Kmflett's Blog

NHS Contracts, the Tory Government & William Cobbett’s Old Corruption

The words below were posted in February 2021 looking back to the provision of Protective Equipment in the first period of COVID in 2020.

At length the COVID Inquiry has found that Boris Johnson’s Government wasted billions of pounds of public money on PPE that was mostly unusable often in contracts to providers associated with the Tory Party.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/jul/14/boris-johnson-government-wasted-vast-sums-on-ppe-covid-inquiry-finds?CMP=share_btn_url

From 2021

A Court has ruled that the Government and in particular Health Secretary Hancock have failed in a legal duty to be sufficiently transparent to whom they have awarded contracts related to the pandemic to.

The Government legislated to remove the usual safeguards around tendering for contracts given the COVID emergency but this did remove a requirement for accountability on what had been done

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-56125462

The BBC reported as a lead item on its news website that:

Labour claimed the government’s awarding of contracts was “plagued by a lack of transparency, cronyism and waste”.

It’s something that has an echo in British history perhaps particularly in the views of William Cobbett

EP Thompson encapsulated the Cobbettian worldview in the Making of the English Working Class. Describing Cobbett’s intervention in the 1806 election for the Westminster seat in the unreformed Parliament, he noted how Cobbett summed up the opponents of the radical candidate:

relations of placemen and pensioners’, ‘tax-gatherers, magistrates, policemen and dependent clergy’, ‘play-actors, scene-shifters, candle-snuffers, and persons following.. immoral callings’.

In his Rural Rides, Cobbett criticised ‘pensions, sinecures, tithes and the other ‘glorious institutions’ of this ‘mighty empire’. He referred to this collectively as The Thing.

That world eventually began to change as Parliamentary Democracy started itself to be renewed with the 1832 Reform Act. It might be noted however that the passage of the Act was a fine call between reform and a plebeian revolution.

High stakes indeed