Thank Lockdowns for the Worst Budget in History
We’re a week away from the most painful Budget in history thanks largely to the eye-watering economic cost of lockdown. Yet Baroness Hallett says next time the Government must be ready to go harder and faster. This is insanity, says Toby in the Telegraph. Here’s an excerpt.
Don’t be fooled by Lady Hallett’s claim that lockdowns could have been “avoided entirely” if the government had imposed “stringent restrictions” at the outbreak of the Covid pandemic.
What would these restrictions have been, exactly, if not an even more severe lockdown? She also said that up to 23,000 lives could have been saved if the first lockdown had been imposed a week earlier. The entire thrust of her report is that we should have locked everyone in their homes sooner and for longer – and not just in the first wave, but in the second, third and fourth as well, accompanied by endless “firebreaks” and “circuit breakers”.
She even has the audacity to criticise Boris Johnson for not locking us down again in the winter of 2021 when the Omicron variant struck – not because it would have saved lives, but because it could have. “If Omicron was as severe as previous variants, the consequences would have been disastrous,” she writes.
Lady Hallett’s Zero Covid zealotry is particularly tone deaf, given we are just a week away from the most painful Budget in living memory thanks in large part to the eye-watering economic cost of the disastrous lockdown policy. The OBR estimates that the cost of the furlough scheme alone was £70 billion.
Had it been extended beyond September 2021, which would have been inevitable if Boris had listened to the hand-wringers at Independent SAGE, it would have cost even more. As it was, the GDP loss in 2020 alone was 11%, the deepest recession since the Great Frost in 1709. According to the IMF, the total cost of the UK government’s pandemic response was £411 billion, with the consequence that public sector net debt ballooned from £1.8 trillion at the end of March 2020 to £2.35 trillion by March 2022.
Needless to say, it has steadily increased ever since. Liz Truss wasn’t responsible for spiralling borrowing costs. That would have been her predecessor, browbeaten into imposing a series of lockdowns against his better judgement.
I drew attention to the harm that would be caused by shutting down the economy in March, 2020, a week after the first lockdown, only to be met with a tirade of abuse about putting profits before people. But who did these holier-than-thou finger-waggers think would pay the price? Fat cats and billionaires? The oil and gas industry?
In fact, the poorest tenth of households saw their incomes decline by 20% during the pandemic, while the richest tenth saw theirs go up.
“Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it,” Toby concludes, “which is why the government’s pandemic response deserves a better historian than Baroness Hallett.”
Worth reading in full.
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In everything one does, one must first ask, “What is the problem we are trying to solve?”
But then I am not a parasite. If they had asked this simple question (and answered it honestly), there would have been nothing on which these parasites could suck, there being no pandemic in the first place.
Clown World.
Exactly – there was, and is, a lot of jobs for the boys (and girls)… a bigger and bigger state, encourages a bigger and bigger state…
Belorussia never implemented any COVID measures because its ruler considered the so-called pandemic an foreign attempt to harm his country. How could this have happened if the problem was ‘the state’ as abstract concept and not the specific people who controlled it?
Don’t know much about Belorussia, but clearly their leader had some logic, and the power to ensure their instructions were implemented…
The first rule in the Civil Service…
Every recruit requires an assistant.
…which encourages a bigger and bigger state, until the only people left are those doing nothing to create value and suddenly there is nothing propping it up, and then… it’s anyone’s guess what happens next.
If Sars-CoV2 had been a dangerous virus, teetotaller attempts to guideline the hospitality industry out of existence wouldn’t have saved us and neither would a safe and effective vaccine which required lockdowns to avoid a catastrophe. Does Hallet at least admit that covaxxing was demonstrably useless? Because that’s an obvious implication of her claims about the fall 2021 variant. Or does she think everyone ought to be vaccinated again and again because that’s part of the proper sacred rites for a deadly pandemic and whether or not this actually helps anyone is – at best – a secondary concern.
“Some day, we’ll have a vaccine that actually works and until then, people have to remain used to accept the procedure”?
