THE ACCOUNTABILITY DEFICIT

How ministers and officials evaded accountability, misled the public and violated democracy during the pandemic

Today we are publishing the first extract from a new book written by UsForThem executive team members Molly, Arabella and Ben.  

The result of months of painstaking research covering thousands of pages of official records, reports and contemporaneous commentaries, THE ACCOUNTABILITY DEFICIT exposes a catalogue of serious failures of governance, ethics and — ultimately — accountability in the UK’s corridors of power during the pandemic period.

While the Covid Inquiry continues to avoid asking the questions that so many of us want asked, this important critique of the UK’s pandemic response confronts the issues head on. 

Many of the grim facts exposed in this book are not yet widely known. Over the coming days we’ll release extracts which give a sense of the gravity of the issues unearthed by the team. Today we are publishing in full the foreword to the book, which explains the origins of the book and our motivations for this project. Also this week we plan to release a preview of one of the most alarming untold stories of the pandemic.

The foreword to THE ACCOUNTABILITY DEFICIT in full:

UsForThem started life in May 2020, six weeks into the initial round of school closures in the UK. Founded originally by three parents, over the next two years, tens of thousands of parents, grandparents, experts and those who cared about children joined our campaigning group as we fought to ensure that children were considered front and centre in the policy decisions impacting them.

What started as a single-issue campaign to press for the reopening of schools, bled into other campaigns against enforced social distancing for children, against the closure of playgrounds and children’s sport, against the ‘bubble and isolation’ policy which by June 2021 had resulted in one million healthy children being kept out of school, challenging the compulsory masking of children in classrooms, and to question the ethics and clinical necessity of the roll-out of Covid-19 vaccines to children. 

Neither seasoned campaigners nor, even, with any formalised organisation for much of our first year, in each case the ferocity of our campaigning was matched only by the passivity of the majority of the incumbent children’s organisations and charities whose raison d’être was to advocate for children.

It has been a three year long fight which has seen us despair as the Government repeatedly burdened children with — in some cases — life defining strictures without, it seemed, having paused to reflect on the question of harms. It led us to threaten the Government with formal legal proceedings not once, but three times; and caused us initially to self-censor, then eventually find the strength to speak out, again as a lone voice among children’s organisations, about what we perceive to be one of the most misguided and unethical public health policy decisions of modern times — the manipulative, propagandised roll-out to healthy children at very low risk of serious illness of a novel medical intervention with no long term safety data.

By November 2022, we found ourselves proudly working with the then Chair of the Education Select Committee, Robert Halfon MP, to introduce a bill to Parliament that would legally define schools as the ‘essential infrastructure’ they are; and by March 2022 it led us to hold our heads in our hands as the UK’s Covid Inquiry, the mechanism under which children and the public had been promised accountability, failed to include the words ‘child’ or ‘children’ anywhere in its terms of reference. We campaigned successfully to change those terms of reference.

For our troubles we have been subject to a three year smear campaign; we have been cancelled more than once; and we now understand that for the majority of our campaigning life our comments have been monitored by the Government’s censorship unit, the CDU. That is despite the fact that, to the best of our knowledge, we have never propagated either mis- or disinformation and that without exception our campaigning positions have been guided exclusively by the welfare and wellbeing of children. 

In the course of this journey what has really become clear is that the fight isn’t about public health restrictions, or about cost/benefit analyses, or — even — about how a country responds to a pandemic. It is a battle about deep deficits in our ways of government, governance and democracy, and about the shape of the future we wish to bequeath to our children. 

With life ostensibly returning to ‘normal’ but a huge array of harm flowing from pandemic policies persisting, and with the UK’s official Covid Inquiry crawling at a pace inconsistent with the need for urgent answers, six months ago we started to examine in detail for ourselves how key pandemic decisions had been formed. This work documents that research.

However obvious it might have been to us from early in the pandemic that children had been overlooked by a response that failed even to consider let alone balance their needs, the failings we uncovered in what follows extend beyond children and have implications for us all. They include:

• ineptitude to an extent which at times was reckless, if not worse;

• the deliberate circumvention of truth on an industrialised scale by means of suppression of dissent and the deployment of propaganda that oscillated between outrageously optimistic and manipulatively dangerous;

• an institutionalised disregard for ethics, integrity and – at times – fundamental precepts of dignity and morality; and

• more prosaically but as important, a two year long refusal to evaluate the harms of policy decisions against the benefits. 

Sitting behind many of these failings is a pharmaceutical industry primed and resourced to capitalise on the opportunities presented by those failings.

And what of the ultimate bastion of ethical and transparent democratic decision-making, Parliament? As we show in the chapters which follow, notwithstanding the efforts of a few courageous parliamentarians, our Parliament failed us: seduced, deceived, bamboozled or swerved by an errant unfettered Executive which accorded it neither respect nor due regard; nor — at times — even truth.

Although our analysis has been centred around key decisions in the pandemic response, we believe the deficits of governance and ethics which so marred the period of the pandemic was and is symptomatic of deeper maladies affecting our country’s democratic institutions and safeguards.

The result is that our community infrastructure, from schools to libraries, swimming pools, parks, transport hubs and hospitals, is crumbling — literally in some cases; our national debt is skyrocketing, and we have already mortgaged the futures of our next generation to pay for the ruinous policy decisions of the pandemic; our ever-unhealthier population has succumbed to a public health dogma which, tainted by excessive corporate influence, captivates our people and politicians with quick fix medicalised interventions in lieu of taking greater individual responsibility for our own good health. 

We reject this model of government and democracy for ourselves and we reject the future it implies for our children. While our purpose in writing this account is not, primarily, to apportion blame, a society that endeavours to bury these failures can only repeat them. 

We publish what follows in the hope that by helping to illuminate how we reached this nadir, we can chart a better course for the sake of our children, and indeed for all of us.

THE ACCOUNTABILITY DEFICIT includes a powerfully candid afterword written by parliamentarian Danny Kruger MP and is available to buy from Amazon and other book stores.