What's Up With The PPE Shortage Issue?

In the article linked below is an open letter from multiple UK manufacturers of PPE to the government

https://medium.com/@change.orgUK/open-letter-to-uk-government-do-you-want-our-ppe-or-not-fce832e6e37a

In England, most goods are bulk-purchased centrally and distributed to providers by NHS Supply Chain, which was established in 2016. Previously most goods were bought locally by hospitals and other health providers, but a government review found large inefficiencies as organisations paid variable prices for the same product. 

However, the source market for these goods are often sourced from international markets, national and local suppliers are ignored. So much for our patriotic, UK business loving Tory government, right? 

The Institute for Government has identified several issues with procurement as it currently operates:

• The UK’s national pandemic stockpile was designed to respond to an outbreak of pandemic influenza (a less infectious and virulent disease), but it was not prepared for coronavirus. As such, it was ready to supply around 200 NHS trusts with protective equipment, rather than the over 50,000 NHS providers, GP surgeries, care homes and hospices that have required it in recent weeks.
• The UK normally relies on procuring PPE from other countries and, as a result, does not have a large-scale domestic PPE manufacturing industry, but global demand has been unprecedented. Several countries have implemented export bans and shipments to the UK have been cancelled or delayed. The UK government did not take part in an EU bulk-procurement programme for PPE.
• There are reports of a large number of UK companies offering to produce equipment, and criticism that the UK government has been too slow to draw on these. It has now created a portal for new suppliers. A key challenge is vetting and validating suppliers and products quickly enough.
• It is difficult to distribute PPE quickly to where it is most needed, and stocks are quickly exhausted. Hancock has said there has been some overuse of PPE, although others have criticised this claim.

Big, corporate international businesses are usually the worst polluters and the worst for workers rights, so how on Earth is it considered efficient and moral to purchase from them? Purchasing internationally also means money leaving our economy and entering another, and less work for Brits. The globalisation of capital is a huge burden for the working class of all countries to bear, and who is it exactly that benefits from this?

The government needs to answer some key questions here:

• Why were we not prepared for a worst case pandemic scenario?
• Why are we sourcing goods internationally when we know that this creates further pollution and waste?
• Why have we ignored national and local manufacturers and made it difficult for them to get onto tendering lists?
• Local manufacturers and local procurement schemes are self-evidently a more efficient means of obtaining quantities of PPE quickly, why have we not thought to follow this up?

I suspect we all know, at least rhetorically, what the answers are to the above. It's a damning indictment of government incompetence that they need to be asked at all.

As a follow up to that last question, local authorities should start seriously considering the Preston Model as a means of municipal socialism - it creates a better community spirit, it encourages production and business locally and helps stop wealth draining to other, more affluent areas of the country.

Some detractors of this article might conclude that I'm being overly nationalist when I say manufacturing should be given to local and national business over international ones. I ask of them, what good is a true international socialism without strong national and productive bases on which to build? The globalisation and financialisation of capital has set every country back decades, eradicated many once industrious areas of manufacturing and shipped jobs abroad where the local working class are better predisposed to higher levels of exploitation.

Our government has seriously let us all down with this catastrophe and they must be held accountable once lock-down is over.

We must demand better.