There are, I think, four key strands of questioning for Rishi Sunak when he appears before the Covid inquiry today. These questions have to be focussed: they only have him for a day.
The first relates to March 2020. The question is whether lockdown was delayed because of Sunak's fear of financial market reaction. Johnson has hinted it was. If that was the case lives were sacrificed to those markets and that would be unforgivable.
Second is a general question, which is why financial support was not given to many of the most vulnerable people who needed to lockdown or isolate and could not afford to do so, meaning the disease was unnecessarily spread. Why was support so badly focussed that this outcome was inevitable? That is the question.
Third, there is the question that needs answering on ‘Eat out to help out', which is why this was done without scientific advice? Was the Treasury really that callous?
The fourth is, maybe, the most important. It was Sunak who brought the proponents of the far-right ‘let it rip' Barrington Declaration to Downing Street in September 2020, which had such disastrous consequences in delay and dithering that autumn. We need to know if he really believed what they said. If so he really is not fit to be prime minister. His indifference to the wellbeing of people would be proven.
Everything else bar these questions is, I think, padding. I hope we get answers.
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An invaluable framing of the issues. Thanks.
The result of long discussion whilst out birdwatching yesterday.
I write the posts here, but my wife helps frame more than most people appreciate.
Not surprised. We have heard something of her interesting views here and I had a sense of quiet influence, at least at one remove (so to speak).
I suspect one third of my tweets, at least, are heavily influenced by her.
Many blogs start in discussion in our kitchen – where she and I most often work these days.
She also does a great deal of media monotoring – which throws up some of the more obscure links used on occassion.
Eat out to help out was the modern equivalent of ‘Let them eat cake’ – something us proles could do to help each other out without those at the top having to lift a finger.
The modern Tory party is good at obtaining power but completely useless to anyone but themselves when they have it.
I think we can see Sunak’s line of defence (only because I have already heard his apologists spinning it on the media).
1) Sunak had to explain the economic costs of ‘lockdown’ inside government.
2) The economic costs were exacerbated by the consequences of lockdown.
The problem with this defence is that the Treasury found it easy to point at the obvious, immediate impact on economic activity of ‘lockdown’ and pursue that to the N-th degree. What Sunak did not do was provide a proper, comprehensive economic analysis; including the economic costs of a) not locking down in a pandemic, with the virus ravaging the whole country; b) not acting fast, and coming out of ‘lockdown’ earlier; c) not acting fast both in Spring 2020 and the Autumn.
Those who challenge lockdown; and a late, flawed lockdown because the challengers of ‘lockdown’ had too much policy influence, and could exploit the economic ignorance of politicians. The defenders of Sunak must provide a systematic model of the economy in a cataclysmic pandemic, without lockdown (and prove it existed in 2020). What they are trying to do is compare the economy with no pandemic, against an economy with ‘lockdown’, after a pandemic. The fact is the apologists for Sunak fear the Treasury analysis was narrow, prejudiced and inadequate, and wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny.
The time is long overdue when the Treasury was brought to account for its failings.
“Those who challenge lockdown, and a late, flawed lockdown had too much policy influence, and could exploit the economic ignorance of politicians”.
I am always in too much haste ….
With regard to your point about the costs of not locking down, something which increasingly bothers me is a similar point about climate change, we constantly hear about the costs of eg phasing out fossil fuels, but never about the costs of not doing it.
Typo Richard
Third, there is the question that heeds answering on
Thanks
Apropos of your remark ……he really is not fit to be PM. ” Richard.
Frankly, pandemic or no pandemic, when has this peevish, entitled, lying and over monied little man ever been fit to be PM?
I would like to know how many lives Sunak thinks it is acceptable to lose to defend ‘the economy’, whatever he thinks that means.
Too often politicians pontificate on matters they know nothing about. Could they be required to publish the research on which they base their claims?
Public attitudes are hugely affected by BBC managers, press barons etc. Will these people be examined by Lady Hallett?
