The cost of living crisis and runaway inflation are a result of imposing ruinous lockdowns on society, experts have told MPs and Peers.
The comments came in the latest meeting of the the Pandemic Response and Recovery All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG).
Chaired by the Rt Hon Esther McVey MP, the group heard from experts about the societal consequences of closing businesses and schools, prohibiting healthcare, ordering the public to stay at home and unchecked money printing. One businessman told the group how government COVID-19 policies personally affected him, costing him £120,000, destroying his previously thriving business and leaving him in debt.
Professor of Industrial Economics at the University of Nottingham Business School, David Paton, explained why lockdowns are at the root of the current crisis:
Eye-watering sums of money were spent during lockdowns, on furlough and business support schemes which helped mask the inevitable economic consequences we are now seeing. Many of our current problems could have been avoided had the government carried out an effective cost-benefit analysis of lockdowns and other restrictions.
Quite simply, the lack of spending opportunities during lockdown contributed to a build up of personal and corporate savings. As restrictions eased, people began to spend these savings and, combined with the supply chain issues that built up in the meantime, sustained inflation became the inevitable result. Even worse, having spent about £70 billion, paying healthy people not to work and some £150 billion in total on support measures, the ability of governments to respond to this cost-of-living crisis via either tax cuts or increased benefits is limited due to the hit to public finances caused by lockdown-induced government spending.
Looking at the latest evidence on the observable economic harms, Professor of Health Economics at Nottingham University, Marilyn James said:
The Imperial College March 2020 report which recommended lockdowns knew the “economic effects of the measures which are needed to achieve this policy goal will be profound”. And indeed we have seen inflation rise dramatically in 2022 in part due to the Ukraine war although the trend starts in 2020, which will have largely been due to lockdown policies.
Instead of paying businesses to shut down and people not to work, we needed to keep the economy functioning and direct those billions towards building up capacity in the health system. It is clear lockdown must never again be used as a pandemic mitigation.
Listening to the evidence, Esther McVey MP, said:
We must not deny that two years of intermittent lockdown policies have helped cause the cost of living crisis. The stark wider economic picture and the heartbreaking personal struggle of business owners like Adam Cunningham who had to close his previously thriving business, bring it home. According to the Federation of Small Businesses, half a million small business owners, the backbone of our economy, face the same devastating end.
Our APPG has heard very powerful evidence, but will these credible voices be heard by the official Government COVID-19 Inquiry? Stay-at-home mandates damaged the economy and reduced access to two great levellers in life – education and healthcare. We need guarantees they will not happen again and the government now needs to acknowledge that the cost of living crisis started with lockdowns.
Speaking about his devastating experience, business owner Adam Cunningham said:
I was proud to start up my telecomms business from scratch, with just £300, and was growing it year on year, by 200%. I started to struggle from day one of lockdown. At that point 80% of my business came from hospitality so I lost more than £120,000 revenue over the next twelve months, which for a small business owner is crippling and because my business was young, I did not qualify for any Government financial support packages so had to take out a Bounce Back Loan. I was beginning to build things back up last July, but it was too little too late.
Many of my clients had themselves gone out of business, others still would not commit to decisions. I took a second job and explored every avenue I could to stay afloat, but I had to pay back the loan and in April this year I was left with no choice but to shut my business. We need reassurances that lockdowns will never happen again. The damage has been immense and irreparable. Bankruptcies, people losing their houses, taking their own lives for something that has been proven not to work.
Jonathan Ketcham, healthcare economist and Professor in the W.P Carey School of Business at Arizona State University, gave a global perspective:
The bottom line is that Government policies have fuelled a cost of living crisis and created a pandemic of inequality going far beyond what the macro economic indicators can show. The huge inflation we have been seeing since 2020, leading to the sharp increases in the cost of living globally are not affecting everyone equally. Increased food, fuel, transportation and housing costs hurt those who spend most of their incomes on those essentials, namely the poor and middle class.
Vice-chair Emma Lewell-Buck MP said:
It will come as no surprise to those of us who warned that repeatedly locking down not just our country but the world, would have devastating economic effects on people’s lives and livelihoods.
Lockdowns break our economy and exacerbate inequalities. We need to learn these lessons and never repeat the harmful and, for many, irreversible mistakes of repeatedly locking down every aspect of society. The damage is now very clear to see and will continue to impact for years to come.
Despite the clear harms of lockdown and the absence of any strong evidence of benefit, Boris Johnson has said he would impose another one, and the Labour opposition has shown no sign of resiling from its backing for the policy. It is essential to keep the pressure on, to draw attention to the immense costs and harms of restrictions imposed to no obvious gain, in order to prevent such authoritarian public health policies being established as the norm for future disease outbreaks.
