Over the last year life as we know it has been devastated by the capital C, COVID-19. The year-old virus has inflicted mass agony on nations all across the world, from taking lives to crushing economies. The UK, however, has been ravaged by the deadly trio of C’s, COVID-19, the Conservative government and the final inessential enhancement of cronyism. Let’s call these the three C’s of destruction.
If a global pandemic was not enough to threaten the livelihoods of those living in Britain, the utter incompetence at the hands of the Conservative government ought to do the job. Since the very early stages of the coronavirus outbreak, the Tories under Boris Johnson failed to respond in a timely, let alone effective manner. Boris Johnson failed to lockdown the nation when instructed to do so by scientists, because as he claims wanted to save our economy. Well, guess what? A year down the line but not only are we still in lockdown, but our economy is also fucked. Back in August last year, the UK entered recession for the first time in 11 years.
So not only have over 100,000 lives been lost to the coronavirus, accompanied by the negligence of the Conservatives but as stated by the Financial Times, the UK economy will be one of the last to recover post-pandemic. However, truly speaking the UK should not put so much trust and expectation into a man who is defeated by his hair and a comb every morning.
Irrationality and complacency, albeit dangerous, can only cause so much harm. The real danger falls at the hands of this government’s long tradition and to some extent obsession with cronyism. Now, for those of you who may be unfamiliar with the term, it simply describes the act of government officials handing out contracts and jobs to their friends, rather than making them available to people who actually possess the required skills. In other words, an abuse of our so-called democracy. Cronyism for example is the reason why last year the UK received 50 million unusable COVID-19 masks, simply because they handed the responsibility off to a friend, with no real experience in making clinical masks.
From the start of our nation’s battle with the pandemic, the government has gifted billions of taxpayers money to private companies, with links to the Conservatives, without any competition, transparency or democratic accountability. In the first 6 months alone £1.5 billion of COVID-19 contracts were handed off to Tory allies without any competitive tender. Cronyism has proved to be as much of an infectious virus in the UK, as COVID-19, with new reports being published every other week detailing yet another government contract being awarded to a private firm. Byline Times has produced a detailed series of reports outlining each one of these contracts, ‘BORIS JOHNSON'S CRONY CONTRACTS.’
The words Conservative and Cronyism have almost become interchangeable. In December of 2020, the National Audit Office published a damning investigation into the government’s handling of the pandemic. The report revealed that companies with political affiliations were considered ‘high-priority’ and fast-tracked for government contracts, with a 10 times higher chance of being awarded a contract. This unprincipled approach would explain why in November 2020, a Spanish jewellery company was given £21 million of public funds to help source Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), chumocracy at its finest, because what experience a jewellery designer has in producing PPE is incomprehensible. NAO also found that a total of £10.5 billion was awarded without the due necessary process, and that’s not including any contracts signed this year. So while our children go hungry, our prisons deteriorate, our health services struggle and small businesses crash, it’s all ok because the rich can continue to get richer at the hands of the Tories.
Some incompetent fools may argue that handing off contracts to the private sector in the midst of a pandemic is more than appropriate due to the state of emergency we are in. But the point is if you’re gonna hand off contracts, give them to companies that at least operate in the same field.
If the mishandling of government contracts under Boris Johnson’s rule was nothing more than errors made under pressure, then these mistakes should have happened maybe once or twice, and not continuously over the course of a year. These mistakes should have been little more than scratch to our financial resources, rather than draining them. The issue is that the Conservatives have a fetish for cronyism and making the rich richer including themselves, otherwise they would have stopped the moment they realised the private sector was failing them.
Take ‘Test and Trace’ for example, a billion-pound failure, overseen by Dido Harding, a close ally of the Conservative government. Now compare that to Britain’s world-beating vaccine nationwide rollout, which has acted as a guiding light in a dark tunnel for many British people, a program managed solely by the public health service, the NHS. Dido Harding received billions of taxpayers money for her countless failures, while the NHS and health workers have been subject to pay cuts, lack of PPE and prolonged hours. But let’s not forget the billions of claps they received from across the country, enough I’m sure to feed their families with, once acts of gratitude are accepted as a form of payment in supermarkets.
It is clear that the Conservatives are aware of their Cronyism and its ability to further the devastating impact of the Coronavirus, they simply choose to do nothing. If their priority was to save lives, they would have learned their lesson from the success of the vaccine rollout.