As The Observer notes this morning:
Rishi Sunak is facing a barrage of criticism in the run-up to the official Covid-19 inquiry as a leading scientist attacks his “spectacularly stupid” Eat Out to Help Out scheme, which is believed to have caused a sudden rise in cases of the virus.
They add:
The president of the British Medical Association, Prof Martin McKee, also criticises the “dysfunctional” way in which the government, including the Treasury under Sunak, overlooked scientific advice throughout the pandemic.
The evidence that the Treasury did not have a good Covid era is growing.
The description of ‘Eat out to help out' noted above may be too kind.
It is now apparent - and confirmed by Matt Hancock - that book-balancing was , as ever, the Treasury goal during this period. People have always featured very low on their list of priorities, even when it comes to matters of life and death.
And let's be blunt, the furlough and loan schemes were recklessly mismanaged with even the most basic checks on whether payrolls and even companies existed being ignored so keen were the Treasury to subsidise business rather than save lives.
It can be argued that none of this was Sunak's fault. He had only just arrived, and then as a deeply inexperienced minister promoted way too fast and probably beyond his ability (not for the first time) due to Sajid Javid's falling out with Johnson. But life is not fair like that to ministers. It is assumed you have the ability to master a complex brief quickly if you are given a role. There is no honeymoon period.
And Sunak knew enough about the Treasury by then to know the beast he was taking on. The cold-hearted creator of mayhem in the UK economy in the 1930s was still in place, ready to roll out its indifference to human suffering yet again. And Sunak let it do that. And we have all paid a price in some way.
So, Sunak deserves to be on Covid trial. But so too does the Treasury. It ignored the evidence, prudence, good governance and straightforward need and did its own hopeless things, so usual. It really is time that it was brought down to earth. It is not the home of the gods. It is the temple of doom, and that's why it needs to be pulled down and rebuilt in a much modified form.
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Along with the DWP for similar reasons.
We should press the Inquiry to understand how the key Sunak/ Johnson/ Treasury Heritage Foundation / GBS- funded ‘herd immunity’ ‘lets spread infection’ policy was delivered into the ear of the prime minister and then adopted against their own expert advice.
That led to the unnecesary deaths of tens of thousands.
Those interim findings could be published in a few months.
Thats what the bereaved families group must want.
Agreed
The public enquiry is going to take until 2026 to reach its conclusions. In the meantime the people’s covid inquiry already had lots of evidence which has been in the public domain since December 2021. Unfortunately the government and MSM has ignored it.
https://www.peoplescovidinquiry.com/evidence
Perhaps people on here could publicise it more?
Too many ‘politicians’ are just avatars – empty vessels loaded up by ‘political advisors’ who in my view really run the country. Sunak is a plain case of that for me.
But the Treasury – or should we call it the ‘Trashury’ – because that is what it does – trash the country – takes me back to my rather controversial comments about civil servants a while back.
The thing is after nearly half a century of neo-liberal bollix it’s hard not to comprehend the Trashury(sic) not being inculcated throughout with people who do not believe in government?
It would be nice and indeed prudent in my view for any genuinely progressive government in the future to have a really deep spring clean of all civil service departments when and if it ever comes in. I mean, how many of these civil servants have set things up and left the service to run what they have created at great personal profit?
Even one is too many?
Sorry but that is my view. Both the permanent and les permanent party political apparatus of our democracy is corrupted I’m afraid.
Whilst agreeing with much of the above, including the malign influence of the Treasury, disregard of scientific evidence, and potential culpability of some politicians, I hope there may be space for a somewhat dissenting view.
According to the Guardian (https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/may/08/sweden-japan-uk-debates-over-who-had-good-covid-wont-end) the UK was neither exceptionally good nor bad in handling the pandemic in terms of excess deaths. Apparently we are middle of the road, better than Germany and Italy but not as good as France. Notably Sweden had half the excess deaths. Perhaps there were exceptional reasons for that. Nevertheless it is difficult to ascibe particular numbers of deaths to particular actions. It would be difficult to find Sunak (and I’m not a fan) culpable beyond a reasonable doubt. Correlation (eat out to help out versus deaths) is not causation.
