Closing summary
Here’s a summary of the day’s main events:
- The Brexit minister, Lord Frost argued for a rethink of the Northern Ireland protocol. In a speech in Portugal, he said the deal his government sought, signed up to and then trumpeted loudly was unacceptable and unworkable. He said it would, therefore, be imprudent of the EU to try to enforce it.
- Frost was accused of lacking maturity by Labour. “Instead of approaching the occasion with maturity and in the spirit of cooperation, Lord Frost has effectively asked to rip up the agreement he negotiated – and the prime minister signed – just two years ago,” his opposite number, Jenny Chapman, said.
- Tory ministers are trying to defend the UK government’s actions in the early part of the pandemic after a report led by two of their own parliamentary colleagues found they constituted one of the worst public health failures in UK history. The Cabinet Office minister, Stephen Barclay, sought to portray the pandemic as an unprecedented situation ministers were trying to get to grips with in real time.
- But a Tory former cabinet minister pointed out that several other countries, facing a similar threat, had managed to mobilise more quickly. Nevertheless, Greg Clark stressed that the UK was “not the only country that made mistakes” and said the failure to implement an earlier lockdown was a consensus decision – despite the opposition having called for it about a fortnight before the prime minister acted.
- The Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice group dismissed the report as “laughable”. Hannah Brady, its spokesperson, criticised a passage that said the “success of the vaccine programme has redeemed many of the persistent failings of other parts of the national response such as the test-and-trace system, so that the outcome is far better than would have been the case without this success”.
- The Welsh health minister Eluned Morgan has apologised for mistakes made during the early days of the pandemic. “Of course, we had a huge amount to learn. Of course, we made some mistakes at the beginning because of a lack of information, data and knowledge. We have a duty to say sorry where we have made mistakes,” she said.
- A Conservative MP was axed from his senior role with a charity for apparently mixing up two senior Asian ministers, allegedly saying “they all look the same to me”. James Gray was told to step back as a commander of the St John Ambulance after reportedly introducing the then vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi as the health secretary at a parliamentary reception last month. Sajid Javid is the health secretary.
Updated
Returning to Frost’s speech in Portugal, he has said a trade war with the EU would not be the UK’s decision. Asked if he would be prepared to risk one by triggering Article 16, the Brexit minister said:
So, there’s obviously a couple of hypotheticals in there before we get to that point. It would be for the EU to decide whether it makes sense to to retaliate.
I don’t think it would make the situation any better by doing so, it won’t help the situation in Northern Ireland but obviously that’s not in our hands.
There are several stages in this process where everybody can look carefully at it and decide to pull back from the brink and perhaps that might be one of them, if we’re in those circumstances, but it’s obviously not our decision.
Welsh minister apologises for Covid errors
The Welsh health minister, Eluned Morgan, has apologised for mistakes made during the early days of the pandemic. Speaking at a press conference in Cardiff, she said:
I’m prepared to apologise to all those who have suffered during the pandemic. This was a new disease. None of us knew how it would impact, none of us knew how it was going to spread.
Of course, we had a huge amount to learn. Of course, we made some mistakes at the beginning because of a lack of information, data and knowledge. We have a duty to say sorry where we have made mistakes.
However, Morgan said it would have been difficult to lock down before England because of the porous border and before the furlough system was in place.
She said that, since the early days of the pandemic, Wales had taken a “more cautious approach” than the rest of the UK. And she denied there was a “groupthink” problem in the early days, saying there were “always very robust discussions.”
Morgan said Covid cases are coming down in Wales but added:
We’re facing a tough winter ahead; the pandemic won’t be over by Christmas.
She said the winter flu season was likely to be 50-100% worse than a typical year and the RSV (respiratory syncytial virus) season began in July and was likely to affect young children who had not yet been exposed to it.
Morgan was very critical of protests by anti-vaxxers outside a Welsh clinic.
We all have the right to take part in peaceful protest but reports of adults bullying and harassing children and their parents as they enter a vaccination clinic are nothing short of despicable.
Reacting to Frost’s speech, the Liberal Democrat home affairs and Northern Ireland spokesperson Alistair Carmichael has said:
This Conservative government is playing out like a badly written farce. The same minister who, just months ago, was trumpeting the government’s botched Brexit deal now says it’s intolerable and has to be changed.
