Mr Sunak…..explained how the minutes from Sage meetngs were edited so that dissenting voices were not included in the final draft.
(Report from the Daily Telegraph.)
In other words, the committee – Sage – that was created by the government to oversee COVID-19 policy deliberately suppressed views from one of the most important departments of state – The Treasury – because it did not go with the lockdown narrative.
I am not a particular fan of former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak, one of the two senior figures running for leadership of the Conservative Party. We have the highest tax burden in 70 years, and he could, had he been so inclined, resigned rather than gone along with that. Nevertheless, his comments on how policy on Covid was driven over the past few years are shocking, if true. Maybe he is trying to justify himself after events – he could, of course, have resigned and explained why he was so appalled at what happened. We must not forget the efforts made by the scientific/policy “establishment” to suppress awkward voices such as the signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration in their calls for focused action against the virus rather than indiscriminate lockdowns.
I am not particularly hopeful that the right lessons will be learned from the COVID-19 debacle, such as how dangerous it is to give power to a group of people with no wider appreciation of the damage actions can cause (assuming that said damage was not indeed part of the actual point). The dynamics of power being what they are, this sort of thing can and will happen again. Groupthink is killing people, in some cases, literally. A solid consensus in the banking/financial services sector before the 2008 financial crash held that central bankers had more or less cracked the problem of setting interest rates, running monetary policy and inflation, and that if banks got involved in odd-sounding derivative products, they’d be fine in lending sub-prime loans; we have had “the science is settled” consensus on global warming, and part of our current energy clusterfuck can be pinned on a determined drive against fossil fuels in much of the West. The response to covid was another dangerous “the science is settled” moment. The way that children are taught – or not taught – in schools is another example of a dangerous consensus.
Challenging these “the science is settled” mindsets is hard, but it has to be done.
People have died because of this mindset. We don’t have the death penalty so at the very least many of these should be in jail while the rest lose their jobs and pensions.
That will teach them lessons. Yet another report with no punishments sends a different set of lessons.
Lord T, alas, as you and I know, the chances of anyone being punished beyond losing political office for this is remote. Remember that in the UK, at any rate, all the major political parties were for lockdowns. The main opposition party, Labour, was for earlier and more severe lockdowns. Those few Tory MPs who sounded any discordant notes were attacked.
None of the SAGE advisors, I would predict, will suffer adversely in their careers from this. Neil Ferguson, the Imperial College chap whose scientific modelling helped terrify the wits out of politicians, isn’t likely to lose a lot of sleep. I remember it was said several months ago that the people who wanted to lock us down would not lose a day’s pay over all this. And yet they treat the dislocations, the damage and the costs of lockdowns as somehow just the fault of Vladimir Putin, or “climate change”, or some other hobgoblin that is unrelated to actual choices people took two and more years ago. There’s a failure to grasp cause and effect (look at economics, for a start) that suggests very large parts of the UK population suffer from room temp IQ and lack of basic understanding of logic.
Sorry to vent. Something about this story has really irritated me.
This is progress – it really is.
We have gone from the insane position of “the policy was correct – it saved lives”, to “the policy was folly, it did not save lives – but the policy was nothing to do with me, I was always against it”.
Are the politicians saying this telling the truth about having always been against the policy? Most likely NOT – but that is not the point. The fact that they are now admitting that the policy was mad is progress – indeed it is vast progress.
Less than a year ago we even had the the leader of the government going around saying such things as “Build Back Better is our Conservative slogan” – when the man knew perfectly well that it is the slogan of the World Economic Forum and the U.N., and that the whole point of it was to GET RID OF what remained of traditional liberty. This slogan has now gone or is on the way out.
By the way – one of the early hopeful signs was when some local Conservative Associations refused to use the “Build Back Better” slogan on their literature – I was expecting to be denounced as “paranoid” when I opposed it, but I got the opposite response. The response I got was “we already know that Paul – which is why you will not see that slogan around here”. I underestimated a lot of people in various parts of the country – they did not need me (not at all) they had already found out the truth for themselves.
See Bob Moran’s cartoon, “I TOLD YOU SO”.
Science can never be settled as it is dynamic. Scientists are fine with the theory of evolution but still argue about the mechanism driving it. The more we investigate DNA and genetics the more we know, the more we realise we don’t know. That’s the way it works. I’ve heard some very heated arguments at question time at scientific meetings (biotechnology and molecular biology).
Paul is right, this is progress of a sort – “There is more rejoicing in Heaven, etc etc”.
In other news, I see that the Covid “enquiry” is busy taking steps to ensure that everything gets kicked into the long grass, damage caused by lockdowns/school closures etc is somehow not in their terms of reference, and nobody gets blamed for anything – indeed, all must have prizes.
As someone remarked at the time of the report on the death of David Kelly, “Bother whitewash!”
See Bob Moran’s cartoon, “I TOLD YOU SO”.
I think it was Richard North who told the sad tale of Cassandra in one of his EUReferendum columns. She was blessed with always telling the literal truth, which included an element of foresight; but she then resisted the advances of one in the immortal realm, who cursed her with nobody ever believing her. North tells of one cartoon he saw with Cassandra standing alone in the ruins of Troy, holding a sign that read “Remember folks, you heard it here first!”
