UNDERSTANDING MORE ABOUT OUR MISGOVERNMENT

Steve Walker, the Labour and Union activist behind SKWAWKBOX, is such an important voice for the socialist movement here in the UK. I am indebted yet again to him and SKWAWKBOX for any insights this medley of material may bring you. Savour the socialist flavours!

First, the thoughts of the man from the United Nations who came to inspect our country. At any other time in our history, this would have been a big deal, wouldn't it? Not now, not since 2010. Long since ignored, buried, forgotten. But here are his parting shots, on retiring from the UN post:

Alston slammed UK government in 2018 and his final report is no less damning
(Monday, 6 July 2020)

UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty Philip Alston during his 2018 UK visit

In 2018, UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty Philip Alston travelled around the UK to examine reports of poverty and abuse of human rights in one of the world's richest countries. His
findings were utterly damning.

In his withering report, whose publication the SKWAWKBOX attended, Alston found that policies of the Tory government were:

• abandoning the vulnerable to extreme hardship with next to no support
• so massively disadvantaged women that they might have been 'designed by misogynists'
• were entirely ideological, in breach of human rights and created hardship that could have been fixed 'overnight' if the Tories wanted

Now, as he bows out and hands over his UN role to his successor Olivier de Schutter, Alston has issued his final report on global poverty - one which he says reveals 'a decade of misplaced triumphalism' and self-congratulation by elites ignoring awful poverty and hunger and sleepwalking into a disaster that will only be worsened by the coronavirus pandemic:

But the UK government, as Alston noted in 2018, is not merely 'sleepwalking' ignorantly into disaster. Instead it is imposing it with political intent and full knowledge of the misery the Tories' policies will create - especially as Johnson and Sunak are deliberately shifting the burden of the impact of the coronavirus onto the shoulders of those least able to bear it.

Now more on the grim figures that show the cost of misgovernment in the UK:

Johnson's government tops grim league table

(Monday, 6 July 2020)

More health workers lose their lives in the UK than anywhere else in the world during this pandemic

Figures released by Amnesty International today show that Boris Johnson's catastrophic handling of the coronavirus crisis has placed the UK at the top of a league of shame.

540 health workers lost their lives to COVID-19 in England and Wales. That figure alone, excluding Scotland and Northern Ireland, would be enough to stand at second-worst in the world, just five behind Russia - a nation with double the UK's population - and well ahead of the US and Brazil, which have more than five times and three times the UK's number of people respectively:

• Russia (545)
• UK (England and Wales (540)
• USA (507)
• Brazil (351)
• Mexico (248)
• Italy (188)
• Egypt (111)
• Iran (91)
• Ecuador (82)
• Spain (63)

But deaths in Scotland and Northern Ireland are more than enough to put the UK shamefully in 'top' position as the worst in the world.

Johnson's utter irresponsibility on personal protective equipment, testing and tracing and his slowness to lock down have taken a horrific toll among our health workers - and have caused the needless deaths of tens of thousands of our people.

Yet he refused even to express regret when challenged last month - and is now planning to 'thank' NHS staff by reimposing hospital parking charges on them. Johnson should be in the Hague, not in Downing Street.

Finally, for today, an admission from a man who back in February sold his soul and his science to the Johnson and Cummings project for crushing our democracy and killing our citizenry: 

The government's Chief Scientific Officer, Sir Patrick Vallance, has admitted to a committee of MPs that the Tories botched their response to the coronavirus crisis.

(Friday, 10 July 2020)

Vallance confessed that the UK's outcome had 'not been good' - by 'good', he once said he meant 20,000 UK deaths - and that mistakes had been made.

Well, ya think, Patrick?

The Tories intentional 'herd immunity' plan, which would have resulted in the deaths of half a million or more of our people and which Vallance touted in media interviews, was just the start of the horror.

Delayed lockdown is estimated to have cost at least 25,000 needless deaths, PPE failures have helped kill hundreds of NHS and care workers and Johnson's haste to lift the lockdown has caused local hotspots and is driving the UK's overall infections back up:

Opening up the economy as the infection rates rise gradually following the easing of lockdown. In around a month's time, the daily death rate will be gradually rising. This is madness. The economy will continue to nose drive UNLESS and UNTIL the infection rate reaches near zero as in New Zealand. What is happening now in the name of government is akin to manslaughter.

Johnson has promised a public inquiry. He should be on trial, along with his cronies.