Dan Hannan has written a belter of a column for the Sunday Telegraph pointing out that our current economic misfortunes are directly linked to the lockdown policy and reminding us that he warned about this in May 2020.
I hate to say “I told you so” but… oh, sod it, no I don’t. I bloody told you so. As early as May 2020, I was warning of what lay ahead:
“If you’re a pensioner, your pension will lose its value. If you’re a public sector worker, you’ll find that, as its tax take evaporates, the Government can’t afford to pay you. If you have savings, they will be inflated away.”
At that time, 96% of people supported the restrictions, every broadcaster was droning on about “putting lives before the economy”, and only 26% of people thought the lockdown was making them worse off. “Only when we are unable to afford the things we used to buy will we understand that ‘the economy’ is what we call the transactions people make to improve their lives,” I wrote. “And, even then, we may struggle to link our misfortune to the closures we have spent the past two months demanding.”
Just as people who clamoured for net zero now complain about the price of energy, so people who clamoured for the longest lockdown now complain about the cost of living. Naturally, politicians find it easier to humour them than to point out the connection. And, of course, no minister wants to take away even a notionally one-off benefit.
But unless we act now to restore our finances, we face a sterling crisis and a collapse which would be most painful for the people on whose behalf the opposition are demanding more subventions.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: I, too, can say I told you so. This is the opening paragraph of a piece I wrote for The Critic on March 31st, 2020:
Like a growing number of people, I’m beginning to suspect the Government has overreacted to the coronavirus crisis. I’m not talking about the cost to our liberty, although that’s worrying, but the economic cost. Even if we accept the statistical modelling of Dr Neil Ferguson’s team at Imperial College, which I’ll come to in a minute, spending £350 billion to prolong the lives of a few hundred thousand mostly elderly people is an irresponsible use of taxpayers’ money. That may sound cold-hearted, but this isn’t a straightforward trade-off between public health and economic health. People are killed by economic downturns just as surely as they are by pandemics and more years of life will be lost than saved if the lockdown is prolonged. The Government should end it as soon as possible and encourage people to return to work, limiting social distancing measures to the elderly and those with underlying health conditions.
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“At that time, 96% of people supported the restrictions”. I’m not sure where this stat. was pulled from, but that is certainly not true. I knew I was probably in a minority of people that opposed the restrictions, but I know from the conversations I had that it was a lot more than 4%. Apathy was the major problem – I’d say slightly less than half of the views I heard were critical of the lockdown, but almost all of those voices were of the shrug-the-shoulder-what-can you-do-type. And there lies the real problem; the masses have been led to believe they have no power – the absolute pinnacle of totalitarian control.
They certainly didn’t ask me!
They never asked me, so I ignored the lot and went about my daily life without changing a thing. I knew the “laws” or “guidelines” were
and that I therefore I was not bound by them – “exemptions” or none!
Cheers!
Me too, and I was far from being alone.
Any herd needs a leader to follow. The Government and the Lockdowners were organised, in positions of power, control, authority, influence and financed.
It wasn’t apathy so much as an absence of any political leadership to follow. That’s the point of having a political process so that dissent, resistance can be represented.
We no longer have a political process it is a Tyrannical Technocracy.
Ah, the cost of lockdown crisis.
Three weeks to flatten the curve was hideously expensive and damaging. And even if one gives the benefit of the doubt and says there may have been grounds for caution at first, taking restrictions to July 2020 and beyond was utter madness (or possibly controlled destruction of the economy or some such). And it is frustrating when one hears collaborators in all this now complaining about the utterly predictable cost of lockdown crisis which followed (and by the way, how many of these people complained whewn it was only people in places like Kenya going hungry?).
The failure of the government to publish a cost-benefit analysis before embarking on all this should be condemned, punished and never repeated.
And on a similar theme, I note that some charities are raising concerns about the cost of energy crisis. I wonder where they were on the zero carbon madness?
Oh and “lives before the economy”? What a whopper! The Labour party, when they still had some sort of principles, used to say how many people could be expected to die from “Tory cuts”. Where have they been through this trashing of the economy which will inevitably lead to many cuts (just in Britain, to say nothing of Africa, South Asia etc.)?
Lives before the economy – we need to start writing that on tax returns, since money is of secondary importance the Govt and its clients can do without it.
The fact that they threw out the long-established pandemic playbook in favour of their vax chums is very telling. Quite simply, the Govt have no interest in caring for us, and will push through their selfish beliefs as policy regardless of the destruction of life it causes.
The viral trajectory, low level, exponential increase, peak, decline – took place in January, February and March with Lockdown being introduced at the tail end of the epidemic when, even if the measures were effective (not) they were too late. The curve had been and gone and is impervious to being flattened in any case.