She doesn’t think, she’s just parroting what she’s been told to say by her civil service overseers in order to try and whitewash the whole sorry business.
She is a corrupt criminal, another fat idiot who hates people like us. Another Medical Nazi.
Why would there be a ‘next time’?
Is it already planned?
Rona Reich. The Plandemic. Viruses don’t exist. Quackcines kill and maim.
There will only be a ‘next time’ if the government doesn’t manage to destroy the economy by other means. There are plenty of other ways they could achieve this aim – borrowing money for overseas aid, proxy wars, slavery reparations, etc. So there may be no need of another ‘pandemic’.
And medical doctors are supposed to be intelligent.
How about you know you’re ill or not by how you feel. NOT by needing to have a PCR test to tell you if you’re actually ill.
But that would being Reality back, and it would be a loss to Virtual Reality, which is where our politicians live.
Respiratory viruses have evolved to transmission by aerosolisation making them more successful at reproduction than transmission by droplet infection.
Since aerosols move by Brownian motion – unaffected by gravity like droplets – respiratory viruses fill and circulate spaces and linger long after the individual shedding the virus has left. Social distancing (or masks) is therefore ineffective.
So-called “firebreaks” and “circuit breakers” can only work if the locus of infectious individuals is known. That is right at the start, before spread when patient zero is known. Once an infectious pathogen is in circulation within the population it is impossible to know who is infected and where they are or how far travelled until they present with symptoms. It is therefore impossible to know where to put these “firebreaks” and “circuit breakers”.
And it is evident that the SARS Cov2 was introduced in Autumn 2019, and was most active during January 2020, infection rate peaking in early February and was on its way out in March, so any effort to contain the virus = shutting stable door after tyrvhirxe gas bolted.
£200 million and Lady Hallet-Nosepoultice doesn’t understand that.
Oh, she does. And if not, her experts certainly do. They just want to reconnect to the money spewing firehose and a situation where everything someone doesn’t like can be prohibited provided it can somehow be linked to COVID. Their measures actually mustn’t work because otherwise, the pandemic would be halted by them and nobody would want that.
Eg, forcing people to remain close to each other in enclosed space for 23 hours a day (walls separating flats don’t affect airflow in houses) is pretty much a strategy to maximise infection and probably wasn’t ever meant to be anything else.
If the country is to be destroyed spiritually, culturally and economically then the industrial backbone has to be broken and this is what this government is about.
They’ve nearly finished.
Digital I/D and CBDC next and we’re done up like Christmas turkeys.
Agreed.
Rubbish!
Peak all-cause death registrations in England and Wales occurred in week ending Friday 17 April 2020. Death registrations were lagging about 5 days behind death occurrences at that time. This is consistent with peak daily Covid ‘mentioned’ deaths occurring on 8 April 2020 (1,360 deaths that day).
The average lead time between infection and death (for those unfortunate enough to die) was about 28 days at this stage in the England and Wales epidemic. Therefore peak infections were occurring in the week ending Friday 13 March. To have any (vain) hope of significantly affecting the overall numbers of infections any intervention would have to disrupt the spread well before 13 March – which itself is more than a week before the actual lockdown announcement. Locking down a week earlier could not have affected the peak as peak infections had already passed.
The fact that peak infections had occurred in week ending 13 March means that the 1st lockdown was not necessary. Infections were declining at least 10 days before the lockdown was imposed.
Wasn’t “COVID” (if it exists) already spread by autumn 2019, just that nobody was “testing” for it?
I wouldn’t take any notice of any “COVID” related statistics, be they for “infections” or “covid deaths”. Surely utterly unreliable.
Yes.
Covid deaths were made to look huge by pcr testing with the cycles set so high they could have found anything, and then by declaring all deaths to be covd deaths.
And Hancock murdered my mother.
I’m sorry to hear about your mother’s death.
PCR testing hadn’t really taken off until well after the first lockdown. Covid ‘mentioned’ deaths at that time were nearly all the death certificate doctors’ opinions.