One particular concern (bearing in mind the primary teachers in my family) is the damage done to children by lockdown. Their education and mental health were notably damaged, even though they were at little risk. Furthermore there are indications that isolation may have damaged immune system s leading to subsequent deaths from common infections when isolation was relaxed.
I guess the point is that this is a complex issue with no easy answers.
I find that argument deeply, tediously, pro far-right thinking
It’s what they all say
Mr Kent,
Here is the problem. You are making a comparison between the UK (which you concede botched it), and Sweden and then draw a comaprison from statistics on all European studies: a little crude.
The UK botched it, but Scotland (trapped within the general Johnson-Hancock-Sunak botch, actuall performed slightly beeter than UK/England, hinting at what might have been possible). The reason for for the disater was laid down over a decade; austerity that dismantled Public Health (read the Cygnus Report findings, 2017; it skewered the UK Government from within, before the pandemic even hit).
A better comparison for Sweden that doesn’t beg the question (a favourite neoliberal ploy), is here: Frederik E. Juul, Henriette C. Jodal et al; ‘Mortality in Norway and Sweden during the COVID-19 pandemic’; Scand J Public Health. 2022 Feb; 50(1): 38–45. Published online 2021 Oct 5. (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8807990/)
The comparison is used by no less than ten researchers, because they make a good public health comparison; not a bad one. Here is a summary excerpt: “This study shows that all-cause mortality in Norway was lower during the pandemic, whereas the all-cause mortality among elderly people in Sweden increased substantially. In previous years, both countries have seen a decreasing trend in all-cause mortality. It remains to be seen whether the observed excess deaths in Sweden during the pandemic may, in part, be explained by mortality displacement and whether the COVID-19 pandemic and mitigation measures are associated with other harms or benefits”.
We already know Britain was hopeless. We live with it every day. It tells us precisely nothing about anyone else. Care is needed to make sound policy. Neoliberal trolling, eh? Who would have thought?
Thank you
Some sense
I don’t know how this site compares for reliability but it shows that while the rate of covid deaths by January higher in the east of Europe, only Italy has more deaths in the west.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1111779/coronavirus-death-rate-europe-by-country/
No easy answers?
Please Tim – think about the state of the country BEFORE Covid perhaps? The denial by your then prime minister? The atavistic policies of austerity? The disgusting attitude to our elderly, cast out of hospitals like used husks when Covid came.
Think about the cultures we have here – kids are under immense pressure to perform at GCSE and A Levels having been told that this is their ‘big chance’ do or die. My son going through A levels now knows that he has missed out on valuable lesson time studying German last year but still has to sit an exam. Thanks.
And the culture of work – yeah – don’t be at home looking after and supporting your children – get out to work, where the workplace can exploit mothers and fathers for cheap labour.
What you are missing – and the bloke who wrote your article I think is missing too – is the concept of redundancy – the time to have time (and other resources) to absorb unseen events and challenges.
Everything seems so pressured these days and on a shoe-string too. Schools are now like sausage machines churning out success and failures and nothing in between. Hospitals are places where people turn up to only to start a process of getting well but people not actually getting any better as quickly as they did and that was before Covid and many will get worse and were dying – just like now.
I cannot tell you what has gone on in France or Germany but I was here in the UK and saw it all with my own eyes. Where were you?
You are being far too kind Tim. Now stop it will you? Please?
I appreciate you allowing me to put a different view on your blog, even though you disagree.
Thanks.
I will never agree with it
The thing is Tim Kent, things don’t ‘just happen’.
The results of Covid are no different to me at least than the Grenfell fire, where government destruction of building regulations led to combustible cladding being used on the externals of the block or how about 2008, where a perfect storm of lax regulation and due diligence in the selling of mortgages and the financial derivative markets caused the mother of all economic crashes?
