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Britain Between Old Scandals and New Elections: A Year of Unraveling

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's surprising decision to schedule the election already for the beginning of July diverted attention from another historical embarrassment of the British state, which the whole nation has finally become aware of.

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Photo: Reuters
Photo: Reuters
Disclaimer: The translations are mostly done through AI translator and might not be 100% accurate.

It was both sad and comical at the same time to watch British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announce to the nation the decision to schedule the parliamentary elections for July 4, instead of late autumn when most expected them.

Sad, because Sunak went out to the podium in front of the entrance to 10 Downing Street in a heavy downpour without anyone from his team thinking that maybe an umbrella should be brought to the Prime Minister; by the time he was done, his expensive suit was literally soaked with water. Comical, because what Sunak said was sometimes barely distinguishable from the loud music that an anti-Brexit activist was playing on a loudspeaker nearby to undermine the Prime Minister's speech, somehow logically deciding on a song Things Can Only Get Better of the group D:Ream from 1993, which owes its fame in the British context to the fact that the Labor Party, then led by Tony Blair, used it massively in the 1997 election campaign, in which it blew the Conservatives out of power.

Thus, the song with a hyper-optimistic title once again served as an announcement of the imminent departure of the Conservative Party from power, which has been in power for 14 years: Labor has maintained a double-digit advantage in the polls since September 2022, which at the time of Sunak's announcement amounted to almost 22 percent, so in the July the vote expects the party now led by Keir Starmer to achieve a safe, easily possible and very convincing victory.

Conservative mistakes are paying off

Polls, of course, know how to make mistakes, but that could hardly be the case here. The disastrous legacy of long Tory rule - today 4,3 million British children live in relative poverty; 2,5 million citizens rely on food from food banks for food; there are 7,5 million people on NHS waiting lists; let's not even talk about the debacle that Brexit has turned into - it's finally paying off.

The Tories are not, of course, to blame for all of Britain's troubles; far from it. As shown by the examples of two old scandals that only this year fully captured the attention of the British public, the impersonal and terrifying power of the state, its institutions and the administrative apparatus in the past decades destroyed human lives, regardless of which of the two dominant parties was at the given moment. in power.

The first is in January, thanks to the collective shock caused by the television mini-series Mr Bates vs the Post Office, many Britons learned with great delay that between 1999 and 2015, several thousand managers of local branches of the National Post Office were falsely accused - and more than 900 of them were convicted - of evasion and fraud that they did not commit, as the accounts were registered as lacking money without exception was the result of errors in the software of the Japanese company Fujitsu, which the Post has used for a long time. All these unfortunate people lost respect in their communities; most of them, together with their families, have failed financially; more than 250 of them were sentenced to prison terms; some committed suicide. But it took years and years for, in perhaps the worst case of unfair trial in British history, to be followed by inadequate monetary compensations (which have not yet been received by all those wrongfully accused and convicted), and lukewarm apologies from Fujitsu and the Post Office.

In the second half of May, on the other hand, the long-awaited file on the monstrous medical scandal was published, which, with the cooperation of some structures in the otherwise usually rightly celebrated NHS, the Ministry of Health and several British governments, continued unhindered from the seventies until the beginning of the nineties. During that period, more than 30.000 people - of whom at least 3.000 have died so far, and others are left with permanent consequences that can even drive them to the grave before their time - received blood and blood products contaminated with HIV, hepatitis B or hepatitis viruses. C, mainly imported from the United States, as at that time British health had a constant problem with blood supplies.

What is particularly shocking is that in a large number of cases the infection occurred with the full awareness of the doctors and researchers involved: the patients (including children: of 122 former students with hemophilia who attended Treloar, a school and college in the 30s and XNUMXs for children and young people with special health needs, and were involved in experimental therapy, today only XNUMX of them are alive) practically used as guinea pigs.

Financial compensation full of holes

Anyone who wanted to could have learned about this affair even before: the first investigation was approved in 2017 by the government of then Prime Minister Theresa May. However, it was only the publication of the aforementioned report and, immediately afterwards, the government's compensation scheme for the injured - families and other guardians of the deceased, survivors and their relatives - on the basis of which compensation will be paid to them (which will be taken care of by an independent body) that made the general public becomes aware of the horrors that, under the auspices of the NHS and with the help of politicians, have been happening for so many years without anyone wanting to listen to those affected.

Neither the lifelong suffering to which the victims and their loved ones are exposed, nor the problems with the state will end with the payment of compensation. A number of victims or their families, those who received the initial part of the compensation of 100.000 pounds earlier - there are about 4.000 of them - are now promised that they will receive another 90 pounds within 210.000 days, and the corresponding rest later; the problem is that the others haven't even received the initial sum yet. And not only are the costs of living with a serious illness high, but in some cases the timing of payments could literally mean the difference between life and death.

The Government's scheme envisages that the individual compensation amount could reach up to £2,7m; for this purpose, a total of around 10 billion pounds (almost 12 billion euros) will be set aside. But a group of about 500 victims believes that the scheme is full of holes, so they announce the filing of a compensation claim against the Ministry of Health, and object that the government representatives, before adopting it, did not sit down and discuss it with their legal representatives.

On the other hand, Robert Francis, who signs the compensation scheme, and the author of the report Brian Langstaff, independently of each other, indicate that it is necessary that, in addition to money, the victims also receive moral satisfaction. It would include everything from bringing those responsible to court and a formal apology from the state - not the kind of fluke that Sunak offered - to erecting a monument in memory of all the victims, and another, separate one, which would be dedicated to the children from Treloar.

And so, the tangle of long-successfully covered-up crimes committed under the auspices of the government slowly unravels, and old misdeeds come to the surface so that everyone can finally see them. But the horror in which the victims and their families live will never truly end.

(radar.rs)

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(Opinions and views published in the "Columns" section are not necessarily the views of the "Vijesti" editorial office.)