Update on legal claim about the government lying about care home deaths (plus informal enquiry set up by cross party group of MPs)

I back the sentiment because we do need a full and frank investigation into our response to this crisis. Sometimes official inquiries, even independent ones, do not provide us with that in an acceptable time frame. Iraq and Hillsborough showed that, they were either inadequate or too late. Also, the courts have a way of focusing people towards the truth.

However, I think this is premature with it's timing. Let's get through it.
 
Lefty said:
I back the sentiment because we do need a full and frank investigation into our response to this crisis. Sometimes official inquiries, even independent ones, do not provide us with that in an acceptable time frame. Iraq and Hillsborough showed that, they were either inadequate or too late. Also, the courts have a way of focusing people towards the truth.

However, I think this is premature with it's timing. Let's get through it.
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I have to say I disagree.

I feel that the UK government needs to held to account now for the many additional deaths that they have caused. Including ones of my relatives in the UK.
 
This needs to happen now, any delays will potentially lead to it losing its impetus but I wouldn't be surprised for the government and its advisers or should I say adviser to act like Donald Trump and try to stop it through direct interference.

This has to be one of the biggest national scandals of recent times and those responsible need to be called to account.
 
spanishman said:
I have to say I disagree.

I feel that the UK government needs to held to account now for the many additional deaths that they have caused. Including ones of my relatives in the UK.
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I'm not saying they shouldn't be held to account, but I don't want them to get off because there hasn't been enough time for all the information to be gathered and investigated, nor for them to not be able to mount a good defence because they were unable to focus away from the job at hand, or indeed not focus on the job at hand because they were all consumed by the court case.

I note that in the R (Wilson) v Prime Minister case on the illegality of the 2016 referendum through Russian Interference and overspend, one of the reasons the judge dismissed the case was that there was no evidence that the interference and overspending had influenced the vote. An absurd statement in my view, but unfortunately the rush to court, in this case because of time limits and administrative repercussions, meant that an awful lot of evidence, discoveries and statistical data was still in the process of being uncovered, interpreted and it's consequences evaluated.

I just wouldn't like to see something like that happen again.
 
Well done to the people involved in making this happen....

1594805237824.pnghttps://www.theguardian.com/…/cross-party-mps-to-lead-indep…

I received the following info about it in an email this morning:

"Well, we did it! Our new All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Coronavirus has just started taking evidence in a comprehensive inquiry into the government’s handling of the coronavirus crisis.
This cross-party group, which has Layla Moran MP as the Chair, March for Change as the group’s secretariat and myself as a Vice-Chair, will be taking evidence immediately. We will hold meetings throughout the summer, make evidence publicly available as we go, and we’ll produce a summary report by the end of summer.
Over the past few months, there have been calls for a public inquiry from doctors, top health & science leaders, former civil service, bereaved families and campaign groups. Boris Johnson has repeatedly refused the calls. The best solution in these circumstances is just to build it yourself. We forged a cross-party platform in collaboration with March for Change so that we could collect all that evidence in one place and bring it into parliament. By starting to collate the information openly and publicly with MPs and Peers across all parties, we can not only conduct a rapid review of urgent measures for the winter months, but we can also start taking evidence immediately.
However, this is a huge task we have taken on. Particularly for March for Change, who will be collecting and categorising the evidence for us, building the schedules of meetings and interviews, taking a lead on writing the output and disseminating it. Therefore, I’m asking you to please donate what you can to help them open up their bandwidth and make sure they have enough research staff and capacity to take on this massive fast-paced task.
I’m sure that you, like me, do not want to see this country run by a government that works alone, burying important reports and refusing accountability. Much better that we have a society where public, parliament, government, communities and expert groups all work together to save lives and build a better country. This is clearly one such effort. So please do what you can to support.
Wishing you and your family safety and good health in these challenging times.
Yours,
Clive Lewis MP
Vice Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Coronavirus
 
I agree with Lefty. It's too soon. I also don't think it will be successful anyway and will mostly be a waste of time. The vast majority of bad decisions are decisions that are unprecedented so there is no best practice to follow. Making bad decisions isn't a crime. I don't think the Government have made the right choices at the right times but I don't think that anything they did was malicious.

There have been excess deaths but which ones are attributable to government policy is unquantifiable. They can't be blamed for there being a virus. They have made some good decisions and lots of bad decisions. We won't know the true excess death numbers until the virus has gone completely and we have all available data from around the world.

I'd struggle to support anything led by Layla Moran. My instinct tells me that if she's involved then it's probably not worth pursuing.
 
Laughing said:
Boromike, given you think any enquiry is a waste of time, what would you suggest?
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I don't have the answer to be honest. Accountability within Politics doesn't seem to have an effective solution. The premise is that they do something wrong and nobody votes for them but we all know it never works like that.

When I say I think it will be a waste of time I mean that they won't get the outcome they want and nothing will come of it. What is the purpose/intent of the enquiry? My guess, based on who is involved with it, is that it is a political attempt to make the government look bad but even that won't have any impact. Tory voters will claim it is just opposition tricks and opposition voters already think they are useless. Nobody will switch their voting allegiances, nobody will be arrested, maybe someone will lose a ministerial position but in the grand scheme of things it will have no impact.