After all the upheaval British businesses have suffered and all the challenges they face now, they need certainty and support from the government, not more pointless posturing. The solution to disruption and shortages is working together with our friends and neighbours, not picking needless fights.
Boris Johnson’s Conservatives have got to stop talking so casually about breaking international law. Every time they do this, it weakens the UK’s standing with our closest neighbours and around the world.
Updated
'Government showing immaturity over Northern Ireland protocol'
The government is failing to approach issues with the Northern Ireland Protocol with maturity, Frost’s opposite number for Labour, Baroness Jenny Chapman, has said.
Today was an opportunity for the government to reset relations with our partners in the EU after a fractious start to our new relationship.
Instead of approaching the occasion with maturity and in the spirit of cooperation, Lord Frost has effectively asked to rip up the agreement he negotiated – and the prime minister signed – just two years ago.
Contrary to moving on from Brexit, senior Tories appear desperate to use a tussle with Brussels to distract from their domestic failures – whether on Covid, the energy crisis, or the needless culling of thousands of pigs.
The route to improving the Brexit deal is simple: secure a veterinary agreement to free up the movement of goods and take up the offer of a visa waiver for workers across the creative industries.
Why is Lord Frost insisting on wrapping businesses and performers in the red tape that his fellow ministers claim to hate?
Reacting to Frost’s speech, the DUP leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson has said changes to the protocol have to go beyond “tinkering around the edges”.
The protocol does not have the support of a single elected unionist in Northern Ireland. If it is not replaced, then it will condemn Northern Ireland to further harm and instability. It is already costing us £850m per year and undermining the union.
The people who live and work here need a solution which can command support throughout the community. That is why, when I became leader just over 100 days ago, I made this my number one priority.
This is not a time for tinkering around the edges with temporary fixes. We need a long-term solution which will then allow us all to plan and get back to focusing on fixing our public services rather debating the protocol.
Brexit minister seeks to tear up key part of his own agreement
Frost seems to be getting round to his point now: in brief, that the Northern Ireland protocol his government sought, signed up to and then trumpeted loudly, is so hated and unworkable, it would be imprudent of the EU to try to enforce it.
The Northern Ireland protocol is the biggest source of mistrust between us and, for all kinds of reasons, we need to fix this problem.
I recognise that’s not easy. The history here does matter. I do understand why the EU finds it difficult to come back to an agreement that was reached only two years ago, though that itself is far from unusual in international relations.
Equally, there’s a widespread feeling in the UK that the EU did try to use Northern Ireland to encourage UK political forces to reverse the referendum results or, at least, to keep us closely aligned with the EU.
Moreover, that the protocol represents a moment of EU overreach when the UK’s negotiating hand was tied. And, therefore, cannot reasonably last in its current form.
Whether or not you agree with either of those analyses, the facts on the ground are what matter above all.
Maybe there was a world in which the protocol could have worked, more sensitively implemented. But the world has now moved on and we now face a very serious situation. The protocol is not working. It’s completely lost consent in one community in Northern Ireland, it’s not doing the thing, it was set up to do: protect the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement.
In fact, doing the opposite. It has to change.
No one here is expert in Northern Ireland and we’re not asking you to be. We’re asking you, the EU, to work with us to help us manage the delicate balance in the Belfast Agreement – and not to disrupt it; to help us reflect the concerns of everyone in Northern Ireland, from all sides of the political spectrum, and to make sure the peace process is not undermined.
The key feature of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement is balance between different communities and between their links with the rest of the UK and with the Republic of Ireland. That balance has been shredded by the way this protocol is working.
The fundamental difficulty is that we’re being asked to run a full-scale external boundary of the EU through the centre of our country, to apply EU law without consent in one part of it and to have any disputes arising from these arrangements settled ultimately in the call to one of the parties.
The way this is happening is disrupting ordinary lives, damaging large or small businesses and causing serious turbulence, to the institutions within Northern Ireland.
Updated
Frost is now hammering EU leaders, painting the UK as a victim of the bloc’s intransigence.
We’ve seen extreme tensions over the EU’s vaccine ban earlier this year, a block on our entry to Horizon so far this year, some threats to our energy supplies through the interconnectors, a needless ban on the import of many shellfish to the EU – causing significant pain to our fishermen – and resorts to legal action over Northern Ireland.
And, overall, we constantly face generalised accusations that we can’t be trusted and that we aren’t a reasonable international actor.
