In forty two years living in this country, I’ve learned that any malicious act or piece of criminal negligence by our government can never be seriously examined while it’s actually happening, and that it’ll instead be investigated when the guilty men are safely dead or retired. https://twitter.com/mayagoodfellow/status/1248732808819941378

This is the weird thing about official malfeasance in Britain: there is no cover-up, no Pentagon Papers moment. What happens is, everyone realises it would be detrimental to their careers to discuss it, and then 30 years later someone makes a Panorama special that wins a BAFTA.

It somehow took thirty years to work out what happened at Hillsborough even though we all saw it - I saw it myself on BBC One, aged 11 - on the news that very night.

I can remember the tutting and clucking over Chernobyl and how it showed the Soviet Union was a decaying state, unable to safeguard the lives of its citizens. People got really, really angry about it, as you’d imagine they would.

I’m not saying there’s a cover up but I am saying the press are allowing themselves to be cowed by an unspoken omertà that *always* assets itself when the British state is in trouble, and that the old saw about “the first draft of history” is true - and we are currently failing.

Hillsborough was proof of the Conservative Party’s contempt for football fans and that took thirty years to come out, once all the guilty men were retired or dead. How long is it going to take for their contempt for the general public in the face of a deadly pandemic to air out.

How long when they straightforwardly said - on national television! - that the strategy was for 60% of the population, or forty million people, to contract the virus, so we could all go back to being economically productive as quickly as possible.

Does that merit a public inquiry, and a proper one rather than some bullshit handed to an alcoholic retiring judge.