Westminster is coming under increasing pressure to publish a clear lockdown exit strategy, up to its coronavirus testing provisions for key workers, and to provide NHS staff with adequate supplies of personal protective equipment.
But will they reach any of these goals as Johnson resettles into Prime Ministerial duties? Political Commentator Pete Durnell gave his views on the matter.
Sputnik: Will the British Government be able to meet their targets regarding coronavirus testing and the procurement of PPE in the coming weeks?
Pete Durnell: We know that the first target date of rolling out one hundred thousand coronavirus tests per day by tomorrow is going to be missed, I think we know that’s not happening, and Boris Johnson has set a second target of a quarter of a million tests a day, but as far as I am aware, no date for it.
Acquiring the tests is great, but we don’t seem to have a coherent strategy for deploying them, and there seems to be no point in just sort of scatter gunning the testing, and with regards to the PPE and the stories we’ve heard about UK companies having huge stockpiles, contacting the government and then getting no reply, and having to sell them abroad.
It is shocking, but whilst the NHS is essentially under the government’s remit, I think we also need to look at the NHS procurement managers because these are the people who are supposed to be doing the procuring.
If they are simply not up to the job, I’d like to see top business people brought in, or top army guys and girls, these are the experts in logistics and getting things done, otherwise, I think that these PPE shortages are going to continue, and we can’t have it.
Sputnik: Has Westminster’s response to the coronavirus pandemic been inadequate overall?
Pete Durnell:Some of the advice that they were getting from the start was based on China’s evidence, which I suspect is a bit suspect in terms of the mortality rates they were getting, so it was hard for them to make good judgements, but I do think that they locked down a few weeks too late probably.
Even that extra fortnight would have given us quite a bit of time. other countries were doing it, and we could have equipped our NHS and our care home workers better, but it is important to remember that lockdowns are very expensive and damaging to economies, and they are really just a delaying tactic, they don’t actually solve anything in themselves.
Delays can be valuable, but you don’t beat the virus by delaying, and at some point, you are going to see increasing infections, so I would like to see us have an adult conversation really, we know that when restrictions are lifted, these infections will start up again, but we need to control and monitor them as much as possible, so let’s be adult about it and not pretend that when we release the restrictions, nothing will happen because almost certainly there will be some new infections.
Sputnik: When should the UK’s coronavirus lockdown be ended?
We’ve got to provide protection for our most vulnerable, and that’s fair enough but as a Libertarian, I am getting really concerned and scared to be honest, because I’m hearing talk about forcibly isolating particular groups, and I find that really disturbing.
There is a new study that has come out from the University of Warwick today, and they actually say things like that if you are over fifty and caught outside, and can’t prove that you are under fifty, you should be fined, and I really don’t want to see us go down that road.
I would like to see us lift restrictions on a testing basis, where we test all over the country, and where the lower incidences of the virus are, we can release some restrictions, I really don’t want us to go down the road of doing it based on age or body mass index, or even ethnicity, because we know that unfortunately, people from the BAME background seem to be dying more frequently from the coronavirus, so where do you stop with this isolating of groups? I think that isolating groups is a very dangerous road to go down.