Have you forgot that you BACKED costly lockdowns, Rishi? Chancellor said it was ‘time to be bold’
Rishi Sunk complained he ‘wasn’t allowed to talk about the trade-off’ between lockdowns to reduce the spread of Covid and the impact on the NHS backlog, economy and education
Rishi Sunk backed costly lockdown measures that saw the economy cripple, NHS backlogs soar and cost thousands of lives, despite now claiming that ministers failed to consider the knock-on effects.
The candidate to be the next Prime Minister urged Britons to stay at home during shutdowns to protect the health service and save lives.
And he previously said he would do ‘whatever it takes to support our economy through this crisis’, including giving billions to business forced to close and workers forced to stay at home.
But Mr Sunak has now complained he ‘wasn’t allowed to talk about the trade-off’ between lockdowns to reduce the spread of Covid and the impact on the NHS backlog, economy and education.
Measures brought in to contain the pandemic, when Mr Sunak was Chancellor, used billions of pounds of taxpayer cash and saw vital life-saving treatment delayed for thousands.
Lee Cain, Boris Johnson’s former head of communications, today dismissed Mr Sunak’s rewriting of events as ‘simply wrong’, while the PM’s former adviser Dominic Cummings called his comments ‘dangerous rubbish’.
And anti-lockdown campaigners on social media critics of Mr Sunak labelled him ‘weak’ for failing to challenge the Government at the time and accused him of rewriting history.
Mr Sunak has now also hit out at SAGE scientists for ‘editing out’ dissenting voices and said different decisions would be made on Covid curbs, such as school closures, if scientists weren’t ’empowered’ during the pandemic.
But scientists today argued that it is ‘not the fault’ of experts that ministers failed to source wider advice on the knock-on effects of lockdown, arguing that is their job to find compromises.
Professor John Edmunds, an epidemiologist and one of the most outspoken member of SAGE, told MailOnline: ‘It’s an old adage that advisors advise and ministers decide. This is how it should be, how it has always been and how it was during the pandemic.’
The number of people in England on the waiting list for routine hospital treatment hit a record 6.7million in June — meaning one in eight are now stuck in the backlog
In an interview with The Spectator, Mr Sunak argued the Government had given too little consideration to the wider impacts of lockdowns in areas such as health, education and the economy.
He said: ‘The script was not to ever acknowledge them. The script was: ‘oh, there’s no trade-off, because doing this for our health is good for the economy’.
‘I felt like no one talked. We didn’t talk at all about missed [doctor’s] appointments, or the backlog building in the NHS in a massive way. That was never part of it.’
Mr Sunak said meetings with ministers were ‘literally me around that table, just fighting’, describing them as ‘incredibly uncomfortable every single time’.
But during Downing Street press conferences, Mr Sunak told Britons to ‘stay at home, protect our NHS and save lives’.
Mr Cain dismissed the former Chancellor’s assessment of the situation.
He said: ‘It would have been morally irresponsible of the Government not to implement lockdown in spring 2020 – the failure to do so would have killed tens of thousands of people who survived Covid.
‘In addition, without lockdown the NHS simply could not have survived and would have been overwhelmed.’
And Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s former advisor, labelled the interview as ‘dangerous rubbish’ that ‘reads like a man whose epicly bad campaign has melted his brain [and] he’s about to quit politics’. He also accused Mr Sunak of ‘unfairly’ pinning the blame on others.
In the interview yesterday, Mr Sunak also hit out at the Government’s reliance on scientific opinion.
He revealed struggling to get answers on assumptions underpinning the often nightmarish scenarios from SAGE — a committee of scientists advising the Government.
He said: ‘If you empower all these independent people, you’re screwed. We shouldn’t have empowered the scientists in the way we did.
‘And you have to acknowledge trade-offs from the beginning. If we’d done all of that, we could be in a very different place.’
But scientists today criticised Mr Sunak’s comments, saying it was for Government to analyse the evidence and weigh up other considerations.
Professor Martin McKee, president at the British Medical Association (BMA), told MailOnline: ‘As Mrs Thatcher said, ‘Advisers advise, but ministers decide’.
‘If Mr Sunak disagreed so strongly with scientific advice he was entirely capable of making his case in cabinet.
‘However this is a very strange example to use given we now know just how important schools were in maintaining transmission.
‘The real question is why the UK did so little compared to some other countries to support children when schools closed down. Perhaps, as Chancellor at the time, he could help us understand why.’
Dr Simon Kolstoe, an expert in evidence-based healthcare at the University of Portsmouth, told MailOnline: ‘I think it is important to distinguish between scientists who are experts in their own area, and politicians whose job is to find compromises between people (or experts) of different areas.
‘The fact that politicians chose to listen mostly to medical experts, and not economic or social science experts, is not the fault of the medical experts.
‘Indeed Covid, especially the rapid production of vaccines and other anti-viral therapies, has been a victory for medical science.
‘That it potentially came at a social or economic cost is the fault of politicians for not consulting more widely.’