So, with all this in mind, we can’t help taking it with a bit of a pinch of salt when we’re told that the EU has stopped thinking about the UK and it is we who are still obsessed with Brexit.
Actually, we’re not. There’s no electoral dividend in endlessly talking about Brexit. Quite the reverse, that’s why the prime minister barely mentioned it in his party conference speech last week.
What we do see instead is an organisation that doesn’t always look like it wants us to succeed.
We didn’t want it to be like this. We just want friendly relations, free trade and the chance to do things our own way; all within the framework of a meaningful and robust western alliance.
With this in mind, I do urge the EU to look at the image that’s being presented to us. If there is a trust problem, as we’re constantly told there is, it’s not the responsibility of only one party. At some point, we must both try to raise our eyes to the horizon, look at the possibilities for better relations and try to help each other solve problems, not create them.
Lord Frost seems to be saying in his Brexit speech that he decided to deliver it in Lisbon to make some sort of rhetorical point connected to his arguments. Not 100% clear year what that point is. I lost track of his train of thought somewhere in Belgium.
— Peter Walker (@peterwalker99) October 12, 2021
Lord Frost says the UK's relation with the EU is now led by what he calls "the power of example”. I get this is a philosophical point, but very hard for it to not sound deeply patronising.
— Peter Walker (@peterwalker99) October 12, 2021
Lord Frost is now seemingly citing England's handling of Covid as one of the "power of example" beacons for other countries. Again.... not 100% sure this is quite the slam-dunk argument it seemed to be presented as.
— Peter Walker (@peterwalker99) October 12, 2021
For Brexit-ologists, Lord Frost's argument that a so-called hard Brexit – removal from all single market/customs union - was always vital for the project to succeed is notable. It makes sense, but was very much not what was billed before the referendum, beyond the zealots.
— Peter Walker (@peterwalker99) October 12, 2021
Updated
Frost says Brexit has changed the UK’s international interests and that the nation will look to fix what has become a “somewhat fractious relationship”. Doing so, he says, will fundamentally depend on “fixing the very serious problem we have in the Northern Ireland protocol”.
He said the UK plans to work closely with Baltic countries and added:
Lord Frost: Despite difficulties we will always look to have constructive relationship with France.
— lisa o'carroll (@lisaocarroll) October 12, 2021
Updated
The Brexit minister David Frost is about to start his speech to the diplomatic community in Lisbon ahead of the EU’s expected response to UK’s Northern Ireland protocol command paper.
Here’s the background to it:
Updated
In April, my colleagues Pamela Duncan, Monika Cvorak and Nikhita Chulani put together this video explainer showing three major areas where officials were out of line with the data on coronavirus infections and deaths available at the time in the early stages of the pandemic:
Summary
Here’s a summary of the day’s main events so far:
- Tory ministers are trying to defend the UK government’s actions in the early part of the pandemic after a report led by two of their own parliamentary colleagues found they constituted one of the worst public health failures in UK history. The Cabinet Office minister, Stephen Barclay, sought to portray the pandemic as an unprecedented situation ministers were trying to get to grips with in real time.
- But a Tory former cabinet minister pointed out that several other countries, facing a similar threat, had managed to mobilise more quickly. Nevertheless, Greg Clark stressed that the UK was “not the only country that made mistakes” and said the failure to implement an earlier lockdown was a consensus decision – despite the opposition having called for it about a fortnight before the prime minister acted.
- The Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice group dismissed the report as “laughable”. Hannah Brady, its spokesperson, criticised a passage that said the “success of the vaccine programme has redeemed many of the persistent failings of other parts of the national response such as the test-and-trace system, so that the outcome is far better than would have been the case without this success”.
- A Conservative MP was axed from his senior role with a charity for apparently mixing up two senior Asian ministers, allegedly saying “they all look the same to me”. James Gray was told to step back as a commander of the St John Ambulance after reportedly introducing the then vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi as the health secretary at a parliamentary reception last month. Sajid Javid is the health secretary.
Updated
The steel industry has said government proposals to lend money to heavy industry to help energy-intensive businesses survive the impact of soaring gas prices would be little more than a “sticking plaster”.
Uncertainty about how to support those industries, which have warned of factory shutdowns and higher prices for consumers, has already sparked a row between the Treasury and the business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng, over whether to offer financial support.
While the Treasury is understood to be reluctant to fund a bailout, ministers are weighing up proposals from Kwarteng to provide short-term loans or guarantees while gas prices are high, to help sectors such as steel, glass, chemicals and paper.