These three outcomes all bear the burden of having some form of interference, some form of rule breaking, some form of mis-directed faith with fingers crossed behind one’s back – all too common these days.
All in pursuit of a notion of freedom for one section of society (producers) , at the cost to the other (consumers and others).
I sort of agree with Tim Kent in that it is easy to criticise with hindsight, and at the time all countries were faced with emerging and incomplete evidence with the result they all made a mix of good and bad decisions. I hope the inquiry doesn’t get bogged down in working out how things would have been done better if they knew what we know now – the next pandemic will be different. (In fact one of the problems was that what government preparation existed was based on H1N1 flu and was insufficiently flexible).
What needs most to be looking at are the decision processes for taking rapid action and allocating resources, and whether they need to be changed to serve the country better in an emergency. As you point out it looks from the outside as if one of the problems was government continuing to function in silos in competition rather than working together (i.e. Treasury versus Cabinet Office versus Department of Health), and that needs proper study and recommendations.
The other big question I see is whether the decision-makers were acting with good understanding. For some reason there is a culture of government in this country that reserves the major decision-making positions (ministers, and the senior civil servants and SPADs who support them) for those with a humanities background, lacking confidence in science and mathematics. A lot of pressure was put on Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance, when the decision-makers themselves should have been competent to scrutinise proposals and ask pertinent questions. (SAGE and the scientific community did their best, but they were real scientists who by their nature question themselves all the time, and they rarely seemed to be challenged by the actual decision-makers).
I think those sorts of issues are far more important for the inquiry to address than looking at whether Boris Johnson attended any parties that have not yet been reported.
I think your judgement very poor.
Sorry – but anyone who can write the lsdt para has really missed the political as well as practical significance of this and IMO also lacks a moral compass. I will be that blunt and suspect you won’t like it, and I don’t really care. I spent that summer, as I have already noted, arguing with those who claimed from academic positions that the epidemic was over and who effectively supported the GBD position. It was glaringly obvious that they were wrong. Retrospective exoneration of the sort you are providing infuriates me.
I am not sure what you are saying there. Are you really disagreeing with my suggestion that Covid showed that government decision-making processes were not fit for purpose, particularly in an emergency?
That is the only point I was making, other than its relevance to the inquiry. I don’t think I wrote anything implying I supported the Great Barrington fools, or thought Covid over, or that I exonerated Johnson et al.
I read a lot more than you think you said
But if you didn’t think it, c’est la vie
The Cygnus report in 2017 wasn’t hindsight. It forecast a disaster if nothing was done, and the expected pandemic arrived (at the time a flu pandemic was predicted). Nothing was done from 2017, austerity went on and on; until a catastrophic pandmemic arrived, as predicted and as a result the national debt that stood at slightly £2.4Trn (the rest of the rise mainly caused by Brexit). Neoliberalism, eh?
I claim no perfect foresight, but I could see ‘Eat out to Help out’ in the middle of a pandemic was a bad policy that would end badly. It was obvious, except for the oner-optimistic, gullible neoliberals always looking for an easy way out for Britain, without actually having to commit adequate resources.
Typtos, eh? I though I had written this, but part of it just disappeared (rather like Conservative promises).
“the national debt that stood at £2.4Trn (the rest of the rise mainly caused by Brexit)”.
Apparently we literally had no money in 2010 and had to have thirteen years of austerity to cut the debt abd create surpluses (and still not over, by a long chalk), destroy the Public Health system and demolish the NHS.
There were no surpluses. And we still raised the National Debt by >150%. Could someone tell me how we did that? Blow £1.4Trn+, turn Britain into a desert; all with no money.
Oh, I have just discoverd you can’t seem to use ‘less/more than’ symbols in comments – it takes out the words/numbers between the symbols; it disappears, if I do not write out “less than £1Trn in 2010, more than £2.4Trn now”. How odd!
I shall slink away now.
