Nearly everything that happens outside the prison walls seems to find a way to land at our gates, and Covid-19 was no exception. Within minutes of Rishi Sunak, the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, announcing the measure of financial help the government would give to the 5 million self-employed people, criminals were hard at work making false claims. The Chancellor wanted to match the 80% figure he had set in place for those who had proper jobs and were paid via the PAYE system, as the government already knew who these claimants were. The problem with the self-employed was that not all of them had been in business long enough to have a track record with the government’s tax department, HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC), and would find it difficult to claim. Add to this those working in the gig community or those on zero-hour contracts, there is no easy way for those workers to claim either sick pay or get 80% of their previous monthly wages under the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme. According to the latest Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures, 974,000 Brits were on zero-hour contracts in December 2019—a record high.
The DWP received a million new claims a week after announcing the safety net. Without a safe way for the Government’s DWP overworked staff to check every claimant, benefit fraud will hit a record high. What the Government should learn from this deadly saga is that the gig community and zero-hour contracts should be banned, and everyone should pay taxes via the PAYE system.
Updated September 2023.
Once this book was published, I sent a copy and backed it up with a letter raising this point above to the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak. He ignored my warning letter, and as a result, £21 billion of public money has been lost due to fraud since the COVID pandemic began, and most will never be recovered. The National Audit Office (NAO) revealed the staggering increase in money lost due to fraud since the pandemic hit compared to a few years before, and it says it is ‘doubtful’ that the bulk of the taxpayers’ money will ever be recovered. Levels of fraud rose almost fourfold from £5.5bn two years before the pandemic to £21bn in the following two years. Since his time as Chancellor, the Conservative Party thought he did well by making him Prime Minster. I can’t help thinking he would have been more careful if it had been his family’s billions.
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Another observation regarding Covid-19 that worries me is how the Chinese communist government could trace any Chinese person who said anything about the virus that wasn’t in step with party propaganda, and the individual was soon arrested. How can the British government allow Chinese companies like Huawei (state-owned) to be part of the new G5 telecoms network in the UK even though Boris’s friend Mr Trump had warned him against doing so? I firmly believe that the Coronavirus (Covid-19) was a gift from China that will kill millions worldwide. It is alleged that the virus resulted from Chinese peasants eating dogs and other wild animals. There were also rumours that the virus was man-made in China as a form of biological warfare in retaliation to America banning the G5 Huawei in the country’s next generation of super-fast wireless networks, and in retaliation at the trade tariffs placed on imports to the USA from China.
What concerns many Westerners is the way the Chinese authorities dealt with Dr Li Wenliang, who had posted to a group chat with other medics about some patients showing signs of a new SARS-like illness in early December 2019, well before Chinese authorities admitted to the outbreak of a novel coronavirus. According to The Guardian newspaper, police detained Li a few days later for ‘spreading false rumours’ and forced him to sign a police document admitting that he had ‘seriously disrupted social order’ and breached the law. Officers said eight people had been disciplined for spreading rumours about the virus, but it was not clear whether Li was one of those. A week later, the 34-year-old doctor developed a fever, and published his account online. After being diagnosed with Covid-19 at the end of January, he died of the virus in early February. His death sparked outrage in China, particularly among internet users. Censors were overwhelmed by a wave of critical posts, including some blaming the government.
China is also accused of hiding the findings of a coronavirus expert—known as ‘Bat Woman’—after she quickly identified the genetic makeup of the new strain that has infected millions. Wuhan-based virologist Shi Zhengli is one of the world’s top researchers on coronaviruses and has discovered dozens of deadly SARS-like viruses in bat caves. She studied samples from some of the first people to become infected with the new and then-mysterious respiratory illness in China in December 2019, and found that it was like SARS. It was identified as a novel coronavirus. Within three days, she completed its gene sequencing, finding that it was 96% identical to a virus found in horseshoe bats in Yunnan. But she was ‘muzzled’, and her team was ordered not to reveal any information about the new disease, which was already spreading rapidly as China kept the world in the dark. Could an accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology release the deadly virus to the inhabitants of Wuhan and then onto the rest of the world?
Several critics also stated that according to www.ceicdata.com, China’s labour productivity dropped by 6.26 % year on year in Dec 2019, compared with a growth of 6.77 % in the previous year. Some feared that the bubble had burst, and that the People’s Republic of China and its Communist Party were trying to hide the country’s poor performance. Other rumours include disbelief about the number of new COVID-19 cases and deaths reported by the Chinese Communist Party, mainly when they said that there were no further cases for three consecutive days. Critics also stated that the expulsion of American journalists was to hide the truth. Two nurses in Wuhan, who wished to remain anonymous because of the sensitivity of the pandemic, told The Financial Times of ‘hidden’ infections that met the national criteria for confirmed cases but were not being recognised in the city’s official count, helping to keep it at or near zero. China’s National Health Commission, the government agency, is very secretive regarding the figures across China. Many critics find it hard to believe that the virus can spread worldwide, yet no statistics for the country’s capital Beijing can be found at the start of the pandemic.