That said, the government changed the rules about death registration in the Coronavirus Act 2020 (among far too many other thing) such that a doctor in a hurry could just slap a ‘Covid’ label on pretty much every death and not be challenged over it. The Act was given Royal Assent on 27 March I believe – so it did not affect the peak either.
Agreed. Hence checking the ‘Covid mentioned’ death occurrences with the undoubted peak in any-cause mortality registration. ‘Dead’ is a diagnosis which is difficult to get badly wrong.
I don’t have any confidence that attribution of deaths to “COVID” was at all accurate
There was a large peak in all-cause death registrations in the week ending Friday 17 April 2020.
Death registrations are supposed to be within 5 days of death occurrence. Sometimes this slips. At the time average registration delay was 5 days.
To find a peak we don’t have to rely on any diagnosis apart from ‘dead’.
Yes but what did they die of?
Something unusual.
There were 22,351 any/all-cause death registrations in week ending 17 April. That was about double the ‘expected’ rate based on the 2010-2018 averages and trends for week 16 of the year – allowing for population changes and trends (death rates slowly falling/improving).
The weekly death registration rate above ‘expected’ closely follows a standard epidemic (Gompertz) curve. This suggests it may be an actual epidemic to which we can give a name if people want. There is a very slight downward deviation from the calculated curve 4 weeks after lockdown but no other deviations which could be so attributed. If that deviation was not due to lockdown then lockdown had no good effect on death rates at all.
If that very minor blip is due to lockdown* then that gives us the lead time between infection with whatever we want to call the epidemic and death. 28 days.
No diagnosis other than ‘death’ needed.
*If the blip is lockdown then it ‘saved’ about 100 lives before the next wave of something cut in. It didn’t actually save them of course – the people who are expected to die each year are nearly all very frail.
Did other countries experience the same kind of spike in deaths? If not, why not?
In general I’m not overly interested in whether “lockdowns” “saved lives” (whatever that means) because I disagree with the whole idea on principle.
Yes, other countries did experience large spikes. Some more than UK and some less. It’d be interesting to have an analysis of why. I strongly expect that analysis would show that lockdowns initially ‘saved’ a few and then rapidly killed more than it saved; and no, I don’t have an analysis to back that up.
Of course we can only draw any insight from the data for those countries which had already established a decent history of reasonably accurately reported weekly death rates. Russia, for example, gave up publishing it’s weekly deaths data in 2014 (I think, after annexing Crimea) – bugger all good for comparing against death rates in 2020.
No, lockdowns did not save lives – at the very best they delayed a few deaths by a few weeks.
If that had included my Mum’s life maybe I’d have been upset if lockdown hadn’t happened (though I hope not). As it is/was my Mum died in 2017 and we thanked God for her long and happy life. Remembering her last few months/weeks she’d have hated lockdown. I think it likely it would have killed her.
The European statistics I’ve been able to find vary considerably from country to country which suggests many factors at work of which an alleged virus would be only one
Large ‘spikes ?’ Not really as it was all based on fake PCR testing.
No. Not all based on PCR testing. Actual deaths from any cause. Unless those numbers are faked.
Midazolam and Morphine – the drugs used for lethal injection in the USA – but in milder doses. Ordered by Hancock, following a policy instigated by Lansley. Implemented by faceless functionaries in the NHS (who knew) and administered by ignorant nurses and care-home workers. Covered up to this day by the legacy media.
Indeed
Suspiciously other countries did not all experience the same thing which if there was a global pandemic you would expect
Yes. Symptoms would have been classified as Cold or ‘flu because there are no symptoms specific to CoVid that are not shared by other respiratory virus infections.
And. Retained samples of blood and sewage water from late 2019 were tested, and in the former showing antibodies, in the later viral debris. This was also the case on the Continent.
Also, from the SAGE minutes of 10 March 2020:
So, in the week in which peak infections were occurring, the government’s SAGEs noticed that ‘Transmission was underway‘. With that level of insight, even if you thought it might be effective, you would not push the ‘lockdown’ button.
Peak alleged Covid deaths occurred in the first part of March. Therefore peak infection was early February.
