Tuesday 21 April 2020

Scrutinising the Covid19 pandemic in Parliament

Your first leader ( “Amid the pandemic, MPs have to hold ministers to account,” The Guardian, 20 April 2020; https://www.pressreader.com/uk/the-guardian-e-paper-journal/20200420/281517933258442 ) is based in the erroneous premise that MPs have not had an opportunity to scrutinise various Ministers on their Coronacrisis policies during recess. 

MPs on several select committees have interrogated ministers, departmental officials and scientific advisors in “virtual sessions” several of which have been reported by Guardian specialist writers.

But MPs have also been able to submit( technically called tabling) written questions for ministers to answer during the four week recess. Around two  thousand such questions were tabled, and answered, published in the written replies section of the parliamentary web site.

SeveraL hundred if these questions were on various aspects of dealing with the Coronacrisis  eg impact on rough sleepers, on autistic children from poor families who relied upon now closed libraries, universities financing, on cramped prisons, on protection for shop checkout people, on medicines and protection clothing availability etc

I have not seen one of these answers reported by The Guardian. At one point last weeK I collected dozens of such Covid19 answers, and shared them with your speculation reporters 

But they did not report any of them.

So your editorial writer (s) needs to be properly briefed before composing opprobrious advice to others!
 
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Letter to The Times:
Your picture-based story today (“Give us a B-L-U-E to cheer on Oxbridge,” Apr15) shows two lots of female US-style sports cheerleaders from Oxford and Cambridge Universities.
They are, to put it mildly, not abiding by the social spacing dictum from Government.
I must assume that none of these elite student academics are studying mathematics at their Oxbridge college, or else they would have realised they are certainly considerably closer together than the two metre requirement!

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