Other Biochemical rumours stated that China was also angry that the BBC’s Panorama program in November 2019 had highlighted the systematic brainwashing of hundreds of thousands of Muslims in a network of high-security prison camps. Official documents, seen by Panorama, show how inmates are locked up, indoctrinated, and punished.
As a Christian, one theory I would like to think could be true is that God sent the Coronavirus as a wake-up call to us all. The virus spread worldwide and peaked at Easter when Christians rejoiced at the crucifixion of Jesus and His rebirth on Easter Sunday, as Jesus died to save us all. I can’t help but wonder at the choice of crucifixion by the Jews, as Jesus would have died from asphyxiation as the weight of His body would have made breathing impossible, as it does with Covid-19.
One of the good things to come out of the pandemic was that it made many of us appreciate the benefit of our community and that we can still help our fellow man. It reminded us about the gift of friendship and love and how love can save us all. It could also be a wake-up call on how we are killing the planet God created for us in seven days. Global warming, plastic pollution, and the destruction of countries through civil war are all things that make God sad, and we must find a way to overcome these man-made problems. God would have also noticed some people’s and specific countries’ sheer greed. If you look at oil production worldwide, countries such as America, Russia and Saudi Arabia have kept the price of crude oil high (pre-Covid) so that they alone could benefit. These three countries were pumping so much crude oil that they could not store it once the worldwide pandemic was in full swing, and demand dropped to a record low.
If you look at the global banking industry, you will see that they always look after number one. Bankers pay themselves millions yearly, even when their bank makes a loss. The greedy footballers are paid a fortune for kicking a ball for 90 minutes a week. The greedy speculators gamble with other people’s money by forward buying (spot-market) items such as wheat, oil, and other essential items, which inflates the price we all end up paying for our daily bread. The greedy drug barons, tobacco basses, alcohol producers and bookmakers get rich on the addiction and hardship of others. The greedy owners of companies like Amazon (owned by the second wealthiest man in the world) allegedly make him richer by not looking after the people who make a fortune for him (see chapter 26, Internet Taking Thousands of Jobs). Who knows, but we may be thankful God sent us this message in a few years.
Several critics (me included) have moaned about the government not buying testing kits, Personal Protection Equipment (PPEs) or ventilators earlier, and that the lockdown should have started earlier. It also upset many people to learn that our airports were still letting planes land from all over the world when other counties had closed their airports. The British government arranged for flights to collect stranded people from Covid-19 hot spots around the globe, at taxpayers’ expense, yet didn’t quarantine passengers for 14 days upon arrival in the UK. Several flights were arranged from Bangladesh with a high infection rate, and I wonder how many Brits died because of this oversight. From June the 15th 2020, people arriving from overseas had to self-isolate for 14 days, but why would anyone bother getting on a flight only to be told to isolate once they land? This is unbelievable, and it sounds like the government doesn’t know what it is doing. The old saying of ‘locking the stable door once the horse has bolted’ springs to mind.
Time will tell if the critics are proven right or wrong. Still, I must admit that I was upset to see Jeremy Richard Streynsham Hunt, Chairman of the Health and Social Care Committee, giving Matt Hancock, the current Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, a hard time when many of today’s NHS problems were caused by the heavy-handed treatment and under-funding dished out by James Hunt when he was Health Secretary from 2010 to 2018, when he starved the NHS of funds and set the moral of Junior Doctors to an all-time low. For readers with short memories, Mr Hunt also stood in the contest to become Prime Minster but lost out to Boris.
I feel that I should also point out that it does make me cringe when politicians have been singing the praises of our nurses and doctors during this pandemic, when on 28 June 2017, Boris Johnson, Dominic Raab, Matt Hancock, Rishi Sunak, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Grant Shapps, George Eustice, Michael Gove, Priti Patel and hundreds of conservative MPs voted against lifting the cap on public sector wages including doctors, nurses, teachers, firefighters and police officers.
