For the past few months, a British group has campaigned for an emergency judge-led inquiry into the pandemic. Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice UK has not got very far: nothing has been offered beyond the promise of an inquiry at some time in the future. Now, though, a parliamentary report has been published which goes some way towards that aim.
It comes from the rather grandly named Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy and is called ‘Biosecurity and National Security’. Because of its focus, the committee concentrates on the government’s preparedness for a pandemic, so it says little about the detailed handling, including the outsourcing, creeping privatisation, chumocracy and all the other criticisms, but it is still a remarkable document on two counts.
The first is summarised in Friday’s press release announcing the publication of the report, which was headed ‘Government failed to act on its security plans for a pandemic’. Just quoting from that release gives a good flavour of the report. It talks of “profound shortcomings in how the government safeguards national security”, and says that the committee “calls on the government to address long-term gaps in the planning and preparation for biological risks to the UK’s national security”. Perhaps most damning of all: “The report notes a striking absence of leadership of the UK’s biological security as a whole, with neither the National Security Council (NSC) nor the Cabinet Office assuming primary responsibility.”
