Former Chancellor George Osborne today queried whether schools should have been shut during Britain’s coronavirus lockdowns as he gave evidence to the official Covid Inquiry. The Mail has more.
The ex-Chancellor claimed it was still an open question as to whether children should have been prevented from attending classrooms when the pandemic hit.
He said there were “absolutely critical questions about balancing the life expectancy of an 80-year-old versus the educational opportunities of an eight-year-old”.
Mr. Osborne, who was in charge of the Treasury between 2010 and 2016, admitted there was “no planning” done by his department for nationwide lockdowns while he was in office.
But he claimed it was “not clear” whether the economic support given to British businesses or workers – such as through the furlough scheme – would have been any better if plans had been drawn up in advance of the Covid outbreak in 2020.
He also defended his austerity policies during his time in charge of the public finances, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, and insisted they had made Britain better able to respond to the Covid crisis.
Mr. Osborne pointed to “poorer countries” not being able to afford lockdowns or provide loans to keep businesses afloat.
The former Chancellor gave evidence to the inquiry a day after his close political ally, ex-prime minister David Cameron, had been quizzed on how he’d prepared Britain for pandemics during his time in Downing Street.
Mr. Osborne suggested there were still a number of unanswered questions about the effectiveness of the global response to COVID-19 as he was grilled about a lack of Whitehall planning for the ‘stay at home’ message issued to households in 2020 and early 2021.
He said: “What I would observe now, just as a citizen who very much wants this inquiry to come up with some good answers, is I don’t think we still know the answer to some of those questions.
“I don’t want to jump ahead of this inquiry, but should the schools have been locked down in the way they were?
“Even now, after the pandemic, we don’t know the answer to those questions. Certainly I don’t and maybe the inquiry can get to the bottom of that.
“They are absolutely critical questions about balancing the life expectancy of an 80-year-old versus the educational opportunities of an 8-year-old.
“Incredibly hard questions and it’s not absolutely clear to me now that as a country we know, or the rest of the world knows, what the answer to those things is.
“The idea that all of this could have been forethought I don’t think is the case.”
Mr. Osborne admitted the Treasury did not plan for an extended lockdown in the U.K. when considering the possibility of a pandemic outbreak.
He said: “There was no planning done by the U.K. Treasury, or indeed as far as I’m aware, any Western treasury for asking the entire population to stay at home for months and months on end – essentially depriving large sectors of the economy like hospitality of all their customers for months and months to come.”
Osborne suggested that lockdown was China’s idea and Western governments were just copying the Communist regime, arguing that had pandemic exercises been done that considered lockdowns governments may have been better prepared to resist the Chinese-led groupthink. From the Telegraph:
“Would we all have gone into lockdown if China had not locked down in January and February? I think the Chinese lockdown is what gives the rest of the world the idea,” [Osborne] told the inquiry in his evidence.
“And it’s the overwhelming of the hospital system in northern Italy that then leads all Western governments to reach basically the same conclusion, which is we’ve got to do what the Chinese have done in order to try and preserve our capacity and our emergency wards.”
He said he wondered whether, if the Government had done a “tabletop exercise” in 2011 or 2012 on the matter, the same conclusion to lockdown would have been reached.
Meanwhile, Dame Sally Davies, who was England’s Chief Medical Officer from 2010 to 2019, said lockdowns were “awful” and had “damaged a generation”. But she still took the orthodox line and backed lockdowns, though “a week earlier”.
Studies comparing countries and regions have repeatedly shown that the stringency and timing of lockdowns did not have a significant impact on outcomes. Analysis has also shown that new daily coronavirus infections in England were declining before each of the three national lockdowns. Dame Sally’s successor Sir Chris Whitty himself pointed out to MPs in July 2020 that the R number had dropped below 1 ahead of the first national lockdown. But these lessons just never seem to stick.
From the Mail.
In her evidence [Dame Sally] hit out at lockdown, stating that while she agreed with it in principle, it had “damaged a generation”.
“It’s clear that no one thought about lockdown. I still think we should have locked down, although a week earlier,” she said.
“But during that we should have thought do we need to further? The damage I now see to children and students from Covid and the educational impact tells me that education has a terrific amount of work to do.
“We have damaged a generation and it is awful as head of a college in Cambridge watching these young people struggle.
“I know in pre-schools they haven’t learned how to socialise and play properly, they haven’t learned how to read at school. We must have plans for them.”