What can be learned from the Covid calamity that should help us with the looming health, food and economic crises which are already evident as a consequence of climate change – mainly exacerbated by burning fossil fuels?
People who are rich, or are experts in one field, need to be challenged. The point was made by Professor Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre for Climate change Research, University of Manchester, who wrote from the COP event (Dec 4):
“I suggest we ignore @BillGates on midwifery, football tactics, pension planning, train design & climate change. If [you] want an expert on … software companies, Bill’s your man. But let’s ignore his nonsense on subjects he patently knows nothing about.”
It’s also true that when dealing with a wicked problem like climate change, where any action taken is likely to have effects in many different contexts, no single area of expertise ever has the answers.
For example, the environmental issues, the economic problems, the agricultural nightmare & the required cultural changes all interact & can exacerbate or damp down other (sometimes unforeseen) problems, and the second & third order effects of apparently minor decisions can be cataclysmic.
Many small steps & careful observation of the consequences are what’s needed. Diversity of action rather than huge changes of direction… but we’re running out of time.
The fourth question on the Heritage Foundation / Koch sponsored GBD in Autumn indeed most important. Not sure the Inquiry has highlighted that.
Maybe he knew Johnson always liked the ‘herd immunity’ ‘let everyone get infected’ and ‘get through’ the pandemic quickly.
So he brought in what Kit Yates and ISage have called ‘fringe scientists’ to tell Johnson what he already wanted to be told.
The Mail and Telegraph now scoping ‘lockdowns’ as a complete disaster – still no discussion about SE Asian approach which involved mitigation, clean air , masks , filters, social distancing etc with few or no lockdowns . Assumes we are so stupid that we can only comprehend ‘lockdown’ or ‘let it rip’ .
BBC chimes in today with ‘balance’ between rabid ‘opinion’ (Luke Johnson) and fact.
Sunak has just talked about the financing of the pandemic, the “difficulty” of getting money from the Bank of England and the need to pay it back. He added that’s why the current tax burden is “higher than I’d like”. Hugo Keith KC didn’t follow any of that up, but actually the inquiry isn’t about that, so I didn’t expect him to.
All of Sunak’s claims are total drivel. In effect he’s suggesting QE did not happen, which is utterly absurd.
There is not a penny to repay for Covid.
He doesn’t remember a lot of it. “I didn’t get that email”, “I wasn’t in that email chain”, “I didn’t write that email…”. Does he realise how all that sounds? Either he was excluded as chancellor, which you just can’t believe, or he wasn’t on top of his job. Yet he also said during his evidence that he wasn’t excluded. The bereaved families have just gone for him in their press conferences at lunchtime.
Asked by the Counsel for Welsh Bereaved Families why the Devolved Administrations were not consulted before ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ was announced, Sunak said that was the way Devolution worked for Reserved areas. He said he did not expect that the Devolved Administrations would contact him or the UK Government about their decisions in non-reserved areas.
Well, that doesn’t work. The Scottish Parliament has just had the Gender Reform Act overturned, following a never used, but lethal Section 35 appeal by the UK to Scotland’s Court of Session. The Scottish Court of Session, Scotland’s supreme civil court, has ruled that UK ministers acted lawfully when they blocked the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill, passed on a cross-party basis by the Scottish Parliament.
100% agreed John
When I was watching it, I thought he had dropped himself and Johnson in it here.
There was one moment, however, that Mr Sunak appeared to land himself in it, when he may have inadvertently revealed that he and the then prime minister broke lockdown restrictions by chatting to each other in the No10 garden at weekends while his family had a barbecue.
‘Discussing the spring of 2020, when discussions were being made about the pandemic, Mr Sunak said: “If I was having lunch with my family in the garden at the same time that the prime minister was, on a typical weekend in Downing Street, then we would obviously be chatting as we were barbecuing.”
Given households were not permitted to mix throughout much of 2020, and a family barbecue could not be considered a “work event”, did these social occasions breach lockdown rules? Surely they were not held before 23 March, when lockdown came into effect, as it would have been too cold to have a barbecue outdoors. Did Sue Gray investigate these events? ‘
Anyone else agree?