One thing that intrigues me is that at least in the Conservative Party, being Chancellor of the Exchequer has become a bit of a poisoned chalice if you want to be PM. In the recent past, both John Major and Gordon Brown became PM after being Chancellor. Since 2010 though you’ve had George Osborne, Phil Hammond, Sajid Javid, and Rishi Sunak. I don’t think Hammond had leadership aspirations but would have had no chance had he wanted this. The other three clearly have had or still do have leadership aspirations but unless a miracle happens for Sunak it doesn’t appear they will achieve it. I do wonder if in basically acquiescing to Treasury establishment orthodoxy, they effectively alienate the Tory membership. And does make me think that had Theresa May wanted to sabotage Boris’ career back in 2016 she should have put him in the treasury rather than foreign office.
Does the UK have a fall guy on whom all failures can be projected? We do.
I’m guessing something must be about to hit the fan, here, so the effort to shift the blame has begun. Maybe it has to do with negative data surrounding pregnancy and the reality that Pfizer didn’t really test for it, yet the vax was pushed on pregnant women? I don’t know, just guessing.
How many Brits took the Pfizer vaccine as opposed to AZ? Does AZ contain lipid nanoparticles?
At least, some good came out of Boris’ resignation: this, and the rise of Kemi.
As to whether Sunak is sincere: presumably, there are other people who will come out to confirm or deny.
Obligatory Yes Prime Minister Sir Humphrey explaining the minutes…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MF-Qnv2Srfs
As to whether Sunak is sincere: presumably, there are other people who will come out to confirm or deny.
He knows, I think that he is not going to win the Conservative Party leadership and therefore is free, to an extent, to say what he thinks really went on. And this seems to accord with a wider impression that SAGE was not allowing non-medical issues to intrude into the discussions around lockdown.
As I said in my OP, it might have done more good had Mr Sunak resigned in principle at the time for the appalling myopia of SAGE and the refusal of those in government to be honest about the costs. Yes, I get the argument that he thought he could do more good inside the cabinet by fighting for reason than outside it, but it struck me at the time how little top-level overt dissent there was about lockdowns in Western governments. It would have been good for Mr Sunak, and possibly his political career, had he called BS on the whole process.
Martin makes an interesting point about how some chancellors don’t make it to the top job. I think one reason is that a good finance minister is often in the role of telling his or her Downing Street neighbour they cannot have their pet spending wheezes without taxes or borrowing going up. They have to say “no” a lot. The chancellor is often the Debbie Downer at a party, the person who throws a turd in the proverbial punchbowl. As a result, they often don’t get the top job because they are seen as mean, or nerdy, or whatever.
Of course, we have the Gordon Brown version, where as chancellor he raised spending massively, undermining the improved fiscal position inherited in 1997, and had this sense of entitlement to the premiership. His glowering stance of moral superiority and entitlement did not, as we know, turn out well.
I make no claim to being “in to” politics, but it seems to me that, if you were to rank ministers by importance you would have prime minister, chancellor, home office, foreign office etc. What I’ve seen happen is a sort of rot creeping up the ladder making ministers irrelevant. Under Blair only he and Brown had any real power, and now even chancellor is just another sinecure leaving just the prime minister, and he seems to be taking orders from elsewhere.
I believe what he says happened is true despite the fact that he’s a typical lying self-promoting politician.
I also believe, despite his belated protestations, that he willingly if not totally enthusiastically went along with it precisely because he’s a typical lying self-promoting politician.
Indeed. Likewise, it would have been good for Boris’ political career if he had insisted on “three weeks to flatten the curve” being literally just three weeks.
Politicians did things during the pandemic that we (and likely, in Boris’ and Rishi’s case, they) can now see were not good for their political careers. Will there be any learning from this in the political class, I wonder?
Niall – I believe this is what basically happened in Denmark.
There was a lockdown in Denmark, but did not last nearly as long as in other countries (such as Britain), because the Danish government (I am told) said “well we said we would lockdown for X amount of time – and that time is now up”.
They “did not get the memo” that the lockdowns were really supposed to go on-and-on. Ditto with them stopping the “vaccine” injections now there are so many reports of injuries and deaths.
Again they “did not get the memo” that the injections were not really about protecting people from Covid.
The “lockdown” in Denmark was much milder and much earlier than the UK lockdown, though: there was no need to flatten the curve, because there was not yet a curve.
From Wikipedia:
No stay-at-home mandate, no closing of all “non-essential” businesses. (Although some businesses were closed.) Not very different from Estonia.
As you can see in the plot at the link, these measures were taken when there had been not a single death in Denmark attributed to covid-19. Also, travel restrictions were introduced even earlier.
The result was that there were never more than 20 deaths/day, which means about 4 deaths/day/million. By contrast, on the day when Boris introduced the lockdown, there were 149 new deaths. The next day in which the UK would have less than 150 deaths turned out to be May 24, about 2 months later.