Nobody is advocating uncritical acceptance of anything, we have a right to know why decisions are taken and in a democracy our politicians have a duty to answer truthfully. They and their advisers in SAGE also have a right to meet and discuss the data and the options and issues in private. Confidentiality is a necessary precondition to ensure the integrity and honesty of those interactions and has been a feature of the relationship between elected MPs and their civil servants and advisers in this country for a very long time. It is a system that has served us well and the secrecy is in the public interest and is temporary.
It comes down to trust really George. Nothing more and nothing less. If they can’t engender trust then how can they expect the rest of us to follow? The easiest way of doing that is just by being truthful. For example, in January, the UK had developed one of the first C-19 tests. One thing we do have is a very high level research base and every public health threat, similar to this one, is always Test, Track, Trace and Isolate, as quickly as possible. By February, despite the WHO repeating and repeating this mantra, we decided to not bother with it. We went from trying to contain it to trying to delay it. Aren’t you at least curious why we chose that path, especially as now, less than 2 months later and following at least 30000 deaths, our strategy is moving towards, Test, Track, Trace and Isolate?
Johnson talked, on Monday, of transparency, of learning lessons every day, which is all they all needed to be saying from the start. Then, four days later, we have the ‘testing target day’. People on here saying how we should give them credit for achieving when, in reality, they’d just lied again. It’s not great for building up the aforementioned trust.
If he’d said that we’ve put in a huge effort, almost got to 100k, a target we set to galvanise the system, and going forward we learned a huge amount which will enable us to increase the testing capacity week on week, he’d have had no criticism from me, as the ‘target’ was never a critical milestone. What does matter is that they couldn’t be straightforward at a time when the country needs unambiguous leadership from our government. We all need to be able to trust them and we need to be able to trust them all. If they tell us that 1 metre distancing is as good as 2, we need to believe them. If they tell us that masks ‘make no difference’, we need to trust them. Opening this business, or that business, we need to believe that the science and the interpretation of that science is believable. It’s not rocket science, it’s much more important than that and we deserve a leadership team that treat us like adults and in whom we can trust, I’d have thought.
