Matt Hancock denies being a liar and says Dominic Cummings created ‘culture of fear’ which undermined Covid response – live

Alba party calls for referendum on giving Scottish parliament power to negotiate independence

Libby Brooks

In a move that appears as much designed to further annoy the SNP government as advance the cause of independence, Alex Salmond’s Alba party is proposing a referendum on whether the powers of the Scottish parliament should be extended to include the power to legislate for and negotiate independence.

The former SNP leadership candidate Ash Regan, who defected to Alba last month, told a press conference this morning that she will introduce a member’s bill to consult the people of Scotland 10 years on from the 2014 independence referendum.

But Regan admitted that she had not yet spoken to any fellow MSPs about her plan – a member’s bill needs 18 proposers from three parties – but said she saw “no reason” why the Scottish government wouldn’t back it. She did this while sitting alongside the Alba leader Alex Salmond, who last week launched a multi-million pound damages claim against the very same Scottish government.

Regan also noted that the parliament’s non-government bills department is already “at capacity”.

Salmond boasted that “hardly a day goes by” when he doesn’t speak to SNP parliamentarians, but would not name any SNP MSPs he thought likely to support the bill.

Salmond also revealed that the proposed bill had been his plan B in 2012 in the event of David Cameron refusing an independence referendum.

Both Salmond and Regan insisted their plan, which includes a “consultation” with the wider independence movement, would break the constitutional logjam around a route to another referendum.

At SNP conference in October, party leader and first minister Humza Yousaf urged members to stop talking about process and convince voters how independence was relevant to the cost of living crisis. The party also agreed that if the SNP wins a majority of Scotland’s Westminster seats at the general election, it will have the mandate to negotiate independence with the UK government.

Keith shows Hancock an exchange of messages on 14 March 2020 where Hancock says they need to ramp up contact tracing, and scale up testing. He says both measures are “in hand”.

But, Keith says, testing had stopped, and there was no contact tracing.

Q: Why did you say they were in hand?

Hancock says he had issued instructions to reverse both those measures.

On testing, the problem was the shortage of tests. He subsequently took responsibility for testing back from Public Health England into DHSC, and he escalated it.

And he says PHE had stopped contact tracing. Hancock says he arranged for it to resume, on a large scale. And self-contact tracing was introduced, which became the app.

He says this is what the reference to these measures being “in hand” is about. Both became big programmes.

Lady Hallett, the chair, asks if these measures were actually “in hand” on 14 March.

Hancock says he meant he was making them happen.

Hancock says, with hindsight, the government should have acted on 28 February.

He says, if they had taken a decision on Friday 28 February, they could have introduced a lockdown on Monday 2 March.

That was three weeks earlier than when it was introduced, he says.

There’s a doubling rate at this point, estimated, every three to four days. We would have been six doublings ahead of where we were, which means that fewer than a tenth of the number of people would have died in the first wave.

Hancock says the costs of this approach were “known and huge”. So he defends the action that the government took.

But with hindsight, that’s the moment we should have done it, three weeks earlier, and it would have saved many, many lives.

UPDATE: Hancock said:

With hindsight – Italy having locked down initially, locally in Lombardy on January 21, and then nationally locked down around also February 28 – if at that moment, having seen the Sage assumptions … if at that moment, we’d realised that it was definitely coming and the reasonable worst case scenario was as awful as it was, that is the moment that we should, with hindsight, have acted.

And we had the doctrine that I proposed, which is as soon as you know you have got to lock down, you lock down as soon as possible, then we would have got the lockdown done over that weekend in on the second of March, three weeks earlier than before. There’s a doubling rate at this point estimated every three to four days, we would have been six doublings ahead of where we were, which means that fewer than a tenth of the number of people would have died in the first wave.

At the time, there was still enormous uncertainty, the number of cases was still very low, in fact, there were only 12 cases reported on March 1, and the costs of what I’m proposing were known and huge. So I defend the actions that were taken by the government at the time, knowing what we did, but with hindsight, that’s the moment should have done it, three weeks, and it would have saved many, many lives.

Having obviously thought about this and reflected on this a huge deal over the last few years, the first moment we realistically could have really cracked it was on March 2, three weeks earlier than we did.