We are all paying the terrible price for lockdown

A historic failure of government during the pandemic set a ticking time bomb not just under the economy, but also in health and education

The UK’S public finances are in a worse state than at any time since the Second World War. Not the Government’s fault, says Jeremy Hunt. It’s the pandemic. It’s Ukraine. It’s world-wide interest rates. It’s just about anything other than the main culprit lurking in the background: the lockdowns of the past two years.

Let us look at a few sobering facts. First of all, government expenditure associated with the pandemic has been by far the largest contributor to the current deficit. The National Audit Office (NAO) has estimated the total cost at £376billion, or £5,492 for every man, woman and child in the land.

Secondly, most of this expenditure was not in fact caused by the pandemic, but by the government’s decision to respond by locking the population down. Less than a quarter of the NAO’S figure represents the extra cost of health and social care. Most of the rest is the cost of supporting people prevented from working and businesses prevented from operating. At the height of the pandemic, the government was spending about twice as much per month on paying people to do nothing as the entire cost of the NHS.

Compare the modest financial hit experienced by Sweden, the only European country to see through the hype by which other governments sought to justify their measures. Sweden operated a largely voluntary system and refused to lock down. Pandemic-related measures cost 60billion kronor in 2020 and 2021, according to government figures. This works out at about £460 a head, less than a tenth of the UK figure. Yet their results in terms of both cases and deaths were a lot better than ours.

We are paying the price of panic, populism and poorly thought-out knee-jerk decision-making. At least the current Prime Minister can point to his warnings as chancellor that lockdowns were unaffordable if extended over any significant period of time. Boris

Johnson’s lordly indifference to mere money ensured that the cost was not even considered. All that can be said in his favour is that, if the Labour Party had had its way, the lockdowns would have been even longer and more costly.

Lockdown sceptics are habitually branded as “libertarians” as if belief in liberty were somehow discreditable. But hardly any one suggested that liberty trumped everything, and certainly I did not. The case against lockdowns was always based on two main points. First, coercion did not appear to work much better in the medium and long term than balanced information and advice addressed mainly to those whose age or state of health put them at significant risk. Secondly, the collateral damage was likely to be exceptionally serious, but was never properly assessed or even considered when it mattered.

The true cost of this terrible social experiment is now becoming clearer. Health professionals warned at the time that lockdowns would have a serious impact on mental health and on the diagnosis and treatment of other conditions. All this has come to pass as surely as Rishi Sunak’s warnings about the cost. Excess deaths are currently running at about 10 per cent above historic rates, almost all from conditions other than Covid. By far the biggest contributor is dementia, a condition aggravated by loneliness and lack of stimulation.

The long-term impacts on education, inequality, relationship breakdown, sociability and the arts are harder to quantify but they are serious and will be felt for years to come. An estimated million people have left the workforce, about half of them older people who simply gave up during the lockdowns.

All this is fundamentally a failure of government. It is what happens when radical decisions are made affecting every one of us, without looking at the whole picture.