The trade body UK Steel said it backed Kwarteng in calling for assistance from the chancellor Rishi Sunak, but warned that short-term lending alone would leave the industry battling against a “hostile environment” and at risk of shutdowns. Its director Gareth Stace said:
While the business secretary’s swift intervention is to be commended, we must see the details of such a proposal, to assess whether these measures will be sufficient to deal with the immediate problems we face.
Our message directly to the prime minister is please don’t just apply a sticking plaster to what is a significant long-term problem. Action can and must be taken now to secure the foundations of British industry.
A Conservative MP has been axed from his senior role with a charity for apparently mixing up two senior Asian ministers, allegedly saying “they all look the same to me”.
James Gray was told to step back as a commander of the St John Ambulance (SJA) after reportedly introducing the then vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi as the health secretary at a parliamentary reception last month. Sajid Javid is the health secretary.
The event was held to honour volunteers who helped the NHS with the vaccine programme during the spring and summer. Gray, 66, was said to have mixed up the two ministers in the room.
A witness who spoke to the Daily Mail said when Gray’s error was pointed out to him, he told the audience: “They all look the same to me.” The witness added that afterwards, Zahawi pulled Gray to one side for a private conversation.
Updated
Five former Labour party staff members have denied leaking a report that found “factional opposition” to Jeremy Corbyn hindered effective tackling of antisemitism in the party.
The quintet, including Corbyn’s former director of communications Seumas Milne and former chief of staff Karie Murphy, said they would “vigorously defend themselves” in a high court action.
Labour has filed papers accusing the pair, along with the communications team member Georgie Robertson, the former head of complaints Laura Murray and staffer Harry Hayball, of having responsibility for leaking the April 2020 report, according to their lawyers Carter-Ruck.
The report claimed to have found “no evidence” of antisemitism complaints being handled differently to other forms of complaint during Corbyn’s tenure, or of current or former staff being “motivated by antisemitic intent”.
His time as leader of the opposition was marred by complaints of racism against Jews and accusations senior officials were slow to crack down on members who promoted antisemitism.
But the report found bias against the Islington North MP contributed to “a litany of mistakes” that hindered the effective handling of the issue. In a statement issued by lawyers for the five, they said:
The individuals entirely reject these baseless claims. They did not leak the report. They fully cooperated with the party’s investigation by an independent external investigator, and with the inquiry led by Martin Forde QC.
They understand that neither of those investigations concluded that they were responsible.
The party has already acknowledged in court that it cannot be certain who leaked the report and that its ‘case’ against them is circumstantial. But it is now trying to make them foot the bill for legal action brought against it.
The party should be focusing on the deeply troubling evidence contained with the leaked report, rather than trying to wrongly scapegoat and victimise former staff who documented it, and who have not been accused by either of the independent investigations.
A Tory police, fire and crime commissioner (PFCC) should leave his post for suggesting women “need to be streetwise” about arrests in the wake of the Sarah Everard case, the former chief whip Julian Smith has said.
Philip Allott, who oversees police and fire services in North Yorkshire, was widely condemned for his comments suggesting Everard “never should have submitted” to the arrest by killer Wayne Couzens.
Couzens, a Metropolitan Police officer, falsely arrested the 33-year-old in order to kidnap her before raping and murdering her and was sentenced to a whole life order last month.
The North Yorkshire Police, Fire and Crime panel will meet on Thursday with discussion of Allott’s comments, for which he subsequently apologised, forming part of the agenda. Smith, the MP for Skipton and Ripon and a former cabinet minister, said:
Recent comments of the NY Police & Crime Commissioner were completely unacceptable. Prior to Thursday’s Police&Crime Panel meeting to discuss the PCC’s future I believe the PCC has lost trust of women and victims groups & should go-I have communicated this to the PCC& panel Chair
— Julian Smith MP (@JulianSmithUK) October 11, 2021
Allott told BBC Radio York:
A police officer can’t just arrest you. There has to be a reason. So, Covid for example, I would classify as a summary offence, it’s not an indictable ie sent to prison or potentially go to a crown court.
So women first of all just need to be streetwise about when they can be arrested and when they can’t be arrested. She should never have been arrested and submitted to that.
He since issued an apology for his remarks.