When asked by lead counsel Hugo Keith KC on whether not foreseeing the possibility of a lockdown when planning for a pandemic was “one of the more notable failures in this strategic planning”, Dame Sally again apologised, saying: “I’m sorry, we didn’t plan for that. I think I would prefer to have planned to not get us to that stage but we didn’t recognise that it could.”
What a shame that people who see clearly what a terrible policy lockdown was still feel compelled to back it. It’s this pathetic lack of courage to stand up against the tyranny of ineffective, disproportionate health policy that dooms us to repeat the horror again and again.
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Dame Sally:
“I still think we should have locked down, although a week earlier…”
Good God Almighty.
Why not 8 days earlier?
8.5. It’s possible to do an awful lot in a half a day, when you put your mind to it.
When I worked for one of the Big 4 I achieved most between 7 am and 9 am, because there was nobody around to distract me and clients didn’t phone til after 9.
(I’m a morning person and persuaded my girlfriend that we should buy a house an 18 minute walk from my office and a 45 minute drive from hers!)
As a member of the so-called ‘laptop class’, even when I’m being ‘lazy’ working at home, I still get far more done than when I worked at offices constantly being distracted. On my own computer, I have everything I need, I know where all my files are, I have high speed internet, so I’m much better equipped than if I go to someone else’s office and constantly need access to their systems.
Another benefit is avoiding the watercooler conversations with idiot sheeple normies, covidians, metropolitan “liberals”, champagne socialists etc.
A small consultancy company I used to manage IT for had a ‘work anywhere’ philosophy for our consultants from really quite early on. Before the Internet became a useful world-wide comms tool we used banks of modems to allow our consultants to file their work and exchange messages with each other from more or less anywhere that had a phone line no matter what the timezone.
The consultants’ managers had a policy that all non-deployed consultants should attend a meeting in the office at least once a week. Partly to listen to the manager(s), but mostly to exchange thoughts and ideas with each other and their support staff. Most of them complained about the imposition of having to travel into the office even though many had been working in Africa or South America a couple of weeks before.
Avoiding interruptions might make the individual more productive but may make others less productive.
The comment for an earlier lockdown, was both a criticism and a support of government, one comment cancels the other. Typical political speech, according to the late Isaac Azimov and review a political speech by using the pros of a politicians speech to cancel the cons of that speech, the politician says nothing of relevance.
Still defending their harmful, costly, unconstitutional, human rights abusing, but above all, POINTLESS lockdowns.
The argument that closing down the schools may have been unnecessary is beyond stupid – we know that children catch and spread the virus, so if they were going to go and catch the lurgy and then spread it at home, there would be no point in shutting anything down. And there was no point regardless, because, just as Tegnell predicted, the virus was going to spread no matter what and those who would succumb to it, did and are still are dying from it, lockdowns and vaxx notwithstanding. No deaths have been avoided, at most the timing was altered.
The one question that I would like to see answered, but that I’m pretty certain will never be asked, will never be entertained, will never appear in a pandemic protocol – what would the outcome have been, what would it be in the future, if hospital capacity were increased by 10% or even 5%? After all, the entire BS was predicated on keeping the hospitals going, nothing else mattered. If keeping the hospitals going was the only thing that counted, why are we not focusing on a way of achieving that in the future and comparing the costs of increasing hospital capacity to the outrageous costs (which go well beyond financial) of the lockdowns and the vaxx garbage and the sucking up of health care staff to give people their ongoing doses of poison?
Unless, of course, keeping the hospitals going was just a bull shit excuse for a major power grab and a mega wealth transfer from the taxpayer to politicians and their billionaire owners.
In another fine post your final para says it all.
Also HCQ and Ivermectin
Aha. I don’t remember a squeak from them when it might have been helpful. Sounds like rats running for the shore before the boat sinks.
Well, you don’t say George.
SOMEONE made this decision and should account for it- but they never will- they might get a dame hood for example. It must NEVER happen again and it is down to us the British people to NEVER ‘obey’ these common purpose loons again. What are they gonna do shoot us all? Arrest us all?
I suspect he is one of many who have suddenly discovered scepticism. It is going to be like France after the war. Everyone was in the Resistance!
He’s not a sceptic. He believes there was a pandemic.