I read somewhere that the Met had stopped looking into Partygate etc. from today. Perhaps they will have a rethink after this.
I heard that and it did not register
At the beginning of his testimony Mr Sunak said he would speak with candour. The testimony was a contaminant free, disinfected, hygienic, laboratory clean zone; he saw nothing, he heard nothing and he said nothing. Whatever his testimony amounts to, I think we can safely say, it was less than candid. Or perhaps he must have been Chancellor in a different Cabinet, a different Pandemic to the catastrophe imploding disaster his close colleagues experienced. Like Johnson, Hancock, Raab and Gove before him, it is striking that the standard of Government that appears to pass muster for a Conservative Minister is so low, it is clearly almost impossible to fail. It speaks, above all to the presumptions of neoliberal Conservatism.
Mr Sunak clearly doesn’t believe in the precautionary principle. He believes in acting only after the evidence is in; although the economic analysis and evidence he relies on with a great deal of emphatic confidence is not scientific and even less certain than the science. Shown some early calculations from the Treasury of Covid impacts, he confessed such work improved over time, but of course the decisions could not be changed in retrospect. And as he acknowledges on an issue that is central (but not necessarily to the Covid Inquiry, at least in this Module), but on which it may fairly be said he failed badly; i.e., on real Cost-Benefit analysis, he confesses it is just too difficult for the Treasury and economists to do.
But first, on your four seminal issues, Richard.
1) Financial Markets. I confess I didn’t feel this was pursued in a way that pinned down an answer. I thought the questioning by Counsel wasn’t really focused on the matter, at least as you raised it.
2) Financing the vulnerable. Sunak claimed he had financed the vulnerable, indeed more than anyone else was helped. He had reduced poverty. He clearly believes he is vindicated on helping the worst-off, no matter how it was raised with him.
3) Eat out to Help Out. The policy was part of the “roadmap” out of lockdown, already established. After announcement and before implementation nobody raised the issue with him; implying there were no grounds for complaint at the time.
4) Great Barrington Declaration. Just the PM airing the views of alternative scientific opinion. Nothing to see here.
Sunak has the mind of a functionary, an apparatchik, not a politician. Questioned closely by Keith on the Treasury, its role and influence; he focused mostly on his role, giving advice of Treasury on the economic consequences of decisions: “My prime responsibility”. As a politician rather than a civil servant, I would have thought his role was primarily political; to provide the government with the resource to fight the pandemic, protect the public, the NHS (already under-resourced by his Government by any measure), with the fewest casualties, and as swiftly as possible. I would expect the precautionary principle to be prioritised. I did not see precaution as Sunak’s first principle. Indeed, as one indication of this even in November, 2020 (second lockdown), he said he “didn’t oppose” it. Contextually, after so much suffering, and failure in policy, this is scarcely a ringing endorsement of the precautionary principle. He is much more ready, assembling the arguments to justify boosting economic activity.
We could therefore describe Sunak as a disciple of the opposite to the precautionary principle; something closer to the pro-actionary principle. The pro-actionary principle is not yet well-defined, but implies systematic, rational analysis of choices. In the context of economics it therefore implies a need for cost-benefit analysis; exactly the analysis that Sunak did not apply. Here is the Sky News summary of his exchange on cost-benefit analysis with Keith:
“Hugo Keith KC, the inquiry’s head counsel, repeatedly refers during his questioning to a 2022 article in the Spectator magazine titled ‘The lockdown files: Rishi Sunak on what we weren’t told’.
In the article, Mr Sunak suggests a ‘cost-benefit’ calculation was not made when it came to COVID restrictions.
Asked what he meant with this comment, he says he was agreeing with ‘something that one of the epidemiologists has subsequently said’.
He says he did not instruct the Treasury to start preparing cost-benefit calculations on account of his view at the time.
Mr Keith questions why he did not do this given his remarks to the Spectator, and Mr Sunak responds that it’s an ‘incredibly hard thing to do’.