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Whether it be boiler taxes, evs, or vaccines an incredible minority of all politicians from any side actually care about the people they rule (sorry, represent)!
Just look at Bridgens covid debate, all the rats were absent!
“Considering?????? ——-You better consider quick.— Infact the whole of Net Zero is an impossibility and is going to cost so much money that it will be abandoned faster than Liz Truss. ——There are 21 million gas boilers in the UK. This gives us the best central heating system we ever had. We want to KEEP IT. ——-You better start getting that bloody gas out of the ground and cut out this pretend to save the plant crap immediately. We have taken a decade or more to try and fit a little smart meter in properties and still are nowhere near to getting that done. So how long is going to take to rip out boilers , radiators, rip up floorboards and force everyone to pay good money to be colder at huge expense. ————-You people have got to be kidding. Wake up from this pretend to save the planet garbage, and that applies not just to the Tories but to you all. ——–You have forced us in law to do the impossible and you don’t even care that it is going to cost trillions. —–You better change that law RIGHT NOW or the people will change it for you.
PS ——-Dear Huxleypigs, I tried some of that power breakfast that you ate this morning and it has certainly fired me up as you can see from the above.
Well done varmint. The power breakfast worked a treat. Stick with it.
Yum yum, where can I get some?
That was bloody spot on varmint
This whole Tory policy of freezing national assets and exporting manufacturing, energy production and mining to India, China and Africa may well go down well in UK academic institutions but is electoral suicide. Not only will shivering impoverished lockdown-damaged voters blame the party but the Tories will give the impression of being bought and owned by the UN and, consequently, controlled by whoever owns the UN. As Jim Hacker nearly pointed out, The Guardian is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country. Unfortunately, Sir Keir Starmer seems to agree!
The Tories are already bought and owned by the UN and those who own the UN. That is an unequivocal fact.
Smart meters largely failed because a lot of people chose not to have one, I ignored at least 8 letters telling me how wonderful they were and that engineers were in my area waiting to install one for me. The problem with gas boilers and EVs is that sooner or later everyone with a gas boiler or car will have to replace it, whereas smart meters were replacing something that still worked. This means the government will have far more leverage over people.
Nearly every month I am offered a smart meter! I have asked them to stop offering them to no avail so I now simply ignore.
Another case of govt floating ideas to see how they are reacted to. If they haven’t worked out what is going to be popular with their natural supporters by now, there’s no hope for them. But we knew that.
The other possibility is that they are hoping their natural supporters are so dozy that they will remember that the govt is definitely going to scrap this tax, just like it is definitely going to cut immigration. They may well be right!
Yes indeed. I remembering them ‘considering’ scrapping the 1000’s of pieces of EU red tape. Actual number scrapped: 0.
Yes and the BBC licence, but we all know they would NEVER give up the state propaganda arm.
Apparently Sunak is going to do an “I want to listen to your opinions” farce on GB News.
Sinking to 20% in the polls BEFORE the ONS predicted immigration figures were announced and the Asylum-chemical attack obviously hasn’t taught him anything.
He is either remarkably dense (I don’t believe that) or he doesn’t much care whether he wins or loses because he knows he can walk into well paid work and continue to influence things for decades to come – job with the UN or WHO or NATO, speaking engagements, the “Sunak Foundation” etc.
Ah yes, that world leading, tax dodging, charidee foundation, based on the successful Bliar model…
Fishy Farcicals.
Either Fishy has sold his soul to the Davos Deviants or they have some seriously incriminating evidence against him because when he is turfed out of Downing St he will carry the stigma of taking the Conservative Party in to oblivion. I don’t suppose he cares. None of them do. If Klaus or Billy says jump Fishy just wants to know how high.
“Fishy” ? —-Oh you mean Norman Wisdom? Every time I see this phony conservative I think of him falling about with that silly Norman Wisdom hat sideways on his head
The sheer brazen audacity of it. Attacking the manufacturers for policy they themselves imposed! Anything to fool the plebs though, I guess.
Dont forget they are doing the same with cars, in that they have set a target on the manufacturers of cars similar to the Boiler tax, in that if they dont sell enough then they have to pay substantial fines, and where do we all think those fines will end up being paid? Why on the cost of petrol and diesel vehicles of course. In short this is how things work in this country now.
Salary – taxed by the Government of anything between 25 and 80 percent including N.I.
Food, items, cleaning items, petrol, clothes, drinks, eating out another 20 percent or more if its fuel taken by the Government.
