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Interesting article from him in regard to the Covid crisis
Here's an excert in regards to racing and Dido Harding
In 2014 David Cameron, an old friend, made her a baroness; she sits in the House of Lords as a Conservative peer.
It would be wrong to claim she had no experience relevant to the pandemic. She sits on the board of the Jockey Club, which runs some of the biggest and most lucrative horse racing events in the UK. Among them is the Cheltenham Festival. By 10 March, it was clear that Covid-19 was a massive problem. Public health experts were frantically urging the government to take action. The epidemiology professor Neil Ferguson estimated that 20,000 lives would have been saved if the government had locked down a week earlier than it did. Many events had already been cancelled, for fear of spreading the disease.
Then we watched aghast as the Cheltenham Festival went ahead, and 250,000 people packed the terraces “like sardines”. It appears to have been a super-spreader event, blamed by some for a spike in infections and deaths.
The racing connection might not have commended her to doctors, but could it have commended her to the health secretary, Matt Hancock? For a long time Hancock, the MP for Newmarket, where the Jockey Club has major infrastructure and investments, has drawn a large proportion of his political funding from the horse-racing industry. An investigation by the Mirror estimates that he has received £350,000 in donations from wealthy people in the racing business. Before the last election he announced: “I’ll always support the wonderful sport of horse racing.”
Harding’s appointment is not the only intersection between racing and tracing. The Jockey Club’s premier annual event is the Grand National. Or, to give it its full title, the Randox Health Grand National. One of the government’s most controversial contracts is with Randox. It gave the global healthcare firm a £133m deal, without advertisement or competition, to supply testing kits.
Randox employs as a consultant the former Conservative environment secretary Owen Paterson. It pays him £100,000 a year for 200 hours of work. Neither he, nor Randox, nor the health department answered the Guardian’s questions about whether he had helped to secure this deal. In July, following a series of errors, the government withdrew Randox testing kits, on the grounds that they might be unsafe.
These apparent connections may be entirely coincidental. But in an emergency, when decisions must be made with the utmost rigour and a relentless focus on public health, there should be no possibility that other interests might intrude, or that ministerial judgment should in any way be clouded.
Like so much surrounding this pandemic, the identity of Harding’s team at NHS track and trace was withheld from the public, until it was leaked to the Health Service Journal last month. Clinicians were astonished to discover that there is only one public health expert on its executive committee. There is space, however, for a former executive from Jaguar Land Rover, a senior manager from Travelex and an executive from Waitrose. Harding’s adviser at the agency is Alex Birtles, who, like her, previously worked for TalkTalk. She has subsequently made a further appointment to the board: Mike Coupe, an executive at another of her old firms, Sainsbury’s.
The “world-beating” test-and-trace system she oversees has repeatedly failed to reach its targets. Staff were scarcely trained. Patients have been directed to nonexistent testing centres, or to the other end of the country. A vast tranche of test results was lost. Thousands of people, including NHS staff, have been left in limbo, unable to work because they can’t get tests or the results of tests.
Having demonstrated, to almost everyone’s dissatisfaction, that she was the wrong person for the job, Harding has now been given an even bigger role, as head of the National Institute for Health Protection, to run concurrently with the first one. This is the government’s replacement for Public Health England, which it blames for its own disasters. Harding’s appointment looks to me like a reward for failure.
You can read the full on article on the Guardian website or type and search George Monbiot on Facebook
Here's an excert in regards to racing and Dido Harding
In 2014 David Cameron, an old friend, made her a baroness; she sits in the House of Lords as a Conservative peer.
It would be wrong to claim she had no experience relevant to the pandemic. She sits on the board of the Jockey Club, which runs some of the biggest and most lucrative horse racing events in the UK. Among them is the Cheltenham Festival. By 10 March, it was clear that Covid-19 was a massive problem. Public health experts were frantically urging the government to take action. The epidemiology professor Neil Ferguson estimated that 20,000 lives would have been saved if the government had locked down a week earlier than it did. Many events had already been cancelled, for fear of spreading the disease.
Then we watched aghast as the Cheltenham Festival went ahead, and 250,000 people packed the terraces “like sardines”. It appears to have been a super-spreader event, blamed by some for a spike in infections and deaths.
The racing connection might not have commended her to doctors, but could it have commended her to the health secretary, Matt Hancock? For a long time Hancock, the MP for Newmarket, where the Jockey Club has major infrastructure and investments, has drawn a large proportion of his political funding from the horse-racing industry. An investigation by the Mirror estimates that he has received £350,000 in donations from wealthy people in the racing business. Before the last election he announced: “I’ll always support the wonderful sport of horse racing.”
Harding’s appointment is not the only intersection between racing and tracing. The Jockey Club’s premier annual event is the Grand National. Or, to give it its full title, the Randox Health Grand National. One of the government’s most controversial contracts is with Randox. It gave the global healthcare firm a £133m deal, without advertisement or competition, to supply testing kits.
Randox employs as a consultant the former Conservative environment secretary Owen Paterson. It pays him £100,000 a year for 200 hours of work. Neither he, nor Randox, nor the health department answered the Guardian’s questions about whether he had helped to secure this deal. In July, following a series of errors, the government withdrew Randox testing kits, on the grounds that they might be unsafe.
These apparent connections may be entirely coincidental. But in an emergency, when decisions must be made with the utmost rigour and a relentless focus on public health, there should be no possibility that other interests might intrude, or that ministerial judgment should in any way be clouded.
Like so much surrounding this pandemic, the identity of Harding’s team at NHS track and trace was withheld from the public, until it was leaked to the Health Service Journal last month. Clinicians were astonished to discover that there is only one public health expert on its executive committee. There is space, however, for a former executive from Jaguar Land Rover, a senior manager from Travelex and an executive from Waitrose. Harding’s adviser at the agency is Alex Birtles, who, like her, previously worked for TalkTalk. She has subsequently made a further appointment to the board: Mike Coupe, an executive at another of her old firms, Sainsbury’s.
The “world-beating” test-and-trace system she oversees has repeatedly failed to reach its targets. Staff were scarcely trained. Patients have been directed to nonexistent testing centres, or to the other end of the country. A vast tranche of test results was lost. Thousands of people, including NHS staff, have been left in limbo, unable to work because they can’t get tests or the results of tests.
Having demonstrated, to almost everyone’s dissatisfaction, that she was the wrong person for the job, Harding has now been given an even bigger role, as head of the National Institute for Health Protection, to run concurrently with the first one. This is the government’s replacement for Public Health England, which it blames for its own disasters. Harding’s appointment looks to me like a reward for failure.
You can read the full on article on the Guardian website or type and search George Monbiot on Facebook