Attributed death rate peaked in first week March, which means infection rate and hospitalisations rates peaked about 4 weeks prior. This is why there never was the Tsunami of cases swamping the NHS and why tens of millions of people were not off sick from work/school as should have been the case for such a serious, fast spreading virus affecting all.
There was no pandemic until lockdown imitated what a true pandemic would have been like.
I told the top brass of my 70,000 strong global insurance broker the same in writing. And more. And I kept doing so.
Quite terrifying, but I knew I had to ring the warning bells. Did I have any effect? Well, the Global CEO managed to send me a response to one of my emails with “no response”. And the UK CEO wrote back telling me that one thing he found interesting in the “current time” was the “variety of opinions” but that he disagreed with me.
My boss’s boss’s boss begged me to stop at one point. I said I couldn’t promise that.
The top man even went on prime time US television to extol the virtues of those who were getting “vaccinated”. My blood is still boiling.
It’s brought things forward a few years but the cliff edge was there in front of us. All we had was something like 4 years of splurge in one year, did we not. Trying to rationalise the irrational with a poker metaphor, they went all in and dared the gods of credit to call them.
The positions set out by Dan Hannan and Toby Young in 2020 were undeniably correct. Unfortunately, both positions were based on a straight forward interpretation of the apparent facts when a more detailed analysis would reveal that the lockdowns had bugger all to do with protecting public health. In fact the aim of lockdowns was to seriously erode public health both mentally and physically.
A touch more research would have led to the Lockstep 2010 document and then on to Agenda 2030. In other words, the lockdowns had nothing to do with the C1984 except in a tangential sense. The lockdowns were part of a deliberate destructive process and one which is still evolving. The economic harms currently unfolding were inevitable and would have been to even the dimmest of politicians, of which we have an unfortunate surplus.
Medals for “told you so” are decidedly not appropriate at this time, and based on articles which failed to highlight the obvious elephant in the room – why embark on a course of action which was 100% guaranteed to bring about economic catastrophes? Basically the reductio position would put us right back at cock-up theory.
Utter bollox.
Perhaps all the lockdown sceptics among us should write “I told you so” to their MPs, to shame them and remind them how catastrophically wrong, at the cost of human lives, they’ve been.
Already done, about this time last year.
Might do it again.
But she’s clueless. Waste of space.
A reasonable point Sim. My MP is Debbie Abrams (Lab). I wrote to her on a number of occasions in 2020 as this shit show unfolded. She did reply. Unfortunately, Debbie Abrams is the very definition of a money grabbing, self-serving, lazy, useless, mendacious Labour MP. I am not minded to interrupt her slumbers with a list – no matter how brief I keep it, for her benefit – of catastrophic harms, economic and physical, that she has assisted this current government in pursuing.
I’ve emailed my MP roughly once a month since the lunacy began and, to be fair, he generally replies. But the content of his replies demonstrates that he is just a piece of CONservative lobby fodder; doesn’t do any individual research and has zero judgement.
I might email him Hannan’s column …. with an “I told you so” and I doubt if I’ll get a reply to that.
But he was and remains wrong to have said “If you’re a public sector worker, you’ll find that, as its tax take evaporates, the Government can’t afford to pay you.”
Tax payer funded employees and pensioners never lose out. Indeed, at the moment, they are enjoying extended stays in the garden, walking their dogs and children past my house on the way to the forest and in all sorsts of other ways.
It is always the private sector that loses. Entrepreneurs lose their businesses and their homes (too often also their marriages) whie the public sector just grows.
I very much doubt that 96% of the population supported the Covid restrictions ….. even the initial “3 weeks to flatten the curve” which did achieve a great deal of compliance ….. before the utter lunacy of the proposals really started to become clear.
But I do believe that 96% of those WHO OPPOSED the lunacy were silenced by the Government, in collusion with the MSM and social network platforms. And those who control the media and social networks control the narrative.
I will never forgive the CON Party for their destruction of our economy and the millions of lives they ruined.
What amuses me the most about our current predicament is that people claim the cause of inflation is due to the conflict in Ukraine, or some other current issue.
We can simply assume that closing the world, affecting global supply chains, pausing health care increasing the need for urgent care now and the cost to deal with it, printing vast amounts of money to pay for minimal productivity, had zero effect.
There are even some who try to claim that lockdowns were the most cost effective option. There is some reasonable debate regarding this, but mostly hinging around the merits of/need for voluntary or mandatory restrictions.
An example I like to use is a couple with a sick child who both give up their jobs to look after the child. They use up all their savings and eventually have to borrow money from friends and relatives or whoever.
Eventually they realise that one or both of them needs to go back to work to keep the money coming in. Only now they need to work twice as hard to not only cover their current costs but to also pay for the money they borrowed and all the things they neglected during this time.
Had one of them stayed working from the start they’d have been in a far better position.