It is disingenuous to use peal all-cause deaths, because many of those clearly were non-Covid and even caused by lockdown.
I maintain to this day and my conviction is even stronger now than in March 2020 that….
Completely right.
“We’re a week away from the most painful Budget in history thanks largely to the eye-watering economic cost of lockdown.”
Not sure about “largely”. State and state welfare expenditure has been growing for a very long time.
National debt is currently around £2.77 trillion (2.77 x 10¹²)
£400 billion for the coof is around 15% of that.
Fiscal year to date (23 Nov) debt is £126 billion. Assuming fiscal year is to end March that’s around 75% of the total. Rough guess £170bn in 25/26
Annual interest is projected at around £111.2 billion, which is about 66% of the annual debt.
So we’re still borrowing like there’s no tomorrow.
The miracle of socialism!
“…browbeaten into imposing a series of lockdowns against his better judgement.” Blimey Toby. You really do have a blind spot when it comes to Boris Johnson, don’t you? As PM it was him that had ultimate responsibility and he effed everything up royally. I couldn’t care if he was ill advised or not, the buck stops with the leader. He always had the option to go the way of Sweden but he was a limp-dick that wimped out. These were conscious decisions only HE made, and behold the epic disaster that ensued. How quickly people forget these useless men in suits that used to be constantly on the telly talking absolute crap, trying to put the frighteners on everyone sat under house arrest, using an unprecedented MKUltra-grade PsyOp on the nation, in an attempt to justify such totalitarian measures. People sat at home, livelihoods, education and mental/physical health crumbling all around them, while these gonks in suits droned on about not killing granny, saving the NHS, R numbers, positive cases, Covid deaths, asymptomatic spread, herd immunity and ultimately getting jabbed ( rinse, repeat ) with a novel, warp-speed vaccine. Johnson, Hancockwomble, Javid, Vallance, Whitty, Van-Tam, Ferguson et al, where are… Read more »
I have to agree. I was one of those who was happy Boris became PM. After March 23rd 2020, my opinion did a perfect 180.
100% agree, especially regarding the blind spot and where the buck stops
“Blimey Toby. You really do have a blind spot when it comes to Boris Johnson, don’t you?”
You are absolutely bang on Mogs.
https://x.com/BorisJohnson/status/1992167330793521182?s=20
The man himself on X…. Safe to say that most comments are not particularly flattering.
400 Billion quid squandered on an epidemic of tested positivitis with an age-fatality profile that paralleled general mortality, and another 200 million squandered on the cover up operation.
These remote control people are a troubling lot. Tone deaf living in bubbles.
Wonder how many people avoided ever getting Covid because of lockdowns and all the other ridiculous precautions?
I am writing my own report which is based on my diary/blog which I kept from February 2020. In answer to Marcus Aurelius knew, the problem was – why did a small percentage of infected people get very ill and die, and did we need to worry about the vast majority who got a bit sick? My view is that the correct management was just to properly treat that small group. It didn’t happen to start with because experienced clinicians were locked out of the decision-making process.
Because that’s what always happens for all respiratory diseases: Pneumonia is a rare complication and in even rarer case – the NHS advice for Pneumonia is rest and drink a lot of fluids – this becomes life-threatening and requires hospital care and some of the affected people won’t survive. Especially, if they’re already old and frail but that’s just the largest group which wil suffer this fate. People at any age can.
“Pneumonia” was the excuse put on death certificates after the cocktail of lethal drugs had been administered.
Exactly, this is why we need a representative democracy with strong leadership rather than government led by BBC hysteria. At the time everyone (a majority anyway) said that you couldn’t put a price on the life of your 85 year old granny. Well you can and here it is – albeit granny died anyway and it’s not at all clear that lockdown achieved anything!
“You can’t put a price on the life of granny and therefore, people must not have pint in the pub unless they also buy food and must don a mask before they go to the toilet¹.”?
I’m not sure that a majority of the people ever really accepted this absurd logic. They were just bending under pressure while trying to avoid breaking, as so-called little people always do.
¹ There are still people doing that. I saw one a few months ago.