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Couldn’t Care Less About Care Homes
Having had to use the services of care homes to house my wife’s relatives, I can tell you that care homes in the UK have been struggling for the past twenty years or more, and the government has disregarded this valuable sector, which in my opinion do an excellent service to our country. On the 13th of May 2020, the Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer stated in Prime Minister’s Question Time (PMQs) that the Government had said that the Covid-19 infection of care home residents was ‘unlikely’, in advice issued until mid-March. The Prime Minister was left squirming when confronted with the evidence, and Matt Hancock, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care sitting next to the PM in Parliament, wished that the PM would stop digging as he was making matters worse. The only good thing from this massive cock-up was that the government would make £600 million for infection control in coronavirus-hit care homes. Two days later, Matt Hancock, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, stated at the daily briefing from Downing Street that he had instructed local authorities to provide a daily report from them stating more significant details from care homes in their area. Pity he didn’t do this from the start as it could have saved, in my opinion, 20,000 lives that were lost due to this shocking oversight.
Another U-turn by Boris happened on the 20th of May 2020, again after the Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer stated in Prime Minster Question Time (PMQs) why the government were charging workers in the NHS and care homes from overseas £620 for medical cover. These low-skilled and low-paid workers, such as cleaners, porters and others, were discriminated against, yet the doctors and nurses couldn’t work their miracles in an unclean environment.
As if to prove that the Government got it wrong, the I newspaper reported on the 9th of May 2020 that ‘the Care Quality Commission (CQC) said it is investigating a “minimal” number of incidents where hospitals who treated individuals for Covid-19 were not tested before the patients were discharged back to their care homes.’ The CQC said the incidents led to the virus being transmitted to others.
Care homes that cater for the aged population and homes that cater for many disabilities had to supply their own PPE. However, this was exceedingly difficult for them as other organisations, such as the NHS, struggled to find suppliers. The Covid-19 test was another stumbling block during the pandemic, as care home residents and staff were also pushed to the back of the queue when it came to testing. With an ever-growing aged population, the Government must sort this mess out, or more care homes will be forced to close. The problem will be that if hospitals can’t release patients to care homes, then the elderly will continue to tie up much-needed hospital beds.
Another big problem for the future of care homes in the UK is the Government’s new policy on immigration. On the 18th of May 2020, the controversial immigration bill was voted through the House of Commons. The new bill that will come into effect in January 2021 will work on a points system. One of the significant point scores gained by the applicant will be if the applicant is applying for a job that will pay a salary of £25,000 per year or more. Most care workers today earn a maximum of £19,000, so they will not be given a visa. This will cause a significant problem for everyone as the NHS and care homes can’t run without these valuable care workers, so they will have to pay workers a minimum of £25K. This will mean that the rates charged to residents will have to rise, and the Government will, via the NHS, have to pick up the bill.
Another worrying titbit (or tidbit to American readers) I heard about some of the current care workers was that they were working two different eight-hour shifts at two separate care homes. This alone could spread the virus from one care home to another. Some care workers from overseas lived in overcrowded accommodation where several immigrant families share the same facilities. This must have added to the number of deaths in care homes.
The Government must introduce a new law covering the employment of all staff in our NHS hospitals and care homes. Anyone working in this sector must be registered with the NHS and would be paid via the various hospitals or care home, but the new NHS human resources division must be copied in on who was being paid and the hours they worked. If this were done, a simple check could be made to see if there were any duplications. Currently, the NHS and care sector rely on agency staff and pay the agency a lot extra for the pleasure. These agencies should be put out of business, as anyone wishing to work for the NHS or care home must be employed via the NHS Human Resources division. This could not be done immediately but could be introduced to start next April. I can assure you that this would save the country millions of pounds every year, and at least stop the double work that is currently going on.
Immigration and Covid-19
The Conservative Government promised the electorate that they would sort out the immigration problem. Still, the new immigration law will do little to reduce the number of illegal immigrants already in the country. The Government won the 2019 election by promising the electorate in many Labour strongholds that they would sort the problem out. However, nothing is being done to correct the problem, and everyday hundreds of immigrants are still crossing the English Channel. This should be stopped, with the boat being confiscated and the immigrants sent straight back to France on the next available ferry. If the government fails to get tough with France, the flooding of illegal immigrants in our towns and cities across the UK will only worsen.
It was also shocking to see on Sky News on the 17th of June 2020 that the ‘Home Office does not know how many people are in the UK illegally, National Audit Office report finds. It went on to state that, according to a report, ‘An up-to-date estimate of the number of illegal immigrants in the United Kingdom has not been produced for 15 years.’ The National Audit Office (NAO) said the last estimate in 2005 suggested there were around 430,000 people in the country with no right to remain. But independent research since has put the figure at more than one million, Whitehall’s spending watchdog said. It is noticeably clear that immigration has not been checked or even taken seriously. Still, if the Government wants to reduce the number of unemployed post-Covid-19 and Brexit, they should deport these ‘illegals’ as soon as possible.
