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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsCoronavirus: UK Minister resigns over Dominic Cummings' lockdown trips
A government minister has resigned over Dominic Cummings' lockdown trips.
Douglas Ross said the embattled adviser's claim he had a valid excuse to travel was "not shared by the vast majority of people who have done as the government asked".
In a letter to Boris Johnson published on Tuesday morning, the outgoing Scotland Office junior minister wrote: "I have never met Dominic Cummings so my judgement on this matter has always been open and I accept his statement on Monday afternoon clarified the actions he took in what he felt were the best interests of his family.
"However, these were decisions many others felt were not available to them.
"As a father myself, my instinct is to always do what is best for my son and wife. We have been fortunate not to have caught this awful virus but if we did, we are prepared to follow the government advice and stay at home to contain this virus.
https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-minister-resigns-over-dominic-cummings-lockdown-trips-11994758
muriel_volestrangler
(101,361 posts)The key paragraph observers are pulling out:
Link to tweet
"I have constituents who didn't get to say goodbye to loved ones, families who could not mourn together, people who didn't visit sick relatives because they followed the guidance of the government. I cannot in good faith tell them they were all wrong and one senior advisor to the government was right."
Scarsdale
(9,426 posts)politician with ethics and morals!! Our crew in the US is all about $$$. No way would they resign and have to work for a living.
muriel_volestrangler
(101,361 posts)Talking of his mother, who had done what the church told her, even about contraception, which she found hard, and then:
She was not alone. And there was no going back from this moment of betrayal. The authority of the church melted away in the heat of this anger. For while people forgive their leaders a great deal often far too much there is no forgiveness for that terrible moment when you realise that the anguish you have endured for the greater good was, to those in authority, just a mark of your credulousness and inferiority.
If Cummings were half as smart as he is supposed to be, he would have shown in his press conference some glimmer of understanding that this kind of betrayal is of a completely different order to the one he and Johnson engage in so routinely. The ordinary treachery of saying one thing and doing another there will be £350m extra every week for the NHS; there will never be a border in the Irish Sea is mothers milk to them. Perhaps because it is so habitual or because they are so used to getting away with it, their sense of how it works has become dulled. They missed the crucial fact that this time its different. This time its personal.
The mundane duplicity that is Cummings and Johnsons stock in trade comes with a knowing smirk: you didnt really think we meant that literally, did you? It is part of an elaborate, highly performative, game. But the rules for collective survival in a pandemic are not ironic. They are intimate. They are embodied. They are the detailed texture of the lives we live every day. Like the rule that said Catholics must not use contraceptives, they inhabit peoples most private selves. You mock those selves at your peril.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/26/cummings-contempt-lockdown-rules-public-catholic-church-ireland