It’s
still raining. It has been raining
solidly for three days. This is not what
I paid up to join when I moved to Catalonia!
Where is the sun?
Poor weather merely forces one to take
even more notice of the news, and that of course drives one back to the weather
once again.
The scandal of the non-appearing PPE in
Britain and the way that statistics are being thrown around concerning testing
make me angry. Politicians seem to
equate hopes with hard statistics, as with the Turkish PPE that were talked
about as supplying the NHS and they are still waiting. In exactly the same way the Health Secretary
was talking about the availability of tests for Covid-19, but the key question
is how many tests have actually been administered? From Beckett’s answers this evening, it is
obvious that he is going to weasel out of resigning when he fails to get to the
target for testing at the end of the month.
While the supply of PPE rumbles on and
with of course hospitals and care homes and health workers failing to be
adequately supplied, the earlier part of that scandal has come back to haunt
the government.
Some time ago Britain was invited to join
other EU countries in uniting forces to source supplies of PPE using the buying
power of bulk purchase. Though invited,
Britain did not sign up. Why? According to the Conservatives, it was
because they didn’t see the email.
According to a senior Civil Servant it was a political decision taken to
placate the Brexit idiots. According to
the Conservatives, it was a single email that was missed. According to other official is was a series
of invitations that were not acted upon.
I have to say that I am inclined to agree
with Philip Pullman who has written that he thinks the entire government front
bench should resign at once, and if it can be shown that they ignored the
invitation because of Brexit prejudice then they should be charged with
manslaughter. The Conservatives have
issued a detailed refutation of the story in the Sunday Times that questioned
their record and their motivations – but this story will haunt (as it should)
the Government and the way that they played the early stages of the crisis.
Here
in Spain and Catalonia there is almost terminal confusion about the
government’s plans to loosen the lockdown to allow children to leave the house
when accompanied by a parent. The
details of who, what, when, where, how often, how far, how old, how many and on
and on are all bubbling up and there is no real authoritative governmental
voice giving the sort of clarity that needs to be in place if there is not to
be utter chaos when the policy comes into play.
Like the masks that each citizen is
entitled to. On the first day of the
distribution of the masks via the pharmacies the system crashed and so the television
news carried stories of chaos rather than the extension of protection for us
all!
There are too many stories of chaos and
too few of planned competence.
On
the lighter side, I have received my parcel from Pound Shop. It seemed to me that that could be a way of
getting essential supplies through via the UK.
It all depends, of course, on how you define ‘essential’.
In order to make the delivery charge
worthwhile I had to spend about fifty euros and what I ended up with was a
positive lucky bag of questionable goodies ranging from ‘chip shop curry
granules’ via Cross and Blackwell baked beans to dark chocolate Toblerone.
In times of isolation, one needs one’s
treats!