Come on tof, you don’t believe Osborne swallowed the pandemic story. He was in on the Scamdemic from the off.
Yes of course I was being lazy with my language. Osborne makes reference to a pandemic which isn’t the same as believing there was one. But he’s clearly not a sceptic.
Not a single sceptical column on anything by him or the ES during the last 3 years. To the contrary. Gene therapy shilling to this day.
Don’t recall a peep from Osborne at the time so he can jog on. So can the rest of them. Dear DS, please stop reporting on the “Covid inquiry”. It’s an illegitimate travesty, purely theatrical, the outcome of which is already determined. To report on it as if there is any semblance of legitimacy in it is to give it a credibility it does not merit. It’s actually way worse than merely being an expensive whitewash because it is in fact an integral part of of the Big Lie that there was a deadly pandemic called Covid. An emergency needs a £114M inquiry, a bad flu season requires some routine reporting and some articles in specialist journals.
Surely such lockdown planning would not have been warranted at the end of 2019 as the WHO actively recommended it should not be used to tackle a pandemic. Of course this recommendation was suddenly and inexplicably reversed in early 2020.
I’m still waiting to meet anybody who admits they were wrong about there being a 21st century Black Death, lockdowns or jabbing.
I know two people who got vaxxed and are more than happy to admit it was a huge mistake and are full on sceptics now. Both of them are exceptional individuals in many ways. I know a few who were sceptical from the start. Everyone else – nothing, like it never happened.
My ex is now admitting she doesn’t believe in global warming, so perhaps it’s a matter of time.
Perhaps it was your good influence that achieved that
Don’t believe a word.. Damage limitation.. Period.
Lock all the Marxists up…
I’ll be the key keeper
”We now live in a society where doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the press destroys information, religion destroys morals and our banks destroy the economy.” Chris Hedges
Wow, how do we go through life basically not being able to trust any of the entities that we took for granted before? When you stop and think about it it’s quite a profound reality. Being red-pilled is harder than going through life docile and naive isn’t it?
”Our politicians have sold us “solutions” to Covid that were far, far worse than the disease, and have generally refused to admit to their mistakes, even when they saw the comparative success of regimes like Sweden and Florida that went a very different direction.
Among the more egregious falsehoods that were either stated or implied by official authorities, and uncritically echoed by mainstream media, were the following:
A part of me hankers after the times when I could just trust my government in a time of crisis. But if I am honest with myself, I have to admit that I’d prefer to live uncomfortably in the truth than comfortably in a fantasy built for me by someone who does not have my best interests at heart.”
https://davidthunder.substack.com/p/what-its-like-to-live-in-an-informational-13a
Excellent stuff. Thanks Mogs
Interesting how Dame Sally was out and away to her ivory tower a year before it all started up handing over the reins to the arch jabber &Galapagos tortoise impersonator Whitty. That Hunt also got out from under just in time to leave the disaster years to Hancock and his democidal urges. This is all very telling and there are no coincidences.
That Dame Sally mourns the loss of developmental time for little school children is one of more crocodilian examples of tear shedding I have ever heard. We may witness much more crying and blubbing before this sh*tshow of an enquiry drags itself to a sorry conclusion, but I do know that by the time it does that the people of this country will have seen with great clarity that most of the witnesses especially the ‘experts’ and politicians, scientists and advisers, to be either useful idiots, charlatans, Quislings or liars.
I’m certain of that. There is a rising disgust for what the government, and in fact nearly all those in parliament did on behalf of (bio-) defence departments and big pharma. You can see the growing panic in the US as Dr Hotez is called out by Rogan and RFK Jr. for the gain of function fraud he is. Our politicians are now so far out of step with what the people in this country can sense and work out for themselves that the damage is now irreparable. It ends in one of two ways. Both unpleasant.
I sense it will not end well for those who currently perceive themselves to be in some sort of control.
I know almost nobody who has admitted they were wrong or is showing the slightest interest in the “Covid inquiry”
They have moved on.
I think imposing the same level of restrictions again would be difficult but to think that anyone but a tiny minority is properly awake to just what a scam the whole thing was seems deluded
Anger about the Covid response is being channelled into Tory-bashing as people feel comfortable with that. Idiots.
I’m not saying everyone’s fully awake, of course not, but there’s slow tectonic movement, a sense of waste, loss, mismanagement, distrust of all the big themes, re net zero etc, woke nonsense. Tory bashing sure. But on real streets people sense and even know there was evil perpetrated.
