Boris has been sitting on a report into Russian influence and he is refusing to release it because apparently there's nothing in there.
Dido Harding has links to the Tory party and was in charge of the Talk Talk data leak scandal, and has been put in charge of the track-and-trace programme in the UK.
They have given all of our NHS data to Palantir for no observable gain to UK citizens.
New corruption stories about the Tories are appearing almost daily in UK media.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/may/27/richard-des...
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8416475/Boris-Johns...
https://www.businessinsider.com/boris-johnson-russia-report-...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/dominic-cummi...
the above is just a selection. I don't believe Hanlon's razor applies to the Tories.
Even if the contract was awarded unfairly through the old boy’s network, the intention was still for it to work.
Not sure why you would think that. I've worked in government before and seen contracts awarded to companies that had no chance of completing them. The intention was invariably to line a friend's pockets and book lots of consulting hours.
Some more context to this: England already has an excellent system for track and trace. Not for covid-19, we fucked that up. But for sexual health we have excellent work being done across the country by public health departments. These were split off from the NHS some time ago, and now they're funded by local authorities so they're struggling to cope with over a decade of austerity. But it's still a weird decision to not make use of that expertise and pull Harding in. Her work at NHS Improvement[1] is good, but she's had very little contact with public health work.
[1] Now NHS England + Improvement
None of this sounds like public health driven leadership to me:
- Hancock's test target was miraculously hit - bending his own rules to boost the figures (and wasting thousands of testing kits in the process)
- Dido Harding trumpeted as a tech heavyweight brought in to deliver a futuristic solution - despite famously claiming after her company's massive data breach "It wasn't encrypted, nor are you legally required to encrypt it. We have complied with all of our legal obligations in terms of storing of financial information.", and sitting on the board of the Cheltenham Festival which opened it's doors to 260,000 people just days before lockdown.
- Dominic Cummings publicly supported by all senior government politicians for breaking the public health guidelines they created
- Rebranding the coronavirus messaging without consulting the behaviourhal psychologists on the governement's own SAGE committee - resulting in unaccessible unactionable nonsense
etc. etc.
The NHS "centralised" app would have worked and worked fine IF they could have made the Bluetooth feature it relied on work properly. But this was always going to be impossible given what every mobile app developer already knows about the platforms. Whilst the NHSX app did have some ingenious ideas in it - it was not enough to get around the platform limitations enough to provide a working solution.
The only reason I can think they were pressing ahead was to collect all the extra data that this approach would have yielded (if it was actually going to work - which it wasn't).