North Yorkshire Fire Brigades Union has previously called for Allott to go, with its brigade secretary Steve Howley saying he has “received an unprecedented amount of correspondence from FBU members regarding Allott’s comments – the common theme is outrage”. He added:
In a situation where the focus should be on the tragic rape and murder of Sarah Everard and love for her family and friendship, his comments have shifted focus to his own outrageous and perspective-less comments.
All public sector leaders that deal in trust should be reflecting on the lessons that can be learned from this tragedy and looking at how this can be avoided in the future, rather than blaming victims.
This criticism and concern is not in regard to rank-and-file police officers but in relation to the comments made by Allott the PFCC.
Given the laws that surround the election of PFCCs and MPs, Allott’s future is largely in his own hands. FBU members have made clear to us what his next steps should be.
Our members universally condemn Allott’s comments and perspectives on this tragedy and I can assure the public it is not reflective of the views of North Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service and the membership of North Yorkshire Fire Brigades Union.
In reality, the Labour party was calling for the government to be more open and transparent and to set out when it planned to impose lockdown measures nearly a fortnight before the prime minister finally announced the “stay at home” order.
Hansard shows that the shadow health secretary, Jonathan Ashworth, told the Commons on Wednesday 11 March 2020 that there was not, in fact, a consensus among the scientific and political communities:
We support the action of the chief medical officer and we very strongly agree that we must at all times be guided by the science. However, may I press [the health secretary] a little further on the epidemiology, the latest medical advice and the appropriate moment when we should move into the so-called delay stage and start adopting some of the more stringent social distancing strategies?
The right honourable gentleman will have seen that some in the science community – the editor-in-chief of the Lancet, for example – are suggesting that we are not following the epidemiology in the correct way and that we are perhaps placing too much emphasis on behavioural science.
Other countries are taking different approaches. Tonight, for example, 3,000 Atlético Madrid fans are arriving in Liverpool to watch the Champions League game. If that game was in Madrid, they would not be able to go to the stadium because of the Spanish social distancing measures.
Will the secretary of state explain the thinking in the United Kingdom and why it appears to differ from that of some of the other nations in Europe? Our constituents would welcome that.
Updated
The government minister Stephen Barclay has echoed Clark’s comments. Asked if the government was slow to go into lockdown, he told Today:
There is an issue there of hindsight because, at the time of the first lockdown, the expectation was that the tolerance in terms of how long people would live with lockdown for was a far shorter period than actually has proven to be the case. And, therefore, there was an issue of timing the lockdown and ensuring that that was done at the point of optimal impact.
And so it is a point of hindsight to now say that the way that decision was shaped and how long we could lock down for ... because we now know that there was much more willingness for the country to endure that than was originally envisaged.
Barclay acknowledged there had been “difficult judgments to be made” over coronavirus lockdowns. Asked if the timing of the autumn 2020 lockdown was an error, he told the same programme:
No, I don’t. Because I think there were difficult judgments to be made. We followed the scientific advice throughout.
We took action to protect our NHS, we got a vaccine deployed in record time, but I don’t shy away from the fact that there will be lessons to learn, that is why we’re going to have an inquiry to get to the heart of these issues and in particular to do so for the families that have suffered such devastating loss as a result of what has been a global and unprecedented pandemic.
Updated
Clark has told BBC Breakfast that the UK was “not the only country that made mistakes”.
He added that the failure to implement an earlier lockdown was a consensus decision. He claimed:
It wasn’t that the government went against the scientific advice, or that there was some great row about it. Everyone agreed that this was the right thing to do.
We now know that it wasn’t – that is using the benefit of hindsight. But it’s important to do so.
So what were the reasons for that? Well, one of the mistakes that was made was that we thought – there was a widespread assumption – that people wouldn’t obey lockdown measures for a very long period of time, so you had to delay imposing them until almost the last possible moment, so that they could have the longest effect.
What we discovered in practice was that people were perfectly prepared to follow instructions to stay at home because they realised the importance of it. So that was an error that we made.
We also didn’t have enough testing capacity at the outset. We had to stop testing in the community. And, if you’re not testing, that means you don’t have information as to how quickly the virus is spreading, who is getting it, how ill they’re becoming. And so that means that we were operating in the dark.
The Tory MP Greg Clark, who co-authored the report with Hunt and chairs the Commons science and technology committee, has told BBC Breakfast other countries – particularly some in East Asia – were able to quickly mobilise their testing and isolation regimes, allowing them to get a grip on the pandemic.
