Moved goalposts and dodgy accounting to hide government’s failure
Health Secretary Matt Hancock claimed yesterday that he had hit and in fact exceeded his ‘unprecedented’ target of 100,000 coronavirus tests per day.
He didn’t.
Hancock used dodgy accounting, moved goalposts and an outrageous scam to pretend he he had hit his target, when in fact he fell abysmally short:
Moved goalposts
Hancock claimed his promise had been to hit 100,000 tests per day. But at the beginning of the month, the government was absolutely clear that the promise was to test 100,000 people per day:
An outrageous scam
Not only did Hancock not test 100,000 people, in his desperation to appear to have hit his target he changed the accounting. He counted 40,000 tests simply posted out on the last day of the month as tests completed – even though the recipients wouldn’t even have received the testing kits by the end of April.
And while he desperately posted out tests and counted them, people travelling to testing centres queued for hours – only for many to be told there were no tests left for them.
In the end, Hancock’s claim overstated the number of people actually tested by more than 50,000.
‘Audacious’
In order to try to make his fictitious ‘achievement’ look more impressive, Hancock claimed it was ‘audacious’ and ‘unprecedented’.
Except it wasn’t – because his boss had originally promised more than double that number:
‘Audacious’ doesn’t mean ‘taking what your boss promised and knocking it down by more than half’.
Three claims, three lies. A 100% ‘success’ rate in misleading the people to cover his backside – with the eager help of the so-called ‘mainstream’ media to promote fiction as fact.
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