The Daily Mail has spilled much ink today in order to boast of the good job it did on sourcing PPE, and downplay the 100,000 items it implicitly accepts were made in factories believed to use the forced labour of Uyghur Muslims. It defends itself on three grounds:

• Only 100,000 pieces out of 42 million were sourced from the factory concerned
• The Daily Mail has now ended the campaign anyway
• It was for charity

We will never know how many factories in China use forced labour, according to human rights organisations the practice is widespread, with prisoners producing Christmas cards for Tesco for example. It is likely that millions more pieces of PPE sourced from China were also made using forced Labour. Whilst credit is due to the Daily Mail for bringing in PPE when it was urgent, that doesn’t alter the truth of the story. Their claim in the paper this morning that the revelations as to the sourcing are because “no good deed goes unpunished”, are a bit bonkers. Nothing thin-skinned journalists hate more than scrutiny of themselves…