gaslighting dither & delay Government helped create conditions for the new covid strain to emerge

1/ When it became clear that schoolchildren were likely contributing significantly to the spread of the virus, his Government denied & issued legal threats to schools

2/ Scientists issued repeated warnings that allowing households to mix during Xmas would lead to a surge in cases.

@BorisJohnson Government refused to heed that advice, U-turned predictably days before Xmas, causing chaos to people’s plans, with crowded scenes at train stations.
3/ Viruses mutate & adapt as they multiply and, if we continue to have high levels of transmission in the population i.e. more cases, this provides fertile ground for new mutations to arise.

Sadly, but very avoidably, this is exactly what @BorisJohnson Government has provided.
4/ Too Little Too Late.

Through repeated negligent decisions and consistently late actions, @BorisJohnson Government has not only missed many opportunities to control the virus in the UK but actively worsened it.
5/ In September 2020, when cases were once again rising sharply, was another example of @BorisJohnson Government deciding not to act.

https://t.co/0s1eddwJxH
6/ Sept 2020 @BorisJohnson Govt ignored its own scientific advisors & invited in proponents of the pseudoscientific ‘herd immunity’ approach - Professors Carl Heneghan & Sunetra Gupta & Anders Tegnell (architect of disastrous Swedish strategy) - to advise
https://t.co/0s1eddwJxH
Ignoring its own scientists, @BorisJohnson Government listened to the pseudoscience which meant no lockdown until late November -
- at which point our health services were at critical capacity & case levels were too high to be brought down sufficiently with a 4 week lockdown.
8/ 2nd lockdown had minimal impact in London & SouthEast England where the B.1.1.7 covid variant was already rapidly increasing & its growth resumed exponentially.

Despite the high number of cases at the end of lockdown, @BorisJohnson Govt went ahead & eased restrictions anyway.
9/ Remember.

This Govt is not short of money - it has spent billions on health measures & support for the economy.

Unrestricted by Parliament, the further powers conferred by the Coronavirus Act gives it complete freedom.

This failure is @BorisJohnson Government’s alone.
@threadreaderapp unroll please

More from Government

This article by Jim Spellar for @LabourList misses the point about why Labour needs to think seriously about constitutional reform - and have a programme for it ready for government.


The state of our constitution is a bit like the state of the neglected electric wiring in an old house. If you are moving into the house, sorting it out is a bit tedious. Couldn’t you spend the time and money on a new sound system?

But if you ignore the wiring, you’ll find that you can’t safely install the new sound system. And your house may well catch fire.

Any programme for social democratic government requires a state with capacity, and a state that has clear mechanisms of accountability, for all the big and all the small decisions that in takes, in which people have confidence.

That is not a description of the modern UK state.

You May Also Like

The entire discussion around Facebook’s disclosures of what happened in 2016 is very frustrating. No exec stopped any investigations, but there were a lot of heated discussions about what to publish and when.


In the spring and summer of 2016, as reported by the Times, activity we traced to GRU was reported to the FBI. This was the standard model of interaction companies used for nation-state attacks against likely US targeted.

In the Spring of 2017, after a deep dive into the Fake News phenomena, the security team wanted to publish an update that covered what we had learned. At this point, we didn’t have any advertising content or the big IRA cluster, but we did know about the GRU model.

This report when through dozens of edits as different equities were represented. I did not have any meetings with Sheryl on the paper, but I can’t speak to whether she was in the loop with my higher-ups.

In the end, the difficult question of attribution was settled by us pointing to the DNI report instead of saying Russia or GRU directly. In my pre-briefs with members of Congress, I made it clear that we believed this action was GRU.