In comparison, he said increasing testing capacity in the UK was “painfully” slow. This had an impact on care homes, Clark added, because testing everyone being transferred there from hospital would have prevented the “seeding of infections into care homes”.
But, even with the limited testing capacity that we had, we should have been more rigorous in the regime around care homes – that’s to say, when people did go into care homes from hospitals, we should have been tougher in requiring that they went into isolation facilities.
Germany did that and imposed that and they had a better record initially on care homes. Other countries in East Asia also did that ... so there are lessons that we need to learn now, to put in place, so that this can’t happen again.
Clark said “everyone working in this was trying to do the best thing, there’s not a single person that wasn’t motivated and working all hours to try to make the right decisions”.
Nevertheless, he said there was a need “to confront ourselves with some difficult truths, especially where they do lead you to be able to do things differently”, though he rejected calls to bring forward the public inquiry.
He said that “in the context where there were things that we didn’t know, it took us too long to get to the right approach”. Referencing the MPs’ report on the pandemic response, he said:
We say this was like a football match with two very different halves, and yes there were those very serious errors that ... led to many tragedies.
But, in the second half of the match, we have the vaccine programme which was – we say – the most effective initiative in the history of British science and public administration. We had the discovery of treatments like dexamethasone in the UK, which saved a million lives worldwide, we had that extraordinary response in the NHS which saw everyone who needed a ventilator and an intensive care bed got one.
Hunt said there was a fatalism in the early days of the pandemic response that led the government to believe that widespread immunity was the only way to stop coronavirus. Asked on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme this morning whether there had been a policy of herd immunity, the former health secretary said:
We don’t think there was any desire for the whole population to be infected, but there was a fatalism that it was likely that, in the end, that would be the only way that we would stop the progress of the virus.
I think we wanted to do everything we could, but once we had concluded there was community transmission, that was going to be very difficult to do.
Hunt said part of the reason was that the government believed some of the measures taken to curb the spread of the virus in China, where the pandemic originated, “would not be possible in a democracy”.
Questioned on the impact of the prime minister’s personality early on in the pandemic, and whether Boris Johnson did not want to shut down the nation in case it was “unpopular”, Hunt said:
Every prime minister’s personality matters but, in this particular case, on those particular decisions, he was following the scientific advice. And the question we have to ask is why across the whole of the system in those early months, everyone was advising the wrong approach?
Hunt said that, when images of the pandemic in Italy hit TV screens in the UK, the focus was on hospitals rather than other places such as care homes. He told Good Morning Britain:
The focus of attention, as so often happened in my time as well when I was health secretary, became what was happening in hospital wards. And we didn’t have that bigger picture as to the whole system and that’s what we urgently need to put right which is why our strong recommendation ... is that we need a 10-year plan for the social care sector, a big increase in funding for the social care sector, just as we had for the NHS going back to 2018.
Updated
The Tory MP Jeremy Hunt, who was health secretary from 2012 to 2018 and now chairs the health and social care committee, has said he was part of the “groupthink” that focused too much on flu and failed to adequately plan for a pandemic.
He told ITV’s Good Morning Britain the UK should have locked down earlier and “the prime minister is of course ultimately responsible, but some of the advice that he got was also wrong”. He added:
There was a groupthink that the way you tackle a pandemic should be similar to a flu pandemic, I was part of that groupthink too when I was health secretary.
In fact, you know, during that period, an American university said we were the second-best prepared country in the world. We know that clearly wasn’t the case.
He said the countries that have “direct experience of Sars and Mers were the ones who responded best in the first half the pandemic”.
Nabarro has added that delayed action when responding to a virus spreading in communities leads to suffering.
What we’re learning is when you get a virus, starting to really spread in a community, the one thing that you must not do is to delay - it doesn’t help anybody.
And, occasionally, people think: ‘Well, if we delay, everybody will get infected. So the problem will go away because they’ll all be immune’. That also doesn’t work.
So I think what we have to remember is: be rapid and be firm as soon as you get cases of the disease. It doesn’t mean you have complete lockdown, it just means you need to be able to test and to isolate and to stop spread.
If you delay, what we’re learning all over the world is that people suffer.
Referring to the Test and Trace system, he said:
What we have learned in Britain – and in many other countries – is you can’t just tell people to isolate and expect them to stay at home without any kind of financial compensation.