Sorry….
Sorry, but that’s rubbish. It wasn’t just parties that Johnnson was hiding. What about, “Let the bodies pile high.”
You wouldn’t know about it now from the MSM, but Independent Sage is still going even though the government doesn’t want it to.
https://www.independentsage.org/2023/05/
Independent Sage has been debating Covid ever since they left Johnson’s Sage group because they did not agree with the premise of Sage, right back to April 2020. They have even more evidence than the People’s Covid Inquiry. If you wish to disagree with Richard, read them first.
That is quite good advice
They are people I much admire
Thank you JenW, I hadn’t realised the Independent Sage group were still going. While I can’t possibly scan their entire output (several hundred videos of around an hour) I looked at their recent written statements and they are all helpful contributions.
I am facing the dilemma expressed by Richard in his recent blog on typos. Since I know what I was trying to write, re-reading it that is what I see. I didn’t think I was contradictory. What I was trying to say was that of course some of the decisions made during an emerging serious situation with inevitably incomplete data would be wrong in hindsight, and that seems to have been true of every national administration (to take a simple example, most countries were issuing advice on hand hygiene even once data was showing the vast majority, and probably all, of cases came from airborne infection). While an inquiry can look at those actions that turned out to be wrong, the real question is whether the decision-making was as good as it could have been under the circumstances, or whether there were systemic shortcomings that can be learned from before the next pandemic or equivalent crisis. So questions like: were the right people in the room, were they truly collaborating for the national good or engaged in internal power struggles, and did they cast the net wide enough when considering evidence to underlie decisions – for example looking at the wider body of expertise like Independent Sage as well as their own advisory panel.
I certainly agree with the main point of Richard’s blog, that appearances create a serious doubt about whether the Treasury (and Sunak as Chancellor) were working collaboratively in the national interest or engaging in a power battle with Number Ten that undermined coherent decision making. My only possible controversial point was saying that the inquiry’s examination of that sort of systemic problem seems to me much more important than criticising specific errors in individual historic decisions that will never recur identically,
But as Richard says, if you don’t think the same, c’est la vie.
Jonathan, any enquiry is only useful in hindsight. Michael Mansfield says as much in The People’s Covid Inquiry, which was done in 2020-1. He knew that the government would prevaricate as long as possible and then tell people that their memories could not be trusted as it had been so long ago, particularly if they were elderly or suffered from memory loss due to long covid.
That’s why his inquiry was set up when it was.
If you can’t be bothered to read much of Independent Sage, at least read the summary sessions of the People’s Covid Inquiry. I watched every two hour session as it happened. I’ve watched them again, as I caught covid while in hospital in September 2021 and forgot everything about them.
Surely your powers of concentration are better than a 74 year old suffering from long covid. (It took me five minutes to remember the word concentration then, by the way.)
https://www.peoplescovidinquiry.com/join-our-sessions
@ Richard,
“Eat Out to Help Out” does look a particularly stupid policy now. However, that’s not what many were saying at the time. We (and I’m not excluding myself) were guilty of a false optimism in the summer of 2020 as the lockdown was ended, albeit temporarily as it turned out, as the Covid infection rate fell to low levels, and especially as no reliable vaccines were yet available.
Your own criticism in Oct 2020 concerned the lack of economic benefits of the policy rather than the policy itself, saying ” eat out to help out was of, overall, marginal significance.”
https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2020/10/09/the-v-shaped-recovery-is-not-happening-were-now-in-recession-and-its-going-to-get-worse-without-radical-action/
I was in correspondence and discussion with optimists that summer – Danny Dorling in particular – who sid my pessimism was misplaced. I decided to be relatively quiet. I was wrong. I should have shared all my doubts.
I think Mr Warren hits the nail on the head. The UK was skewered from the start by the evisceration of public services, particularly the NHS, over more than a decade of austerity. That, IMO, is the real crime here, though I doubt the guilty will face any sort of justice.
