A critique of the fake-Jennifer copy n' paste Tory propaganda operation

A hyper-partisan Tory diatribe is doing the rounds on social media, with many of the iterations purporting to be from the actress and comedian Jennifer Saunders.

The reality is that the poorly written blame-shifting Tory rant was one of those dire copy n' paste jobs that are always doing the rounds in Tory, far-right, and Brexity circles (like the copy n' paste post pretending that the poster had read the Lisbon Treaty for example).

The actual Jennifer Saunders has been forced to come out and distance herself from this vile Tory rant, but that hasn't stopped the page owners from crying victimhood because they were cornered into deleting the post, and posting yet more pro-Tory propaganda on the Saunders fan page.

It's become clear that hyper-partisan Tories are infecting all kinds of local "for sale" pages, community groups, and fan pages with their disgusting pro-government propaganda, and this obnoxious copy n' paste rant is still doing the rounds in Facebook pages and groups all over the country.

As far as I can see nobody has done a comprehensive critique of this mega-viral copy n' paste nonsense, so I guess it's up to me to go through it point by point:

Anyone who has questions about the government's handling of the crisis is a "crayon eater".

An opening sentence aiming insults at anyone who questions the government suggests that this is going to be a very long way from an impartial appraisal of the facts.

The funny thing about this opening salvo is that someone has actually corrected the grammatical errors that appeared in the now deleted version from Fake-Jennifer, but they somehow decided not to correct any of the provable lies, deceptions, and displays of grotesque political illiteracy in the rest of the statement!

This is a lie. Plain and simple. It's a complete misrepresentation of how NHS procurement works.

In 2018 the Tory government set up a government-run company called NHS Supply Chain to manage NHS supplies, with the Tory health secretary Matt Hancock controlling the shares, meaning the government does deal with logistics for the NHS.

The Tories restructured the NHS supply chains to put the health secretary in ultimate charge, but the hyper-partisan copy n' paste Tory liars definitely don't want you to know that.

Furthermore the Tories repeatedly ignored warnings that NHS stockpiles were woefully inadequate. Jeremy Hunt ignored the warnings after Operation Cygnus in 2016, and Hancock ignored the warningsover inadequate PPE again in 2019.

It's difficult to express the level of contempt you should feel towards someone claiming to "respect" NHS doctors and nurses, whilst simultaneously seeking to deflect blame away from their beloved Tories, and onto the NHS.

Operation Cygnus took place in 2016, not "two years ago", and as already mentioned, the NHS actually said that they were unprepared for a respiratory pandemic, with particular concerns about the hopeless lack of protective gear, plus insufficient intensive care beds and respirators.

The Tories were still busy inflicting their austerity cuts to the NHS, and further reducing bed capacity, so the appeals for more PPE fell on deaf ears. The claim that the Operation Cygnus report included the quotes "we can flex" and "we are OK" is frankly absurd, as anyone who has ever set eyes on an internal bureaucratic report before can attest.

The Brexit bit is absolutely confounding. It's ridiculously obvious that four years of Brexit chaos, stemming from the fact the Brexiteers never even had a plan for how to actually do it, means government has been utterly distracted on all the Brexit issues.

The idea that the NHS said "we are OK" is bizarre enough, but "we are OK because ... Brexit" is absolute ridiculousness.
 

Questioning whether the NHS Supply Chain company which is ultimately controlled by Matt Hancock even understand that ships take time to travel from China is being posited as a defence of the government!

Then there's a criticism of globalisation. Why oh why didn't we prioritise UK-based manufacturers? Well because if any government had attempted to do that then the Tories and their minions in the right-wing propaganda rags would have screeched "protectionism", "communism", "Marxism" at them, just like they did with Labour's modest proposals to renationalise rail, water, and the national grid.

You see running things in the national interest is absolutely forbidden by the Tory ideology, if there's the remotest chance of it interfering with the profiteering of capitalists.

And now to make excuses for this grotesque capitalism above the national interest Tory ideology, the Tory tribalists are making out that NHS managers are responsible for the neoliberal globalisation agenda, not the politicians who made the prioritisation of local suppliers illegal!

As a result of four decades of neoliberal pro-privatisation politics, mainly pushed by the Tories, the majority of care homes are now operated by profit-seeking private companies, therefore the Tories are absolved of blame!

The idea that the government should just let care home residents die in a pandemic because the care home is privately operated is quite frankly disgusting.

OK, if the care homes couldn't cope with their responsibilities during the crisis and needed bailing out at the public expense, lets have the debate about renationalisation of care services after the crisis is over, but the government's first priority in this pandemic should obviously be to prevent people from dying, wherever they happen to be. 

It doesn't matter how many times you write MANAGERS in capital letters, the fact remains that the secretary of state Matt Hancock has ultimate responsibility.

And look, it's not just the NHS to blame for the Tory failings either, it's journalists and ordinary members of the public too (who the copy n' paste Tory propaganda brigade quite obviously regard with absolute contempt).

Anyone with any sense can see that the corporate media are crap, not because they criticise the Tories, but because they continually allow them to play politics on easy mode, whilst continually attacking the opposition, and even outright faking scandals about them.

As for ordinary members of the public expressing their opinions, you hardly had to be a trained virologist or epidemiologist to figure out that just letting the virus spread exponentially through the population for weeks instead of following the established WHO protocol (test, trace, isolate) was a very poor strategy in the crucial early stages.

That's why South Korea - who tested and contact traced from the beginning - has a total of 243 deaths, and the UK has 20,000+ according to the official statistics, and almost certainly double that when all the care home and community deaths are finally counted.
 

"The government has probably made some mistakes" is some hell of an under-estimate in regards to a crisis that's taken tens of thousands of lives, followed by rather a lot of words to argue that anyone who dares to discuss what these "probable mistakes" might be, deserves to be dead.

Ah yes, "let's get through this and beat this together" by ... erm ... copy n' pasting incredibly divisive, hyper-partisan Tory screeds full of outright lies, blame-shifting, Trumpian rhetoric, ALL CAPS SHOUTING, and a load of insults and sneering condescension towards ordinary members of the public who dare to ever engage their critical thinking skills.

The worst thing about fake-Jennifer and all the other Tory partisans sharing this outrageous rubbish is that they're probably stupid enough to believe that propagating such egregious blame-shifting lies is good for the country, because they're incapable of separating the interests of Boris Johnson and his cabinet of hard-right thugs, from the interests of the nation as a whole (which are obviously best served by not having a lazy, incompetent, elitist liar like Johnson running the show).

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