‘I think we shouldn’t we shouldn’t just assume that it was available off the shelf to just do,’ the prime minister says.
‘We shouldn’t pretend that you can reduce all these things to a simple number that the prime minister can just see and then make a decision based on it.’”
Cost-benefit analysis is difficult. It is difficult because economics has failed to deliver a satisfactory methodology. This should make Sunak more inclined to follow the advice of the science rather than analysis that he can’t deliver (the science was ‘on the edge’ of knowledge, but still not reliant on such a weakness in method as economics), and he should have been less confident in his economic analysis; but it doesn’t make any difference to him.
The case is worse. When Sunak was issuing Treasury advice on the adverse economic consequences of lockdown, or various other NPI measures, he was comparing the current economy, with (say) a lockdown economy. You do not need modelling to see the adverse implications for the economy – they are obvious, to the point of the banal; but this is a completely false prospectus for the Treasury analysis. The impacts being measure are all immediate, and obvious. The real economic problem, the real difficulty however is not obvious. It is far, dar more complex. too complex for the Treasury, as Sunak acknowledges above. Hoist by his own petard.
The real comparison is between lockdown; and not the status quo, because the status quo is not going to withstand the impact of infection: but of an economy adversely affected by infection, hospitalisation, tens or hundreds of thousands of deaths, and widespread, demoralising calamities for many families, and millions of people – because there is no lockdown. There is an unanalysed (un-analysable) adverse economic impact. That analysis wasn’t even offered, because the Treasury can’t do it. In Treasury speak; if they can’t do it, it doesn’t count. It can be dismissed. At least that seems to be Sunak’s position.
The Scientists may sometimes fail; but the economists and bankers do not even reach the starting gate. That, nevertheless is why Sunak believes in the economics over the science. When he talks of saving millions of jobs, he isn’t really following rigorous economic analysis; I hypothesise that in such a predicament and what really persuades decision makers facing, for example the imminent Lombardy disaster as a warning of what is coming (combined with the best judgement of real scientists, not mere economists); or later by simple economic intuition.
In the end, scientists are scientists. Economists aren’t scientists. Sunak is PPE Oxford, MBA Stanford, Goldman Sachs banker. He isn’t a scientist, and doesn’t possess the capacity to deliver to others the technical degree of confidence required by scientific observation and experiment (something economics struggles to do).
That, at least is my impromptu, first intuitive judgement.
Many thanks and appreciated.
Deeply depressing
But it proved the man really is not fit to govern.
As ever I need to tidy up an incoherent paragraph; and add a gratuitous blue-sky peroration.
“The Scientists may sometimes fail; but the economists and bankers do not even reach the starting gate. That, nevertheless is why Sunak believes in the economics over the science. When he talks of saving millions of jobs, he isn’t really following rigorous economic analysis; I hypothesise that in such a predicament what really persuades decision makers facing, for example the imminent Lombardy disaster as a warning of what is coming (combined with the best judgement of real scientists, not mere economists) is a human intuitive response to a frightening prospect; or if moved by economic anxiety that is not open to appropriate quantitative comparative analysis, then by a human response – a simple economic intuition”.
The precautionary principle is the human response to a human crisis; prioritising the most fundamental of basic human values. The proactionary principle is rational, analytical, or quasi-posthuman, detached from the weight of the purely human response; it sets aside purely human responses, or human-centred responses for a supposed ‘objective’ critical rationality. Neoliberalism is, I suspect an early form of the proactionary principle, applied to politics through economics. The economy in the modern proactionary neoliberal form is not a system that serves the ends of the human; but rather, the human serves the self-functioning ends of the economy, by following a set of analytical, typically financial prescriptions.
Sunak seems to me to represent an early, current, mechanical but overtly political experiment in Conservative proactionary neoliberalism. The problem is (ironically); this brand clearly doesn’t sell well, because it does not readily induce a favourable human response. Hence, no doubt AI will soon help to refine the technique of presentation, for the next generation of AI cloned proactionary principle politician.