There should probably be some sort of internal audit process in place and any decisions assessed and scrutinised by a cross-party body. Something that contains members from all sides of parliament would carry more weight with the public than the usual opposition naysayers.
 
boromike85 said:
I agree with Lefty. It's too soon. I also don't think it will be successful anyway and will mostly be a waste of time. The vast majority of bad decisions are decisions that are unprecedented so there is no best practice to follow. Making bad decisions isn't a crime. I don't think the Government have made the right choices at the right times but I don't think that anything they did was malicious.

There have been excess deaths but which ones are attributable to government policy is unquantifiable. They can't be blamed for there being a virus. They have made some good decisions and lots of bad decisions. We won't know the true excess death numbers until the virus has gone completely and we have all available data from around the world.

I'd struggle to support anything led by Layla Moran. My instinct tells me that if she's involved then it's probably not worth pursuing.
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I disagree BM. I don't see them as bad decisions, doing nothing or not doing enough when the consequences can reliably be foreseeable is much more then making a bad or wrong decision.

They knew who was at most risk from Covid19, they told us this well before lockdown. They did very little to coordinate the response required to protect these people and in fact enabled the opposite, and then they even lied to deceive us months later with the so called non existent protective ring. People with Covid19 where allowed into the very places where they new the most vulnerable lived that's not bad decisions, it's a combination of incompetence, neglect of duty and not good enough on any level there are no excuses for me.

Thousands of innocent people have lost their lives either earlier then expected or totally prematurely, for me it's an absolute national disgrace and should start now and not be given up on.

It took the Hillsborough families 30 years of non stop fighting to uncover the truth for their loved ones despite all the cover ups and lies that were told by the establishment.

I have little faith that this will be any different but we owe to the people who have died and their families and for this the people responsible need to be called to account.
 
boromike85 said:
I don't have the answer to be honest. Accountability within Politics doesn't seem to have an effective solution. The premise is that they do something wrong and nobody votes for them but we all know it never works like that.

When I say I think it will be a waste of time I mean that they won't get the outcome they want and nothing will come of it. What is the purpose/intent of the enquiry? My guess, based on who is involved with it, is that it is a political attempt to make the government look bad but even that won't have any impact. Tory voters will claim it is just opposition tricks and opposition voters already think they are useless. Nobody will switch their voting allegiances, nobody will be arrested, maybe someone will lose a ministerial position but in the grand scheme of things it will have no impact.

There should probably be some sort of internal audit process in place and any decisions assessed and scrutinised by a cross-party body. Something that contains members from all sides of parliament would carry more weight with the public than the usual opposition naysayers.
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If we do nothing we get exactly what we deserve boromike. Apathy is no the answer, that's for sure.
 
The only result I want from any enquiry is the truth and the evidence that any policy implemented was done so with the primary intention of saving lives, restricting the spread and protecting the populace.

I’m not after a witch-hunt but explanations into why decisions were made and how they were executed, whether the mistakes made were reasonable or negligent, who decided what and why, what went right and what went wrong, what has been learned and what has been put in place in case of future incidents.

I want clarity and it to be in the public domain, open to scrutiny, so that all of us can form our own opinion, it will not ease the pain of loss or bring anybody back but everyone effected by this deserves the truth and opportunity to see what happened and why.
 
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Laughing said:
If we do nothing we get exactly what we deserve boromike. Apathy is no the answer, that's for sure.
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I agree with holding them to account. I just don't know the best way to do it. Opposition-led enquiries rarely yield the outcomes that they should. Doing it now will get no results.

Politicians often do things that they think is right at the time or sometimes they jump on something to be clever which gets them a bit of spotlight but sometimes ends up backfiring. Like the Change lot that started their own party that weren't as clever as they thought they were and achieved nothing or the bill that meant Boris had to ask for an extension. They thought it meant Boris would have to admit defeat and he had broken a promise but everyone could see that he was forced into it and so nobody blamed him, if anything it gave him an out and strengthened his position as we saw at the election.
 
RandySavage said:
I'd start by looking at the country that failed to inform the rest of the world and go from there.
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That’s fair enough but - the rest of the world knew we had a huge problem by the end of January.
Actions (or lack of) after that have had varying degrees of success in countries the world over.
 
1finny said:
That’s fair enough but - the rest of the world knew we had a huge problem by the end of January.
Actions (or lack of) after that have had varying degrees of success in countries the world over.
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Oh I agree. There a hundreds of people implicit from leaders of countries to management in health care settings including our NHS.
Got to start at what we know, why did China suspend all internal flights after they discovered this virus and continue to let international travel carry on?
 
American_Mary said:
The only result I want from any enquiry is the truth and the evidence that any policy implemented was done so with the primary intention of saving lives, restricting the spread and protecting the populace.

I’m not after a witch-hunt but explanations into why decisions were made and how they were executed, whether the mistakes made were reasonable or negligent, who decided what and why, what went right and what went wrong, what has been learned and put in place in case of future incidents.

I want clarity and it to be in the public domain open to scrutiny so that all of us can form our opinion, it will not ease the pain of loss or bring anybody back but everyone effected by this deserves the truth and opportunity to see what happened and why.
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I would agree with that. However I would add one extra thing. Timeliness.

We need the process started now. With a preliminary interim report produced in time to help with preparation for what happens this winter. Lessons need to be learned quickly. To avoid similar mistakes being made this winter.

My gut feeling is that the government is guilty as sin. Sadly they will do anything they can to avoid or delay their culpability being confirmed in public.
 
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