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Keir Starmer slams 'serial incompetence' as he accuses Government of '13 or 14 U-turns'
Keir Starmer has slammed the Government's management of the Covid-19 crisis as he accused Downing Street of making "13 or 14 U-turns".
The Labour leader hit out at what he described as "serial incompetence" while speaking at the Co-operative Party virtual conference on Saturday.
Shadow chancellor Anneliese Dodds also spoke at the virtual event which is themed on 'Owning the Future' and is due to run until October 17.
Sir Keir told his viewers: “I think it is 13 or 14 U-turns now.
“If it was one or two, I think many people across the country, if the Government made a mistake and then U-turned, would say ‘well, fair enough, we are dealing with a pandemic’.
“But when you have 12, 13, or 14 U-turns the only thing that can be read into that is serial incompetence,” he added.
Sir Keir also accused the Government of not having any “anchors” in its economic approach to the coronavirus crisis.
“At the moment, amongst my concerns is that the Government hasn’t really got any anchors," he said. “It’s bobbing all over the place.”
After his speech the opposition leader took to Twitter to condemn the "act of gross irresponsibility" for Government sources to leak information about plans for further lockdown restrictions to newspapers.
"It was an act of gross irresponsibility for anonymous Government sources to tell newspapers on Thursday about plans to impose further restrictions on millions of people," wrote Sir Keir on Twitter.
"They did so without any detail, without any consultation and without any statement from the Prime Minister."
It was an act of gross irresponsibility for anonymous Government sources to tell newspapers on Thursday about plans to impose further restrictions on millions of people.
They did so without any detail, without any consultation and without any statement from the Prime Minister.— Keir Starmer (@Keir_Starmer)
The Labour leader stressed test and trace was "critical" and needed to be urgently "fixed".
“The Prime Minister said we would have a world-beating system – we didn’t need that, we just need an effective one that works," said Sir Keir.
“‘World beating’ is just Johnson rhetoric. Getting a test quickly, getting the result quickly and then reaching the contacts so that self-isolation works – that’s not working properly, which means that thousands and thousands of people are walking around today who should be in self-isolation.
“So, that bit needs to be fixed.”
It comes after a technical issue with an Excel spreadsheet stopped nearly 16,000 cases being transferred swiftly to the test and trace system.
Susan Hopkins, deputy director of Public Health England’s national infection service, said of the 16,000 people who tested positive for coronavirus but were not contact traced, 75 per cent had now been reached.
She told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “We are very sorry that this happened in the first place in Public Health England.
"But, I would also say that we are very happy with the work that we have done with our colleagues in NHS Test and Trace and the efforts that have gone into tracing these individuals.”
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