A campaigner who questioned school closures during the Covid pandemic has said she has been in tears at the “flippancy” of ministers in the Matt Hancock WhatsApp leak.
She told GB News: “On the one hand, it tells us nothing new. This is sadly what we suspected all along.
“I mean, it’s been obvious from the start, in fact, we went back and we looked at the very first letter, the letter that led to UsforThem being created, that was May 2020.
“It was an open letter to Gavin Williamson, saying that we were very concerned and no one had thought about kids and asking very politely for the evidential basis of the decisions.
“In that case, it was the decision to require very strict social distancing, including for young children, and their decision to keep schools closed.”
She explained to Esther McVey and Philip Davies: “Actually, what we’ve learned so far is that each of these interventions were very harmful to children. They were treated so casually.
“Here is such flippancy in the face of such egregious and widespread harm to children.
“And I have to say, I’ve been in tears for a lot of the week because you just think how has this happened in a society that proclaims to care about children? It is really, really shocking.”
She continued: “We were so concerned about school closures and about masks, we threatened legal action, I think a total of five times against the Government.
“We were universally stone-walled and ignored and worse than that, actually, we now know we were also spied on, censored and smeared.
“So for Gavin Williamson to stand up and claim that he was a lone voice fighting for children’s interest – I’m afraid that just does not chime with our experience.”
She said: “I think the really upsetting decision point for masks came a little later when we now know from the WhatsApp messages that masks were required in classrooms really, almost against Chris Whitty’s advice.
“It was very clear there was no rationale for this, yet they were required anyway.
“As we heard from so many of our parents, requiring children to wear masks for seven, eight hours a day, if you include transport, was just such a detrimental measure. It never should have been contemplated.
“There was no one really advocating strongly for kids from within the centre of government.”
Ms Kingsley added: “A lot of the harms and consequences sadly were not only predictable but predicted.
“But I think we do also have this bucket of unforeseen consequences, which is that actually we’ve opened a can of worms, we’ve taught children that schooling wasn’t important, and we have really degraded the quality and the expectations attached to education.”
