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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Nothing to do with Brexit then – good to know.
These people clearly are not the right sort of experts.
Why do we need any experts to tell us this (which should have been plainly obvious to anyone with two brain cells to rub together) in the first place?
Who’d have thought that paying millions of people to sit around doing naff all for best part of 2 years on money “printed” out of thin air and destroying the economy (which was already ****ed) would have caused this?
I reckon it’s not lockdown. It was Russia that did it. Remember that when you’re starving to death – not lockdowns, Russia.
There is nothing the government can do about it really as it has nothing to do with them. Russia! Russia! Russia!
Fuel cost rises are the result of green policies.
Inflation generally is the result of excessive money supply growth over many years. Inflation as measured by the RPI/CPI was subdued by low cost imports from China whereas asset prices, which are not in the indexes, shot up in price.
There is no mystery but politicians and journalists nwho do not want to face the truth and be accountable, are trying to confuse the issues.
“politicians and journalists nwho do not want to face the truth and be accountable, are trying to confuse the issues.”
No change there I fear.
Supply chain issues didn’t “build up”.
Governments the world over took a jack hammer to the world’s economies and wrecked the supply chains, amongst plenty of other things.
At the insistence of Bill Gates, btw, who was allowed time in major news programmes to advocate lockdowns. He and his class have seen their wealth multiply since then. Those are just facts.
The Government knew that lockdowns would not stand up to a proper cost-benefit analysis. That is exactly why they didn’t do one.
It’s the same reason why they won’t do one for net zero or conduct a proper safety analysis for the gene therapies.
The world over there are now “experts” stating the bleeding obvious.
Think how much money and time could be saved by simply consulting any random comments page from Lockdown Sceptics from March 2020 onwards.
The main problem now coming down the road will be the natural, annual rise in respiratory infections from about September onwards.
As we approach this point the ghosts of Sage and independent Sage and their allies in the media will re-appear beseeching the government to re-introduce all the same old lockdown, mask-wearing and other measures which have caused the disastrous financial, health and educational effects we are now seeing.
The government’s biggest test will be to stand up to these doom-mongers who’ve already been proved catastrophically wrong. Unfortunately, the signs aren’t good.
Unless they’re more worried about the food riots…
It’s ironic, isn’t it? We are retired without children and our biggest outlays annually used to be holidays, hobbies and entertainment. Well obviously that all went by the board and that money that would have been spent was put aside. Just as well, as we will need it to be able to eat, heat our house (oil) and drive our cars. The future looks thoroughly depressing, but it must be a billion times worse for the millions that are only one wage packet away from disaster.
Time for a bit of civil unrest – I can’t understand the mentality of people anymore. They just shrug their shoulders and don’t seem to care about what is happening. Where has our anger and fire gone to?
Much though I applaud what has been said by Esther McVey and her fellow committee members it appears that they are still failing to ask why lockdowns and attendant, abusive wasting of taxpayers money went on for over two years.
While intellectual vigour is in extremely short supply in Westminster it is reasonable to conclude that even an O’ Level Economics graduate could work out that spending 400 billion £’s on a modified ‘flu was a criminal waste of money, money that we haven’t got and which we will never now generate owing to the government’s wilful destruction of the economy.
So, the correct questions are still not being asked. Why?
I too am a small business owner. Survived on a Bounce Back loan. Almost canned it after the ridiculous Omicron scare, but now profitable and fighting on. (Still paying the bloody loan back…). So who gave the briefing that we had to follow Italy, following China, that lockdowns were the answer. It changed very rapidly, and across almost the entire world suddenly. Even the duplicitous WHO were briefing against lockdowns to start with.
The worst of it is that we were all saying how damaging lockdowns were at the time.
Isn’t it strange how many ordinary commentators below the line of various publications were saying this at the time the destructive lockdowns were imposed.
And some seed fell on stoney ground.
“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.”
Are these people thick and brainless or just inherently evil?
So Boris would do the same again, probably expecting different results. Classic definition of insanity.