The Daily Mail has carried out an audit of the economic, social, educational and healthcare damage the continuing lockdown is doing to the UK and the headline figure is that it is costing the country £500 million a day in lost output and adding £1 billion to the national debt. But there are other, equally alarming findings.
Today’s lockdown audit illustrates the crippling impact that 12 months of curbs have had on swathes of the economy, with pubs and restaurants losing an estimated £1.7 billion a week, and some 15,000 shops expected to never reopen.
The grim Covid death toll, which yesterday hit 126,155, is well known. But today’s analysis also reveals the dire impact of the past year on the nation’s health. The NHS waiting list has soared to a record high of nearly 4.6million, with 300,000 waiting more than a year for treatment.
On cancer, 44,000 fewer patients started treatment last year and there were 4.4million fewer life-saving diagnostic tests. An extra 6,000 people died of heart disease and stroke. Mental health services saw a 27,000 rise in individuals seeking support, while child eating disorders doubled.
As the Mail points out, this makes the news that the EU is considering slapping an export ban on vaccines to the UK, which in all likelihood would delay Britain’s reopening, even more unwelcome.
Worth reading in full.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
But hey, we sure did protect the NHS, didn’t we?
Inflation is a stealth tax the elite use against the plebes.
Of course, printing so much the currency eventually becomes worthless may be one of this op’s primary goals.
“Inflation is a stealth tax the elite use against the plebes.”
Other way around in reality. Inflation is a stealth tax that rots debts like mortgages which means mortgage holders (banks) are the ones that suffer most from inflation. Hence why the banking fraternity are obsessed with keeping wage rises in particular under control.
Everything else goes up with inflation, including wages and pensions, otherwise it isn’t actually an economic inflation.
It’s Rentiers that hate any inflation at all. Those who are getting something they shouldn’t be getting
Fair point about inflation rotting depths – providing real interest rates are low.
For reasons I don’t quite understand, it’s often said that banks struggle to make money at very low interest rates. I guess it’s the loan/deposit rate margin which matters.
High inflation hurts far more people than it benefits – and, as so often, it’s the poor who suffer the most.
High Inflation only damages those on a fixed income – bankers. And we haven’t had high inflation for decades.
It doesn’t damage anybody else at all because they all get their income and their expenditure relative to each other. That’s the only way you can get inflation in the first place – an unresolved distributional conflict between the wage share and the profit share.
Don’t believe the banker propaganda.
I had to lay 20 men off. I got ‘gizz a job’ phone calls from good honest men saying that they couldn’t feed their families. The bank pulled the plug on me and then gave me a ‘forbearance package’. By the way there is a fee and the interest rate has gone up.
Some people love lockdown. They are making money. Pensions go further and you save money being on furlough. The amount of home improvement I see going on confirms all that.
The sadness is we are raising a nation of uneducated kids and many people are suffering but willingly accept that because they believe they are doing the right thing by looking after granny. I clap for them but they are misled by the shameful lockdown propaganda being pumped out by the Gov.
Well said, Boris.
Truly: “There are none so blind as those who don’t want to see”.
All for a virus no worse than a bad seasonal flu. Hang your heads in shame Johnson, Hancock, Whitty, Vallance and Ferguson.
Just ‘hang’ would do. They have no shame
None of this could have happened without the media in the first place.
They need to be held as accountable as every member of the political class.
Plus the collaborators and sheep.
PS: Laurence Fox came out with a “gud un” this morning on TR: “The safetyists”.
The problem is that there is no real ‘media’ in the rounded sense of the word – only what are largely propaganda captured by vested interests.
True journalism is largely a dead art, substituted by ‘churnalism’ (pace Nick Davies) – the repetition of matey narratives.
“Every Day Britain Remains in Lockdown Adds £1 Billion to the National Debt”
And by accounting identity adds £1 Billion to the stock of Sterling Savings.
Why are you so against people saving in Sterling? Eventually they have to spend it here.
How on earth does printed money, squandered on vested interests, add to the stock of sterling savings?
You’ve missed the other half of that:
So not only are we borrowing ridiculous sums that we can’t afford to pay back we’re destroying the means to even attempt to pay it back.
As a counterfactual, is Britain had never gone into lockdown, the media would be screaming bloody murder at how terrible the death toll from covid-19 had been. Even if was exactly the same as it is now.
Nobody comes out of this covid-19 clusterfuck looking very good. Shame on the Conservatives, shame on Labour. Shame on the press. Shame on the medical and scientific establishment. Shame on the police. Shame on the Church. Shame on teachers. Shame on Universities.
And shame, shame, shame on the British people for going along with this. Shame on the jobsworths checking your mask in the shops. Shame on the curtain-twitchers phoning the cops to report suspicious dog walkers and surreptitious granny-visits.
And shame on all of us for letting our society rot to the point that we let this happen.
Sadly, I have to agree.
Also – shame on those who have, wilfully or maliciously, forgotten some of the few history lessons that ate beyond contention.
Comment, from johnk I think, saying Ramsay needs to be TTFO, has disappeared.
LOUDLY and OFTEN !