Britain's opposition party leader says UK PM is 'asleep at the wheel' amid COVID-19 crisis

Amid the unprecedented outbreak of coronavirus, UK Labour Party’s leader Keir Starmer took a dig on British Prime Minister Boris Johnson on June 29. In a televised interview with an international media outlet, UK’s opposition party leader said that Johnson “has been asleep on the wheel” during the COVID-19 crisis. He not only called the measures taken by the Conservative government “slow” but also called the communication “terrible”.

Moreover, Labour Party leader told ITV that UK government’s response to coronavirus contagion began to “break down” when Johnson’s adviser Dominic Cummings started defending his actions defying the protocol and travelled hundreds of kilometres citing the safety of his son. Starmer also said that British PM’s administration did not do the groundwork required for ‘test, trace and isolate’. Meanwhile, as per Johns Hopkins University tally, UK’s infection toll has surpassed 312,600 with at least 43,634 deaths.

“I think the prime minister has been asleep at the wheel, he has been slow, the comms, the communications has been terrible,” Starmer said. “It began to break down frankly when Dominic Cummings put forward a ridiculous defence of what he had done in the northeast.”

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UK PM was 'too slow'

Recently, after Starmer visited Stevenage and had a word with the construction team on site, Keir Starmer noted that Johnson’s response to the health crisis was “too slow” but the same can not be repeated while reopening country’s economy. Calling it one of his concerns, the Labout Praty said that at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, UK PM “didn’t see the problems that were coming”. He also said that Boris Johnson was “dismissive” of the challenge of containing the spread of coronavirus and “was just too slow”. 

Keir Starmer said that UK PM was “slow into the lockdown, slow to provide protective equipment, slow on testing, slow to appreciate the problems in care homes and now slow on track and trace. We can’t go into the economic crisis that’s coming alongside the health crisis in the same way.”

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Image: AP