If that’s your personal experience then I am glad and hope it’s indicative. Perhaps I am surrounded by an especially dense, conformist, air-headed bunch of dimwits.
Oh FFS!
Lockdown a week earlier requires all the evidence gathering (such as it was) to be considered a week earlier:
We could not sensibly have gone into lockdown without the Coronavirus Act 2020 being in place (yes, I know going into lockdown was not sensible – bear with me). So Coronavirus Bill would have to be introduced to Parliament on 12 March, lockdown announcement on 16 Mar and Royal Assent on 18 Mar. Health secretary to take emergency powers on 20 March. At least we then could not blame Prof Ferguson as he didn’t publish Report 9 until 16 March.
===
So, in fantasy world:
12 March Coronavirus Bill introduced to Parliament. By the end of 12 March there had been 39 deaths in the UK where Covid was mentioned on the death certificate. Of these 3 had been registered. (I think Parliament would not have passed the Bill without division with only three deaths registered).
16 March PM Bojo addresses the nations… ‘We’re going to do lockdown with immediate effect.’. By the end of 16 March 158 deaths but only 16 registered. Prof Ferguson’s Report 9 predicts half a million deaths.
18 March Coronavirus Act 2020 Royal Assent. By end of day 289 deaths but only 55 registered.
20 March Health Secretary takes emergency powers. By end of day 486 deaths but only 124 registered.
===
From retrospective analysis we know that the infections leading to the deaths that occurred around the peak of mortality on 8 April were occurring on 12 March (27 day lead time).
Not only would lockdown not have been approved a week earlier. It would still not have been effective.
We can see a slight beneficial kink in the cumulative mortality curve at around 19 April. 27 days after the real-life lockdown announcement. It is the only beneficial kink in the mortality curve and the effect lasts for just over a month. If that isn’t the beneficial effect of lockdown then there is no beneficial effect. The actual peak in mortality is on 8 April. Peak infections therefore occurred about 27 days earlier on 12 March. Lockdwn on 23 March did not disrupt peak infections. Even if it had been two weeks earlier lockdown could not have had any effect on the peak of infections or deaths.
Dame Sally is wrong.
There was no pandemic. If Covid exists, it’s an infectious disease very much like many other mild for most infectious diseases with which we’ve lived since time immemorial. I emphasise the word LIVED as opposed to the living death of lockdowns. We are social animals. We must not indulge in nit picking speculation regarding lockdowns. If that’s your bag, I want to live on a different planet to you. Leave us alone – by us I mean people who want to get on with the business of living.
I applaud your view that you want get on with the business of living. How did that go for you during the lockdowns and tiers nonsense?
If we let people like Dame Sally get away with repeating the ‘just a week earlier’ bullcarp without challenge people will start parroting it without thinking it through (parroting it as I think she is actually doing). We have to show that it’s not just wrong, but why it’s wrong and showing the working.
Well I certainly didn’t enjoy the Covid restrictions
My view remains that we must tackle the problem at the root and not in the specifics. If you tackle the specifics it usually turns out to be an endless rabbit hole.
Osborne admitted that when he was at the Treasury there was no planning down for a lockdown. Why should they have wasted time and money planning for a lockdown when at the time the government’s pandemic preparedness plan highlighted the importance of keeping as many businesses, not to mention schools etc, open as possible.
So here we have it. It has been said. Lockdowns were wrong, but as a politician, of course, I can’t possibly comment. They will never admit to making a mistake, they will obfuscate and prevaricate, PM’s have been removed for less.
Of course there were no plans for lockdowns carried out in Osborne’s Treasury.
Government Policy was that lockdowns were explicitly ruled out as a means of pandemic control.
Johnson capitulated to SAGE, media and international pressure.
It isn’t a pathetic lack of courage.
It’s the knowledge that if they dare retract their support for lockdowns/jabs and all the rest of the Globalist Agenda, their careers will be over 2 seconds after they’ve finished speaking.
Dame Sally the senior medic could not understand why bloodletting was not curing the patient but was convinced that cutting further up the body would surely work. She then cried some salty tears at the necessity of it all.
Dame Sally the senior medic could not understand why bloodletting was not curing the patient but was convinced that cutting further up the body would surely work. She then cried some salty tears at the necessity of it all.