation loss to connect to the AC network in the correct frequency, the impact on airflow and detrimental results for the environment when reducing the kinetic energy of the atmospheric air movements/wind by converting it to electrical energy, etc.
Its quite a lot of information for those wind generators alone and i highly doubt that even half of the negative effects of brainless "lets plant lots of those" are being taken into account.
I also doubt such complex information can be simplified enough properly enough to get the "news" consumers informed enough to make an informed decision.
I really like your idea that any media spouting lies must remedy this by publishing a correction as prominently as the lie, as was german newspaper law in the 1980ies. In reality, the corrections were printed in the commentary section (for more "integrity oriented" media) or in small letters and placed in between the sex phone adverts and similar paria printouts. If at all.
Nowadays... forget it. The best you can hope is a stealth recensoring like with the "fact checkers" from state and NGO sponsored media outlet "Correctiv" concerning a presumed "secret meeting for mass deportation" in november 2023. Which was neither secret nor discussing mass deportations but this fake news ignited mass protests "against nazis" while minister faesers idea to resurrect Adolfs "Sippenhaft" (punishing people who have done nothing because they are family members of criminals) or her idea to destroy the principle of "innocent until proven guilty" ("Unschuldsvermutung") strangely didnt trigger the nazi warn sirens.
Your analogies are interesting. So when the defector from N.Korea describes life in N.Korea do you give them equal weight with N.Korea describing paradise? When someone escapes the cult do you believe them or the cult? Do you still think- "By my argument they should be given no more than their share - and maybe none at all, depending on how bonkers their view is"
Now lets consider truly bonkers. A few conspiracy theories have turned out to be facts in the US! Give truth airtime or not because it might sound to some people 'bonkers'? You talk about brexit as a bad thing and somehow think leave advocates were bonkers. Maybe in your opinion but most of us voted leave and a few remainers seemed upset the country didnt implode as they were told it would. Accurate reporting would have swept a lot of the FUD from both sides away. It would have left very little for remain to say (single market basically) but a lot for leave to say.
"You talk about brexit as a bad thing"
So do the IEA:
https://iea.org.uk/why-brexit-was-a-mistake-from-a-libertarian-perspective/
Big Fail. Even Mr Farage has said so.
"A few conspiracy theories have turned out to be facts in the US! "
A stopped clock is right twice a day.
Which conspiracy theories have been correct? QAnon? Pizzagate? Birther? Superbowl was fixed for Taylor Swift? The moon landings were faked? There was no holocaust? The Earth is flat? The Earth is hollow and aliens live inside down at Antartica? The Sandy Hook school massacre was staged?
Which of the above (And the ****ing tonne of other garbage) were true, hmmm?
Is it the one about 5G turning people who were vaccinated against covid19 into zombies?
Is it the Sovereign Citizen movement beliefs? Deep Underground Military Bases being used for child trafficking? The Illuminati ? David Icke's Lizard People? The Secret Space Program? JFK Jnr is alive and will be Trump's running mate? Paul McCartney is dead? Elvis is alive? ....
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Just an admission of the predicted failure. I see no proposal on how to remedy the bad situation they helped to push for.
And to be fair that is the case for all the vociferous pro-brexiters. They got what they wanted, but it delivered nothing they promised or were promised. No reduction in foreigns. No cheaper food and power. No massive trade dealers with new trade partners etc etc etc.
The sunlit uplands turned out to be nothing but Brexit bullshit. Even Mr Farage and his band of grifters have admitted as much.
Would be a lot easier for any real transitioning person (i have several friends and one in the family who suffered long and hard to finally succed in transitioning) who detest the excessive extremism that sullies every discussion. The outright ignorance and holier than thou attitude coming from the usual extremists who are themselves not affected but claim to be "activists" for those poor immature shy minorities that wont stand up for themselves (usually because they just want to be accepted, not praised and put on display) is disgusting.
Thats basic parenting. Tell one child it is somewhat more important and disrespect the other and there will not be too much love between the siblings.
Just let people live their lives without stuffing the "Those are our minorities of the day" praise and propaganda in everyones face.
