Sunak’s prophecy is the most worrying of them all

CHANCELLOR Rishi Sunak is forced to commit yet more taxpayers’ money to supporting people driven out of work by his own colleagues’ lockdown policies. Worse, this is money which does not really exist and which must be plundered from the future.

Try as he may, the worries about the national economy intensify. The long, relaxed summer of Covid, of working from home and furlough, turns into an autumn of apprehension.

And this is why Mr Sunak has quite rightly been asking the Cabinet’s pandemic militants to produce the evidence that justifies their latest wave of regulations and closures.

It seems to be very weak and sketchy. In the case of the pub and restaurant curfews, most intelligent analysts believe they actually make things worse.

And at the same time there is little reason to believe that these measures have done any good. In 19 out of the 20 places subjected to local lockdowns, there was no benefit.

Even in the 20th, how can we be sure that the improvements were caused by these economy-damaging rules?

In any case, how reliable are the totals of so-called ‘cases’, in reality positive tests of people who are often not even ill, produced following a huge expansion of testing? Hospital admission figures need to be treated with care as we now learn they include patients who have tested positive for Covid after arriving.

We have had quite a few alarming prophecies about the dangers of

Covid. The time has now come to listen to the equally worrying prophecies, perhaps more solidly based and actually coming true, about the effect on the economy if we continue this dismal cycle of closures and lockdowns.