Electricity and Gas biils to heat and eat by, Government loads levys on to the providers which are passed on to the consumer in high bills, thus taking another wedge of already highly taxed post PAYE and N.I income.
If you save your taxed income, then they tax you on the interest you earn.
In short the amount of disposable income you are allowed to spend is minimal compared with the Lions share the Government takes.
What do they spend all this money on I wonder? we are in a serious financial mess, due to mismanagement of the economy, The health service is 3rd world standard, our Education system turns out indoctrinated zombies who cannot think for themselves and consequently cannot push the country forwards, our roads are a mess, our Police are only interested in virtue signalling, we are awash with ilegal immigrants who contribute nothing but use our medical care, our homes, our schools and of course our legal system. We have the largest number of State employees in History, the highest taxes, and the worst standards in care, Eduation, infrastructure, military, law enforcement since whenever.
So my question is what exactly are they doing with all of our money?
A fine summary of the state of the nation.
Sadly, what is occurring ie national destruction is actually being planned. The destruction is deliberate. In order to ‘Build back Better’ what currently exists has to be destroyed – all of it. Our roads, our hospitals, our justice system, parliament, our ability to defend ourselves, our industries, everything. To speed the process along the government wastes money on a collosal scale and then uses this pointless spending as an excuse to raise taxes thus rapidly impoverishing the population.
Nothing occurring today is genuine. Nothing. Or as Neil Oliver more eloquently puts it:
It’s not always about what they say it’s about.
Also we need to recognise who the real enemy is.
Giving shedloads of it away: Ukraine; Gaza; India; China; various Commonwealth countries; the UN; the EU; the WHO …… “charity-quangos” which oppose stated Government policy.
You name it ….. they get it.
Absolutely.
Yes because we are now not a Nation anymore, we are a region of the global community where the wealth gets redistributed. ——-That is what climate policies are eg. ———“One has to free oneself from the illusion the climate policies are environmental ones anymore. We redistribute the worlds wealth via climate policy” ——Edenhofffer IPCC.
At some point tax become extortion. We reached that point a very long time ago. I remember the Beatles song “The Taxman”, where they sang jokingly about taxing the air.———Lo and behold that is exactly what they are now doing —The Carbon Tax.
Well Hester, the car manufactures are moving away from electric vehicles in droves, they can’t sell them! GM yesterday, VW the other week etc. An electric car is not Green at all (except the possible paint colour) at least 90% of the lifetime emissions of a nice Euro6 Diesel. The fuel (electricity) costs a lot more than diesel if bought away from home, and the depreciation is horific at 30% a year! Then the batteries are clearly a severe fire hazard, three electic buses in London burnt completely last week. All this could be a devious idea of course, you cannot buy an IC car and you can’t buy an electric car! Ah well I will just make one then, or perhaps get a nice vintage car with huge emissions and no MOT!
And they have the audacity to try and con us into a smart meter by telling us it will save money because we won’t have an estimate bill anymore. ——–When all the while they know they want that meter in there to ration energy use, and charge more at peak times because they know that as they rely more and more in wind there won’t be enough electricity to provide base load.
Could, might, considering.
And not a Conservative principle in sight.
In order to run down the gas boiler and petrol/diesel vehicles by 2030 they would need to close production at least a year earlier. The time is running out and only Reform UK are standing on a policy of increasing domestic supply by fracking, mining & digging up our own resources.
“Reform UK” = “Common Sense Party”.
They should change their leader.
I may be wrong but ReformUK is owned by Tice and Farage. The members have no say whatsoever in how it is run. He is unlikely to sack himself. The Brexit Party was the same structure I believe.
How I hate the trite expression “hard working families”, its a blight on everyone, Pensioners, the sick, those who dont have families but are working, its just another transfer of cash from the citizen to the Government to spaff on their career enhancing projects.
According to Julian Assaunge, that is the job of the state, to take public money and place it into private hands.
I wonder why the Conservatives are considered to be in complete disarray and on the verge of an electoral wipe out. Hmm, I wonder why…..
In any case, on the issue of policies not quite working out as intended, Scott Adams expressed it quite well recently. He observes that liberals understand objectives but don’t understand systems. Which is why everything they try to affect with their high minded, lofty intentions turns to complete and utter shit.
There is a Liberal Progressive Virus spreading all over the western world. ——A Political Pandemic.
Could there be an election on the horizon?
Having established the principle that it is wrong to ban something that will have a detrimental effect on consumers by pushing up prices, the same logic needs to be applied to ICE cars and vans. Banning ICE vehicles is increasing the cost and scarcity of new and used car and vans, placing additional costs on drivers. Scrap the ICE ban now.