Just like i experienced in Bristol. Theres an indian with the traditional headdress in a smart suit passing by someone in a kilt, half naked with pict tattoes all over his body, some women with a headscarf is passing by, some punkers in their usual attire, some people without any specific peculiarities and.... NOONE gives a damn about attire or looks of anyone else. THATS "tolerance" and acception and quite a better experience than imposing verbal minefields and dystopian newspeak just because some oversensitive unstable wannabe entitled person might want to feel insulted.
Strange, when you talk to those supposedly "empowered" by all those wokish extremists, they share my disgust for those parasitic jokers who abuse real or made up minorities to show their own made up importance and propagate their peculiar ideology.
And for those who want to feel insulted now, grow up and get a life.
"We see this now with Brexit regret, and a majority in favour of rejoin - and an even larger majority wishing that we hadn't left in the first place"
Except, we're not seeing any such thing. Confusing your Twitter echo-chamber with reality again, apparently.
"It is not unreasonable that the majority, who have not had the education necessary to interpret scientific (or mathematical, or other complex topic) information should attribute volume to validity. "
Most attributive to people like yourself, a guy who failed to even realize Biden is centre-right by British political standards, where Trump and Republicans would be far-right.
Said it before and I'll say it again, the governments need to define data standards for records, health data, education data, welfare data, etc. all needs to have a common data standard that's flexible to cope with future changes, but robust enough to survive long periods without the standard being updated.
If they did that, then all the software companies wanting to tender for government business would have to work off the same approach when it comes to data interchange.
An attempt was made back in the 1980s… EDI
Okay it didn’t extend to medical records, but the idea of common and open data exchange formats would have. Unfortunately, short term laissez-faire market thinking by politicians largely killed the initiative, the laugh is in the UK the DTI (department of trade and industry) and CCTA prior to No 10 interference was promoting open data exchange formats…
So that seems the sensible approach, but then take a step further and establish the oversight bodies as the authority data standard. All data from each department must be exported to them in real time in a defined manner and structure. Surely can’t be that difficult, even for Fujitsu. Just needs someone with the political will and determination to see it through.
Anyhow 60 bn will fill the MOD black hole and fund the local councils with the money they should have been getting all along.
Most of the fraud was committed BY MPs of both major parties. They gave contracts etc to "best buds".
The whole Tory / Labour and even US Republican/Democrat thing is a total farce. Behind the scenes off camera they're personal friends, go to each others weddings, birthdays etc.
System designed to make you THINK there's an election choice.
I remember early on during the pandemic when the government back loans were introduced.
People were complaining banks were taking too long, so the press and other politicians were screaming for the checks to be removed by banks. Checks there to stop fraudulent loan claims due to the pandemic.
Eventually the government relented and ordered banks to streamline.
Well, that has consequences. For everyone who says this is now bad, at the time the government and banks were the bad guys being too cautious and slow.
The way the press whips hysteria is half the problem. It would have been better to let many businesses go to the wall rather than enable this amount of fraud.
Let me just say I'm surprised Baroness Michelle Mone OBE isn't under investigation for corruption.
Leak reveals Michelle Mone told government she would not benefit financially from PPE firm
The Conservative peer Michelle Mone assured the government that she was not entitled to “any financial benefit whatsoever” from a PPE company, five months before £29m of its profits were transferred into a trust for her benefit.
Leaked emails between Mone and the Cabinet Office reveal that a civil servant asked her to make a declaration that she had no conflict of interest in relation to the company, PPE Medpro, which she had recommended to ministers in May 2020.
Mone stated that she had “no conflicts whatsoever” and that she was not “entitled to any financial remuneration or financial benefit whatsoever”.
I suppose putting the ill-gotten money into a trust is *technically* not the same thing as putting it in her own bank account, so maybe she didn't stand to gain at that exact moment in time when the question was asked. :D
The fly in the ointment is that her [husband's] company is being sued by the government for providing defective PPE, so putting £30 million in a trust might be seen as a cynical move to put the money outside the reach of the courts.
Either way the whole deal stinks from start to finish.
"Mone stated that she had “no conflicts whatsoever” and that she was not “entitled to any financial remuneration or financial benefit whatsoever”.
Translation: "I didn't feel conflicted about receiving the money, because even though I wasn't entitled to it, obviously I was able to accept any financial remuneration or financial benefit offered”.
Twisted politician's minds are twisted.
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