BEHAVIOURAL scientist Professor Susan Michie must be feeling pretty pleased with herself these days.
The lifelong communist and her fellow Sage experts have done more to wreck the capitalist system than Karl Marx, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and “Uncle Joe” Stalin combined.
Backed by such useful idiots as Prof Neil Ferguson, they scared the nation witless, sparked havoc in Downing Street and shut down UK plc just as we were poised for a post-Brexit bonanza.
Lockdown turned Britain into a gigantic prison patrolled by bullying cops who treated decent law-abiding citizens as criminals.
Today we are counting the cost of their victory — a stupendous £410BILLION, rising like a volcanic cloud over our smouldering economy.
That’s £6,100 for every man, woman and child in the land.
Thanks to Mad Vlad Putin, the whole world is facing recession. But lockdown gave Britain a savage extra twist.
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And it’s just the beginning of an economic and social nightmare which will haunt our children and their children for decades to come.
According to Bank of England boss Andrew Bailey, who shares some of the blame, our economy will dive deeper and faster than anywhere else in Europe.
Today Michie and Ferguson are the almost forgotten villains of the Great British Lockdown Disaster of 2020-22.
But they should be the first witnesses grilled by a new public inquiry which is already pouring more taxpayers’ cash down the drain.
Lightbulb moment
A year before it is due to launch, chairman Baroness Hallett has hired 60 barristers, including 11 QCs on £220 an hour.
The probe could drag on for years, rivalling the infamous Bloody Sunday inquiry which lasted for 12 years and burned through £200million.
Trending In The News could save them the money, and all the time which will be spent by Whitehall preparing to cover its collective backside — time which could be spent on helping the country through the cost-of- living crisis.
Here is the story of chaos and fear, official secrecy and diplomatic cover-up which triggered the biggest social and economic crisis in modern British history.
It involves eye-bleeding sums squandered on useless equipment, grandiose planning and rip-off contracts.
A torrent of cash included the well-intentioned but chaotic £37billion for test and trace, £70billion for furlough and £850million for Eat Out To Help Out.
“We were hurling money at it . . . hurling money,” fumes a senior Treasury figure.
Some of it disappeared in blatant criminal fraud costing at least £16BILLION and already written off.
It all began with the now universally accepted view — outside China — that the pandemic was started in the winter of 2019 by a bat virus leaked from a Wuhan laboratory.
China kept it secret and the World Health Organization obligingly swallowed its denials.
The pandemic hit France in March 2020, then Italy, which became the first country outside totalitarian China to lock down.
Watching Beijing in action on the TV news, Neil Ferguson experienced a lightbulb moment.
He recalled: “It’s a communist one-party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought . . . and then Italy did it. And we realised we could.”
This was a gob-smacking confession.
At first Boris Johnson resisted lockdown. He argued — with early support from Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance and others — that herd immunity was the solution to an unstoppable microscopic bug.
Covid was deadly for the frail over-80s, but of little risk to the under-50s. Most school-age children were either immune or symptom-free.
And the NHS could cope, couldn’t it? A colossal mistake!
The health service, the blundering Public Health England quango and the Cabinet Office contingency unit — all tasked with preparing for such emergencies — had been caught short.
PHE, now defunct and renamed, was obsessed with fringe issues such as obesity.
Ex-Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt admits the NHS was focusing on another risk — a flu outbreak rather than a Covid-type respiratory virus already hitting Asia.
“I was part of that groupthink,” he admits. “During that period, an American university said we were the second-best prepared country in the world. We know that clearly wasn’t the case.”
The result was panic in high places.
The cry “Save the NHS” rang out. Industrial-scale Nightingale pop-up wards were erected around the country. They cost £503million. Few were used.
The reason? Jeremy Hunt admits there were not enough nurses and doctors to staff them.
Tens of thousands of brave and dedicated staff did battle valiantly on the front line to save lives — and were applauded each week by a grateful nation.
A gaunt and plainly ill Boris Johnson was pictured, clapping, on the doorstep of No 10, moments before he was rushed into intensive care.
But 10,000 elderly care home residents paid with their Iives for these failures when they were infected by Covid patients hastily shunted out of NHS hospitals to make space.
This is one of the great scandals of the pandemic, tarnishing the NHS as a world-beating health system.
Different light
We are paying for that right now, with £11billion in National Insurance hikes to finance social care improvements, most of it already grabbed by the cash-hungry NHS.
We cannot blame the Government for all this. It is not Boris’s fault that millions of children lost an entire school year after being locked out of their classrooms by militant teachers’ unions.
Many will never catch up on their education or the social skills to make friends.
This will affect their life chances, their health, earning capacity and even the risk of jail in later years.
Hard-pressed families, including single parents, were driven mad by kids squabbling over laptop lessons while the adults were desperately trying to work from home.
Now WFH itself has morphed into an economic issue, with half the civil service refusing to return to the office, inflicting chaos on key departments such as the passport office and driving licence authority.
Two years later, it is still shocking to recall the treatment by jobsworth authorities of bereaved families, hospital visitors and lonely old folk separated from loved ones by closed windows.
It is an image enduringly captured by the Queen, sitting alone at the funeral of her beloved husband, the Duke of Edinburgh.
It is important to know, at the peak of the crisis and before the brilliant AstraZeneca vaccine breakthrough, that Downing Street was operating flat out, with staff virtually hot-bedding as they worked 18-hour days for the national good. It is at least arguable they deserved a drink at the end of a gruelling non-stop week of hard labour.
This casts a quite different light on so-called Partygate and allegations of drunken excess.
And it is only fair to remind ourselves that nobody had ever experienced a pandemic of this scale. Once it grew into a full-blown crisis, it was the Government’s duty to react to the facts available.
Trust the people
This explains the frantic worldwide chase for PPE kit and face masks from almost any source at any price.
Up to £9billion was spent on PPE which was never used or was actually useless.
Much of this was inevitable. Every other country was in what seemed like a race for survival.
Baroness Hallett’s inquiry should give Boris Johnson full credit for Britain’s world-leading breakthrough in Covid vaccines.
It cost taxpayers £12BILLION in Astra-Zeneca research and distribution but it was worth every penny.
Far from notching up the worst Covid death toll in Europe, Britain performed better than Germany, Italy and America.
Had we still been EU members, we would have been 15th out of 28 states — about average.
Also to his credit, Boris finally defied Sage and Labour Party gloom-mongers and scrapped lockdown earlier than other European countries. All bar one. Sweden.
The Stockholm equivalent of Sage did what Boris Johnson wanted to do at the outset — trust the people.
The Swedes took sensible advice, wore masks if they wished, and kept a safe social distance apart.
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Their death toll was lower per head than Britain’s.
Most important, Baroness Hallett, they did not lock down their economy, close their schools or treat fellow citizens like disease-ridden vermin.
