Vocal Voices

The government (and others) will now have to hand over unredacted evidence, as requested, and it will be for the inquiry to decide what is relevant or not.

Good. This is the second time the government has wasted public money in losing this argument. Not handing over the documents amounts to withholding evidence and should be a criminal offence.

What I find amazing, and inexcusable, is that a lot of this stuff is on unsocial media and via texts. Ministers should not be carrying out government business, sensitive or otherwise, on platforms such as WhatsApp and Twitter, especially when they have secure internal channels to do so.

I am sick of hearing / reading that Minister X or a spokesperson "tweeted" blah, blah, blah. Maybe 'government by twitter / WhatsApp' is also something that the inquiry should look at?

Agreeing with all of that, Frank. It's absolutely right and proper that all of the evidence is handed over, and no way should government business be discussed over social media, or personal phone accounts!

This is a parlimetary commission, not legal and it is all politics.

Theoretically the government could pass a law stating that this enquiry doesn't have the right to this unredacted data and then the courts would have nothing to say.

Only Tory MP rebels are blocking this.

But if the courts think they are winning on this perhaps they should go back and review the right to prorogue parliament and the fixed term parliament act repeal.

It all looks very clever at this time. But revenge will always go to those with the real power.

Theoretically the government could pass a law stating that this enquiry doesn't have the right to this unredacted data and then the courts would have nothing to say.

As any government could by doing away with their Lords Spiritual, even the HoL and even removing the Monarchy from politics.

However, any government doing any of these things would go up against the public with possible disastrous results for its future.

The evidence is that the committee, in trying to find out how the Covid pandemic was handled, has the support of the public, but maybe not with hardline, hard-right, Con members, to get to the bottom of this.

We have a right to know how the government handled the whole of the Covid pandemic from start to finish. Without that knowledge we cannot learn from the mistakes made.

It is not political, it is health and wellbeing related. The Johnson WhatsApp thing is media click-bait - a sideshow.