Should China Be Made to Pay?
No country will do well out of this pandemic, there will be a backlash, and hopefully people will stop buying anything made in China. I do hope that Western countries insist that any item made in China will need to have the Chinese flag shown on the front of any packaging so that people can easily see where the product was made and can then choose whether they want to support the Chinese Communist Party or not. Listings and advertisements on the likes of Amazon, eBay and Google should also make it clear to potential customers that they are buying a product made in China.
Were the Chinese Communist Party to blame for not acting upon Dr Li Wenliang’s findings and those of Shi Zhengli, the Wuhan laboratory’s globally respected expert in transmitting animal-born coronavirus to humans in December 2019? Could the pandemic have been avoided if they had made the world aware of the problems in December 2019 and placed Wuhan City in lockdown?
I’m convinced that the Western world will never get to the bottom of who was to blame for Covid-19, but what the Chinese Communist Party can’t deny is that their inaction to make the world aware of the problems in December 2019 led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people around the world and caused bedlam in the financial stability of many nations. China should be made to pay for their mistakes and when they refuse, the Western world via the United Nations should ban all flights to and from China until they pay up. If any country such as Russia uses its veto, it should also face the ban. The UK and Europe should also follow the USA and put an import tax of 30% on any item made in China.
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Prisons During the Pandemic.
During the pandemic, prison officers significantly protected staff and inmates during these difficult times. Sadly, Catherine Kelly, who worked at HMP Manchester, died from Covid-19. Catherine was 65 years old and had worked for 12 years for HMP. Many prison officers stayed at hotels to avoid taking the virus home to their loved ones. It was nice to see that the OYO hotel group offered cheap rates to all critical workers across the UK. Hopefully, all prison officers can keep everyone safe during these terrible times.
Covid-19 Prison Update
Prison.org.uk stated on the 12th of June 2020, ‘The number of prisoners who tested positive for Covid-19 flatlined in the most recent data released by the Ministry of Justice. 490 prisoners were confirmed to have had the virus across 80 prisons, with no change in 24 hours, while the number of infected staff rose by three to 964 across 105 prisons. At least 23 prisoners and nine staff are known to have died, including one prison escort driver and one NHS trust employee working in a secure training centre.’
Boris and Cummings Saga
Nothing about this saga sounds right, and it has been alleged that Cummings must have something over Boris, as people have never seen a PM take a hit to his popularity to defend the undefendable before. Was the story about Boris nearly dying from Covid-19 in the hospital a set-up? Not one paparazzi photographer saw him going in or out of the hospital, and Boris only thanked two overseas nurses for caring for him in the hospital a few weeks later. Jenny McGee from New Zealand and Luis Pitarma from Portugal allegedly nursed Boris in the Intensive Care Unit at St Thomas’s Hospital. Was this spin doctoring taken to a new level?
Exiting the Pandemic
This is the most challenging stage, especially when the public is sick and tired of getting mixed messages from all sides, and it has been shown that the elite can get away freely by totally ignoring the rules, when the other 67 million of us must stick to them. Due to the sad killing of George Floyd in the un-United States of America, there were protests around the world which did nothing to stop the spread of Covid-19. For weeks we have been told that social distancing is the most important thing we can do to help prevent the spread of this deadly virus. We all know about the BAME death rate being higher than the rate for white people. So, what do many of the black population do? They go on several protests in cities nationwide and ignore the law on social distancing.
I have nothing against protesting as I have been on several protests myself, but the organisers indeed recognise that activists will use the protest to cause havoc. With football matches being shut down, the football hooligans have little to do on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon and will string along with any protest hiding in the background. After the peaceful march, the troublemakers will guide the hooligans towards Downing Street, where they know the police will rightly protect the seat of our democracy, and all hell will be let loose as a result.
As a prison counsellor, I always look at both sides of the coin as the back of the coin will be different from the front and have a different meaning/message. Slavery will always be a tricky subject to comprehend as people will have their views on whether it is right or wrong. Some would say that without slavery, there wouldn’t be a race problem today as there would be very few black people in the world, as the vast majority originated from descendants of enslaved people. Had the slave trade never happened, all enslaved Black people would have led a shorter life in Africa and been killed by hunger, drought, or disease. In my opinion, modern-day slavery can be seen in the gig community, and those people who are on zero-hour contracts which should be banned. Slavery is a fascinating subject; many facts can be found at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_slave_trade.