Dr David Nabarro, the World Health Organisation (WHO) special envoy for Covid-19, said the report on lessons learned in the UK during the early phase of the pandemic would help the government plan for “future problems”. He has told Sky News:
For us at the World Health Organisation, this kind of really cold, hard look at what happened is very useful. We don’t think it’s relevant to apportion blame at this stage, we do think it’s right to learn.
I think that, if I had my way, every country would do this kind of analysis and would then have quite a dense learning moment so that the lessons can be applied.
I want to stress this virus has not gone away, it’s continuing to mutate, it’s capable probably of causing all sorts of future problems. So why not let’s all learn what the experiences of the last two years, and make sure we’ve got them on board for the years to come? And then we will actually be better able to resist it – it’s not going to just go away if we wish it away.
Some of the families of those who died during the pandemic have called the report “laughable”.
Hannah Brady, a spokesperson for the Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice group, criticised a passage in the report that said the “success of the vaccine programme has redeemed many of the persistent failings of other parts of the national response such as the test and trace system, so that the outcome is far better than would have been the case without this success”.
What a surprise: a committee led by the previous health secretary and which exclusively spoke to his friends in government, found that the deaths of 150,000 people were ‘redeemed’ by the vaccine rollout.
She said the report “manages to barely mention the over 150,000 bereaved families”, adding:
Sadly, this is what we expected, as the committee explicitly refused to speak to us or any bereaved families, instead insisting they were only interested in speaking to their colleagues and friends.
The report it’s produced is laughable, and more interested in political arguments about whether you can bring laptops to Cobra meetings than it is in the experiences of those who tragically lost parents, partners or children to Covid-19.
This is an attempt to ignore and gaslight bereaved families, who will see it as a slap in the face.
Brady said the report proved a judge-led independent inquiry, which has been promised by the government in spring, “must have bereaved families at its heart”.
That is the only way that the serious questions, like why families were told their loved ones were not fit for intensive care without medical assessment, or advised by 111 to keep their loved ones at home even in their dying moments, or why there were even more deaths in care homes in the second wave than the first, will be answered.
Updated
Asked about not locking down earlier, Barclay told the broadcaster:
It was an unprecedented pandemic, we were learning about it as we went through and of course with hindsight there’s things we know about it now that we didn’t know at the time.
Asked if he would apologise, he said:
Of course there are going to be lessons to learn; that’s why we’ve committed to an inquiry. But the government took decisions at the time based on the scientific advice it received, but those scientists themselves were operating in a very new environment where they themselves were learning about the pandemic.
We protected the NHS, we got the vaccine deployed at pace, but we accept where there are lessons to be learnt, we’re keen to do so.
Barclay has claimed the government “did take decisions to move quickly”. He has told Sky News:
The decisions were taken on the evidence and the scientific advice at the time, they were taken to protect the NHS.
The understanding of issues such as asymptomatic infection and how that spread the disease, we now know far more about that than we did in 2020 at the start of the pandemic.
I think a question for the inquiry will be what information did the government have on something that was unprecedented? Were the decisions informed by the science at the time and do we now know different things about the pandemic to what we knew in February in 2020?
And, of course, we’ve learned a huge amount. But we did take decisions to move quickly; that is why the vaccine was deployed at pace, that was a success that the report recognises.
We’re going to have an inquiry to look at the lessons to take forward to the future.
Government's Covid response led to higher death toll, report finds
Tory ministers are trying to defend the UK government’s actions in the early part of the pandemic after a report led by two of their own parliamentary colleagues found it them constitute one of the worst public health failures in UK history.
Two former Conservative ministers, now serving as chairs of parliamentary committees, said Whitehall displayed “groupthink”, evidence of British exceptionalism and a deliberately “slow and gradualist” approach.
And health officials and political leaders were criticised for failing to be transparent with their data, meaning to little constructive criticism could be offered.
It is now clear that this was the wrong policy, and that it led to a higher initial death toll than would have resulted from a more emphatic early policy. In a pandemic spreading rapidly and exponentially, every week counted.
Representing the government this morning, the chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Stephen Barclay has sought to portray the pandemic as an unprecedented situation ministers were trying to get to grips with in real time. He has told Sky News:
We were learning about it as we went through and of course with hindsight there’s things we know about it now that we didn’t know at the time.
However, critics would point out that this was the situation that faced every nation on the planet, yet the UK compared poorly with many.
