I can’t be arsed reading the judgement. I’ve never pretended I have. I don’t have the time to read pages and pages of legalese. I’ve got a life to get on with. I did read the paragraphs you mentioned. I’m taking my information from the guardian report I posted and it’s report that Hancock failed to comply with his legal duty to publish the contracts and the judge did not accept the pandemic was a reasonable justification for the failure.
Setting this alongside the £15billion of public money that has found its way into Tory linked private entities, the failure to put those contracts in the public domain appears…shall we say…convenient?
Which is precisely the challenge of the other legal proceedings. Let’s see what they reveal because this judgment doesn’t touch on those issues regardless of how much people who haven’t read it would like to pretend it does.
“The secretary of state’s evidence provides a cogent explanation of his historic failure to comply … but this explanation amounts to an excuse, not a justification. It follows that, in my judgment, the secretary of state acted unlawfully by failing to comply with the transparency policy.”
You say the Judgement accepts that the Pandemic was an understandable reason for the breach, but the in the quote above, it quite clearly isn’t deemed ‘understandable’. The ‘an excuse, not a justification’ live is particularly cutting.
I’m no Lawyer, and not used to arguing about stuff like this, but it appears to me that what the judge is saying is
*You say that you were overwhelmed and could not meet your legal duty. That isn’t a good enough reason and you should have done better. *
It feels pretty clear to me.
I don’t pretend there weren’t actually overwhelmed. I know there were. I’m sure your precurement lad you mention was doing his best and trying super hard, but at heart this Government at disaster capitalists. They know how to turn a crisis to financial advantage. For many of them that was the whole point of Brexit. Ministers can look at a Civil Service floundering in the face of the pandemic , allowing process to fall between the cracks, and understand full well the opportunity this gives them to cash in on the confusion.
No idea (I still need to read the passages you mentioned, but I’m up to my neck in DIY stuff at the moment) but I can understand why you would say that and you are correct there is no factual basis for that accusation. But there is a reputation of the people that lead this government have been economical with the truth on numerous occasions.
There is zero basis to trust anything this government has said.
Have you read it? It quite evidently wasn’t deliberate (the judge rejected that contention by the Claimants in clear terms).
I’m not arguing that this judgment means that the government have behaved honourably throughout, of course not. But equally this judgment doesn’t prove that they didn’t so to suggest otherwise is a disingenuous distortion.
Perhaps the sorts of responses in here to these things are simply too predictable?!
That said, I did kind of hope people would read the actual judgment rather than relying on the sort of distorted reporting I specifically warned of at the outset.
There are legal challenges in the offing that really get to the heart of many people’s concerns. The Rutnam tribunal, and the challenges brought against the awarding of specific contracts in particular.
To be fair Kopstar, the general tone on this thread has been an understanding that it’s a relatively minor slap, but added the rest of Governments performance through the pandemic, it is another addition, if only a small one, to the box file marked reasons not to trust this fucking government.
However I’ll also add that if your and the tweeters consternation is that twitter is full of hysterical people, well erm yeah. I’ve just gone down a rabbithole there after following a tweet in the post match, and it’s very much not the place for sober analysis or measured debate. The shit I’ve just read about Mo Salah beggars belief.
A) Rick Webb, head of the department in charge was not aware of the transparency policy until August 2020. Before then he thought it was a 90 day time period.
B) following this revelation I haven’t seen anything to state what they have done to comply with that 30 day time period.
So I’m inclined to go with the ruling that states that best efforts is no reason to explain the issues, especially when they fully understood the policy I cant see anything that says they’ve put measures in place to address the problem. I still believe it’s a resource issue but with little motivation to address it.