I hope the comment about neo-liberal trolling was not aimed at me, but suspect it was. Someone further from neo-liberalism would be hard to find. But, nevertheless, I try to take a balanced view. Yes, the UK botched the pandemic badly, but so did many others. That’s not to excuse anyone but it seems unnecessary to overly denigrate the UK (though God knows there’s plenty else to denigrate).
Anyway, thanks to all for an interesting discussion, particularly Richard for starting it.
Read my Coronavirus timeline
It was possible for there to have been better policy
I make the point because I proposed it
That was gracious of you Mr Kent; and yes the trolling comment was made about your comment because it followed a certain way of approaching the nature of the problem that is a sound guide usually standard neoliberal deflection.
The excuses for the UK do not wash; especially as we were constantly told by Government and media throughout that the UK was a world leader in its response to the pandemic. It wasn’t; the radical innovation and delivery on vaccines was German science, and American Big Pharma execution; it changed the development profile of vaccines for the future.
We have blown a King’s ransom in executing Brtitish Government failure on the grand scale, by a Party and Government that are frankly a national embarrassment, or worse; and led by a quite obviously appalling inept collection over over-promoted, underequipped politicians, who have one consistency; a lack of compassionate humanity, combined with political narcissim on the grand scale. This was obvious to anyone who wasn’t blind or sinking in denial.
We elect and promote the wrong kind of people in Britain. This is a fundamental flaw in our culture. We urgently need to think about that (because we keep doing it, over and over – in politics, business, media ….), if we are going to care about anything but raw greed and individual self-absorption; ….. but I am confident we won’t. We have been doing it for a long time.
To confirm the disaster we were in, Prof John Edmunds, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and a Sage committee member, advising Ministers during the pandemic is well placed to comment on ‘Eat Out to Help Out’. He has said (Guardian, yesterday), that Eat Out to Help Out was never discussed with scientists. If he had been consulted, he offers a crisp and unambigous summation of his opinion, that doesn’t miss and hit the wall: “As far as I am concerned, it was a spectacularly stupid idea and an obscene way to spend public money”.
This is how we are governed. This is neoliberalism. You really did not require to be a scientist to work out that Eat Out to Help Out, given where we were, was plain daft.
I looked for that quote this morning…..
For those who think I was not talking about the risks of a second wave of Covid read this from me in June 2020. https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2020/06/26/coronavirus-the-fat-lady-has-not-sung-yet/
I have reviewed several months of my writing on this issue now. Of course I got some things wrong (I under predicted deaths, but was told I wildly overestimated them). But overall I think I offered vastly better policy than we got .
I’m not well-informed with politics in general, but what I do know is that I found this blog because I searched for ‘How to stop a corrupt UK government’. I’m unsure as to what extent propaganda around helping local businesses during the pandemic changed public mindsets, but I remember not wanting to lockdown at the beginning and then immediately realising it was too late. Maybe the government did save lives in places, but have definitely not been transparent, nor taken a ‘for-the-people’ with any activity they do. I do feel some sympathy for those such as Liz Truss who have been ostracised, but at the end of the day shouldn’t have joined a right-wing party.
In Britain I think its hard to grasp the concept of an ideal government who perfectly serve the people who supposedly chose them as their advocate, because we haven’t had a good government system for so long. How to go about replacing it and exposing the corruption – especially on mainstream bias media – is another question.
I get most of that
But nit the bit on Truss
I voted against her when I lived in her constituency
The UK government has not upgraded the numbers of deaths in the UK since March 17th. It says so.
If you think they could have saved lives, how come according to Worldometers we have the 6th highest number of deaths in the world, and the highest in Europe?
Mr Tim Kent might have a look at the following paper published in the Economic Journal, Vol 132, April 2022, pp 1200-2017 in relation to the impact of the eat out scheme.
