Hancock BS exposed again as he claims he’s been talking to car manufacturers and other engineering manufacturers
The Tories have been caught out again over their handling of the coronavirus crisis, after Health Secretary Matt Hancock claimed the government had been talking to ‘a whole host’ of advanced manufacturing companies about urgently switching their production to make ventilators for the NHS:
Hancock said:
They are relatively complicated pieces of kit, I couldn’t make one, but they’re not so complicated that the advanced manufacturing that this country is so good at now can’t be able to turn its production lines over to.
The thing the NHS needs now more than anything else is more ventilators.
We’ve been talking to a whole host of companies about it and the Prime Minister is hosting a conference call today with them to say very clearly to the nation’s manufacturers, ventilators are the thing that we are going to need, and frankly, right across the world, the demand for them is incredibly high, so it is not possible to produce too many.
So anybody who can should turn production and their engineering minds over to the production of ventilators.
When Hancock spoke to the BBC’s Andrew Marr this morning, he explicitly mentioned car manufacturers as a category of company he’d been talking to:
But when ITV’s Robert Peston contacted Rolls Royce, one of the UK’s biggest and most advanced engineering companies and car producers, the company’s chief executive had heard nothing from the government:
Hancock’s flailing discomfort when asked how ventilators would be staffed was plain.
Is Hancock’s ‘whole host’ in reality such a short list that it doesn’t include the most obvious options? Or doesn’t it exist at all and he’s just making it up as he goes along and hoping nobody will find out? When Hancock claimed he had been talking to supermarket chains about ensuring vital supplies, they outed him and said they’d heard nothing from him.
Either way, it doesn’t include one of the most obvious choices of a company that might be able to allocate manufacturing capacity to producing ventilators in the shortest possible time.
And the government has known since the virus outbreak began in China that it was very likely to reach the UK and threaten lives here.
So why is Boris Johnson only holding his alleged conference call today, weeks after the first UK cases?
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