When I was a boy, you hardly saw a black man or woman in the UK. That was until the NHS started to recruit black nurses from the Caribbean, and other organisations like the London Underground also urged black people to emigrate to Britain. These immigrants were later known as the Windrush generation, named after the ship, that transported them. Between 1948 and 1970, nearly half a million people moved from the Caribbean to Britain, which 1948 faced severe labour shortages in the wake of the Second World War. The immigrants were later referred to as ‘the Windrush generation’. I do hope that we will see harmony between all races and creeds, but instead of ‘Black Lives Matter’ or ‘White Lives Matter’, we will see ‘All Lives Matter’.
Another problem that I can foresee is when the pubs and clubs reopen. With the police, paramedics, and the NHS already on their knees, the Government must ensure that night clubs must be closed at midnight (with the last orders being stopped at 11.30 p.m.), or these front-line workers will again be stretched to breaking point. There is no need to keep clubs open until the early morning hours as yobs simply stay at home drinking cheap supermarket booze until 11p.m and then head for the nightclubs already partially drunk. The 24-hour rule was introduced when the Labour Party were in power, but I don’t think it has worked well for most (that’s unless you’re a brewer or club owner) and exiting Covid-19 may be the right time to bring binge drinking and the pressure placed on our front-line workers to an end.
Another concern of mine is that the NHS and care staff will suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and I hope that they will be treated better than the soldiers and other service personnel that keep us safe and don’t face the same problems as Alan Frazer did along with hundreds I have seen over the years. More about Alan’s case can be read in Chapter 27.
The most disturbing thing about this pandemic to me was that families were not allowed to say their final goodbye or to hold the hand of their loved one as they passed over. With the Government failing to act quickly and stating that the infection of care home residents was ‘unlikely’, in my opinion nearly 20,000 lives could have been saved. We will come out of this pandemic, but whether we return to the ‘normal’ we once took for granted, we will have to wait and see. I pray that I never hear the phrases ‘scientific advice’, ‘social distancing’, and ‘flattening the curve’ ever again. This is a burden that Boris and the Conservative Government will have to carry, and hope that the British voter has a short memory.
As the virus spread across China, many Western companies who had moved their production to China to benefit from cheap labour and fewer health and safety measures were now worried about getting their products out of China. Dr Martens Boots & Shoes is a brand my friend in Northamptonshire loved. His father and mother had worked in the company’s Rushden factory, but in 2004 production was moved to China and Thailand. He said that it was a way of life for the community, and, with Max Griggs at the helm, they even built a football stadium for the Rushden and Diamonds team. In 2005 owner Max Griggs sold the Club to the Supporters Trust for a nominal £1. However, without its wealthy backer, the Club struggled, and he eventually quit in 2011. In what seemed a rather bizarre move at the time, Kettering Town moved into the ground, but left in 2012, after which the ground became unused. An article in The Guardian on the 30th of November 2019 stated that it was just a small question in their regular Consumer Champions column. Why, a reader asked, had her £170 Dr Martens boots fallen apart after just six months? The response was huge, with readers accusing the bootmaker of sacrificing quality, offshoring production and chasing profits under the ownership of a London-based private equity company a long way from its roots in Northamptonshire. Wikipedia state that Dr Martens AirWair International’s revenue fell from US $412 million in 1999 to $127 million in 2006. In 2003, the Dr Martens company came close to bankruptcy. On 1st April that year, under pressure from declining sales, the company ceased making shoes in the United Kingdom and moved all production to China and Thailand. I told Lewis that when my wife and I went on holiday to Orlando, my wife wanted to look around the shopping malls, and I noticed that one shop was busier than most, so, being nosy, I had to find out why. It was a shoe shop, and in the window was a big stack of trainers, but what caught my eye was the big Union flag on one side of the shoe box. I asked one of the shop staff why they were flying off the shelves, and she said that people liked to buy British as it was always good quality. Pity Dr Martens and the hundreds of UK companies who moved production to China weren’t there to see this simple example of why satisfied customers are more important than cheap labour.
Several critics have moaned about the Government not buying testing kits or ventilators earlier and that the lockdown should have started a week earlier. Time will tell if the critics are proven right or wrong.
In my opinion, Boris and his chancellor are doing their best to make sure that the ordinary worker won’t suffer too much, but we all know who will pick up the bill in the end. Yes, you got it in one, you and me and all our children and their children for generations to come. Add this to the massive bill we are all paying for the 2007-2008 banking crisis, and it may be a good idea for the country to declare bankruptcy and start again. I would like to know who we owe these trillions to. Someone or a country had to have the money to lend to us in the first place, and it would be nice to learn how they amassed these massive sums of money.
For further reading on how top UK companies such as Dr Martens moved production to China, please read Afterword’s – Chapter 15 at the end of this book.
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