Subsidising the spread of COVID-19: evidence from the UK’s eat-out-to-help-out scheme
Thiemo Fetzer
This paper documents that a large-scale government subsidy aimed at encouraging people to eat out in restaurants in the wake of the first 2020 COVID-19 wave in the United Kingdom has had a significant causal impact on new cases, accelerating the subsequent second COVID-19 wave. The scheme subsidised 50% off the cost of food and non-alcoholic drinks for an unlimited number of visits in participating restaurants on Mondays–Wednesdays from 3–31 August 2020. Areas with higher take-up saw both a notable increase in new COVID-19 infection clusters within a week of the scheme starting and a deceleration in infections within two weeks of the program ending. Similarly, areas that exhibited notable rainfall during the prime lunch and dinner hours on the days the scheme was active record lower infection incidence—a pattern that is also measurable in mobility data—and non-detectable on days during which the discount was not available or for rainfall outside the core lunch and dinner hours.
Checked it
Looks persuasive
Looks like correlation in this case does suggest causation because controls were created
Is there anything good for a non-Brit to read about the history of the British Treasury and the “Treasury View” over the last century?
I would never describe the U.S. Treasury Dept. as enlightened but at least under Morgenthau (FDR’s second Treasury secretary) it was not openly reactionary. But my impression is that, except when Keynes was effectively running the show, the British ministry has been much more consistently bad. References?
None spring instantly to mind
But it is early
Anyone else got some?
Unprepared for the pandemic ( or almost anything else)!
Excess deaths, poverty, inadequate social/healthcare, unemployment, lack of educational access!
It took a Social Liberal and a “Socialist” government to start to tackle these issues.
“Beveridge famously declared war on the five ‘giant evils’ of Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness. “ Citizen Clem, A biography of Attlee.
And it has taken Hayek/Thatcher/Osborne to deliberately and systematically drag us back to the 30s and before.
My family and I lived through SARS-1 in Hong Kong in 2003, and for a few tense hours I caused panic in our local district hospital in UK during a brief home visit at Easter 2003, because it was thought I might have brought SARS-1 to the UK. It was clear at the time that there was no obvious local plan to deal with the problem of highly dangerous infectious disease entering the UK via air travel. After that 2003 case of a nasty infection escaping China, the UK government under Labour came up with a plan at national level and mandated resources to cope with similar disease transfer. These included large stockpiles of PPE and would have used a widespread and well-staffed Public Laboratory Service (PLS) to pick up samples, analyse and then disseminate timely information about the spread of infectious disease.
We now know that this sensible planning was allowed to wither away under austerity from 2010 onwards, with a warehouse full of out of date PPE and a PLS privatised. Public Health England was hollowed out and its expertise diminished. All of these institutions could have provided the foundations for a rapid expansion of testing and tracing, on a South Korean model, but instead we ended up with the embarrassment of so-called ‘NHS Test and Trace’, presided over by a former mobile phone executive and fleeced of £’ms by Deloittes and other consultants trying to make a ridiculous call-centre model work when it was local expertise which should have been deployed.
It is not just Johnson, Sunak, Hancock et al who are responsible for the subsequent calamitous handling of the pandemic in 2020 and 2021. It included Cameron, Osborne and particularly Hunt who presided over the trashing of an important set of pandemic fighting resources that needed a long term view of risk to public health.
The ‘stupidity’ of Eat Out to Help Out and Covid business loans were symptomatic of a fundamental problem with the Tory philosophy, where lobbing un-targeted money into the private sector has to go hand in hand with shrinking the state.
My concern in the long term is how do we shrink government out of areas which need long term sustainable governance and investment in order to provide sound services? When Baroness Hallett’s enquiry concludes, will it recommend setting up a new set of services and institutions, only for them to be sold off or run down by a future Tory government?
I would like to see health and education taken out of the hands of government ministers altogether, with their funding set at sustainable levels that reflect demand, not the whims of a here-today, gone-tomorrow dilettante such as Hunt, Hancock, Coffey and now Barclay. Strategy and policy to be developed by health and education experts, not politicians. I live in hope…