Indeed - but they are trying to attribute blame (and then punish accordingly) those who have deliberately done things which they knew (or should know) were criminal/'wrong', for reasons that most people would regard as 'bad', and sometimes 'evil' often related to personal gain and/or total disregard for the rights/interests of others and their possessions.
I'm sure you meant to say "have allegedly deliberately done things..".
Before that stage though there is an investigation (hopefully unbiased), evidence is gathered, a charge of wrongdoing is levelled, and the strength of the evidence and truth of the charge is then examined in court.
But until the investigation is done, nobody knows if there has been wrongdoing. It's known that something happened - there's property missing, or there's a window broken, or there's a dead body in the street, but possibly none of the hows/whys etc are known.
This inquiry is the investigation. There won't be a trial at the end (I very much doubt), but there will be the conclusions of Baroness Hallet which she draws from the evidence uncovered by the inquiry, and of course the good old court of public opinion.
It's astonishing that you don't think there should be an inquiry.
I seriously doubt that anyone could sensibly suggest that such was the case of any members of government during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. In attempting to deal with an unprecedented crisis, they may have been misguided and made many mistakes/errors of judgement, but I feel sure that their intent will have been 'good', rather than deliberately 'bad'.
Strongly disagree.
There is enough evidence that procurement rules may have been broken, i.e. evidence that there may have been serious wilful abuse or neglect of the power or responsibilities of the public office held by those who decided to award large PPE contracts to friends, family and party donors to merit investigation to see if anybody did/was likely to have committed Misconduct in Public Office.
It's astonishing that you don't think there should be an inquiry.
As above, we are not talking about deliberate criminal acts, perpetrated for 'bad' reasons by people with no regard for the rights and interests of others.
How do we know that unless we investigate?
We're talking about people who were presumably doing their best to do what they believed was the best for the UK population, in this unprecedented crisis
Are we?
We are talking about people who ran an illegal PPE procurement scheme.
We are talking about people who at the same time that they made rules which resulted in at least one person being fined £10,000 for organising a birthday party, broke their own rules, organised their own birthday parties, laughed about it and then lied to Parliament and lied to the country about it.
And you are so sure that they were all doing their best to do what they believed was the best for the UK population that you don't think there should be an investigation to find out if anything else any of them did might have been influenced by personal greed, or party-political benefit, or a contempt for the law, or a callous disregard for the population's feelings, or sheer **** incompetence.
Astonishing.
- and that is not something one would want to discourage. If the pursuit of 'individuals to blame' discouraged anything, it would probably be to discourage very good people from accepting a position in government in the future.
So what has been discouraging very good people from accepting a position in government to date?
For a start, we do not have 'government by individuals' but, rather, essentially 'government by Cabinet. I find it hard to believe that any individual member of government would do anything that was opposed by the majority of the Cabinet - so actions are really the corporate responsibility of the Cabinet, not of individuals.
No reason why an inquiry cannot inquire into those actions. For instance, can we be sure that no Cabinet minister went along with a decision which he/she believed was wrong in order to keep their job?
Again, as above, if you were to threaten individual members of the government with 'prison terms' for making mistakes when they were doing their best to do their job, that could well discourage valuable people from accepting posts in government.
Well, the possibility of prison terms could only come at the end of a slow change in attitudes to incompetence/recklessness/malfeasance, plus the turkeys voting for Christmas, and I did say that maybe this could be the first step, not that the people being investigated this time should be imprisoned (as appealing as that might be).
And again, as above, there is already sufficient evidence that there were people who were
not doing their best to do their job (unless they thought their job was to ensure their personal political survival at any cost, or ruthless self-aggrandisement) that an inquiry to see if anything else they did was not motivated by what they believed was the best for the UK population is fully justified.
Have you started the election campaign (on behalf of a party other than the one currently in power)?
No.
There are differing political ideologies, and those (millions) who subscribe to one or another sincerely believe (sometimes passionately) that the ideology they subscribe to is the one that is best for members of our society. However, I don't see this has any direct relevance to an Inquiry which appears, at least so far, to be focussing on the actions and behaviour of individuals.
Well, firstly, unless you're postulating tablets of stone, any decisions made cannot have been made other than by the actions/behaviour of individuals. Whether in isolation, or as part of a collective-responsibility team, it was all people who did things. And to repeat from earlier, there really is enough evidence of "wrongdoing" in a broad sense to justify looking into how widespread and egregious it was, and what, if anything, can be learned so that in future decisions are not made with an eye to enriching ones friends, or are not made in order to secure one's political survival, or are not made in a spirit of "the rules are for little people, not for us".
Secondly, re competing ideologies, absolutely. But maybe people should have their eyes opened to the true consequences of their ideological choices.
"Module 1 opened on 21 July 2022 and is designated to look into the preparedness for the pandemic. It assesses if the pandemic was properly planned for and whether the UK was adequately ready for that eventuality. This module will touch on the whole system of civil emergencies including resourcing, risk management and pandemic readiness. It will scrutinise government decision-making relating to planning and seek to identify lessons that can be learnt."
https://covid19.public-inquiry.uk/structure-of-the-inquiry/
So if the consequences of a "private good, public bad" ideology, the consequences of a "centralised good, local/devolved bad" ideology, the consequences of cutting spending on health and social care and preparedness are that we were inadequately resourced, we were unable to manage risk properly, we were not sufficiently ready, the government were not making the best decisions, then how can it not be right and proper for the public to be able to make fully informed decisions about whether they think the "costs" of implementing their ideological preferences are acceptable?
