boris lockdown cartoon
Bob’s cartoon from today’s Sunday Telegraph
Talk about a cock-up! Downing Street originally briefed that the Prime Minister would be holding a press conference on Monday to set out plans for a second national lockdown. Then someone leaked the details to the press, meaning Conservative MPs had to read about the plans in yesterday's papers rather than being told about them by Boris. In an effort to minimise the damage, Downing Street brought forward the announcement to 4.30pm yesterday. Then moved that to 6.30pm. And in the event, the Wizard of Oz didn't appear from behind his curtain until about 6.45pm, even though Downing Street had been warned by the BBC that it had to start at 6.30pm because they weren't going to move Strictly.

As one Conservative minister told the Times's Matt Chorley: "The incompetence is another level. Is this a deliberate destruction of the Tory Party? People only vote for us because they think we don't care, but are competent. Lose the competence and we're f***ed. We've lost the competence. And we are f***ed."

And let's not forget the PM scoffed at Keir Starmer's call for a two-week 'circuit breaker' three weeks ago and described a second national lockdown as the "nuclear option". Pitch rolling, Boris-style.

The key points of yesterday's announcement were as follows (courtesy of the Mail):
  • Restrictions will start at midnight on Thursday morning and last until December 2nd.
  • People can only leave their homes for specific reasons, such as to do essential shopping, for outdoor exercise, and for work if they are unable to work from home. International travel will only be allowed for business purposes and returning travellers will have to quarantine. (This is a devastating blow to the already beleaguered aviation industry.)
  • Non-essential shops will be told to shut, although supermarkets do not need to stop selling non-essential goods, as happened in Wales.
  • Restaurants and pubs will have to close to the public, though they can still operate a takeaway service.
  • Leisure centres, gyms, sporting venues, hairdressers and beauty parlours will have to close, although professional sport, including the Premier League, will continue.
  • Key businesses that cannot operate remotely - such as construction - will carry on as before with safety precautions.
  • Schools, colleges and universities will remain open.
  • Places of worship can stay open for private prayer.
  • Funerals are limited to close family only.
  • The furlough scheme will be extended during the period of the lockdown, rather than ending tomorrow as originally planned.
  • Exercise is permitted with no limits on frequency, but organised sports - including outdoor activities such as golf - will not be permitted.
  • When the lockdown lapses the Tiers system will be reinstated, although Boris didn't say what metric will be used to decide whether areas can have restrictions eased.
Rather implausibly, after Witless and Unbalanced had unveiled graph after graph of doom, Boris claimed to be optimistic about the medium- and long-term and tried to get the dour-faced Patrick Vallance to second that, which he reluctantly did. The reason for this optimism? Vaccines, obviously, but also a rapid testing programme that's due to be rolled out in the next few days. Boris promised whole towns - nay, whole cities - could be tested at a stroke, with the help of the British Army. The Times has more on this plan, which is stage one of the Prime Ministered fabled "Moonshot".

Not sure many people will be convinced that upscaling the NHS Test and Trace programme, which has proved completely ineffective to date, is a silver bullet.

He also said, rather ominously, that the Army would "help" people to self-isolate. Does that mean purpose-built quarantine facilities, like the kind they have in New Zealand? Let's hope the buffoon just misspoke.

Towards the end of this rambling stream-of-consciousness, Boris said we'd need to observe the old mantra that was rolled out in March: "Stay home. Protect the NHS. Save lives." Bit of a shock, that, given how many people who needed urgent care avoided hospitals last time round, seemingly in a misguided attempt to "protect the NHS", with catastrophic consequences. Did Boris just pull that out of his hat at the last minute?
boris covid cartoon
Bob’s sketch for a cartoon that wasn’t used. Too brutal?
According to a Twitter thread by Matt Chorley, the fact that the "stay home" mantra was being revived came as news to the Cabinet, as did the extension of the furlough scheme. Is that why the press conference was delayed for more than two hours? Was Boris negotiating that with Rishi? The furlough news went down like a cup of cold sick with Northern leaders, who'd been told less than two weeks ago it would not be possible to cover workers' pay above two thirds as part of the Tier 3 support scheme. Why all the brinkmanship if the Treasury was going to fork out four fifths two weeks later? Feels to Andy Burnham and others as if the PM thought he could get away with short-changing Northerners, but now Southerners are going to be locked down as well he's decided to be more generous.

There is also a lot of suspicion among Tory MPs that the new restrictions aren't being imposed because of the gloomy data; rather, the gloomy data is being conjured up to justify the new restrictions. Many grumbled to Chorley that case numbers were falling in their constituencies. For instance, cases are falling in all of Liverpool's local authorities.


Comment: When all is said and done and winter passes without the projected catastrophe, they will claim the lockdown was successful, thus avoiding the obvious question if a second lockdown hadn't been implemented: If we got through winter without a lockdown, why the hell did we have the first one?


One Conservative MP told the Sunday Times: "The sentiment some of us are trying to convey to the Prime Minister is that goodwill is at an all-time low and his long-term future in Downing Street could be at risk. It just looks like a shit-show."

How much comfort should we take from Boris's assurance that the second lockdown will only remain in place until December 2nd, at which point the country will return to the three-Tier system? Absolutely none, obviously. Chorley put together the following timeline of other assurances made by the Prime Minister:
Mar 19th: Turn tide in 12 weeks

May 17th: "Near normality" by end of July

July 17th : "Significant normality" by Christmas

Sep 9th: "back to normal by Christmas"

Oct 23rd: "some aspects of our lives... back to normal" by Christmas

Oct 31st: very different and better by spring
The word "omnishambles" doesn't quite fit the bill here. Nor does "shit-show" or "cluster-f***".

The word to describe this level of incompetence has yet to be coined.

Stop Press: Ross Clark in the Spectator assesses the claim that new daily cases are escalating so rapidly it won't be long before the NHS is overwhelmed. He says the Government's blind panic is largely based on last week's REACT survey, which showed cases doubling every nine days. However, the most recent King's College London survey has cases doubling every 28 days, while the latest ONS infection survey has cases doubling every two-and-a-half weeks. If you take the seven-day average of confirmed test results, as reported on the Government's coronavirus dashboard, it shows daily new cases have risen from 20,249 to 22,678 over the past week, which yields a doubling time of about six weeks. Clark's conclusion: "Last week's REACT survey does look something of an outlier." Shame the Government decided to base a second lockdown on it.

10 Reasons A Second Lockdown is a Terrible Idea
boris covid cartoon
I thought I'd put this list together, just in case anyone needs reminding.
  1. Our rights belong to us by dint of our status as freeborn Englishman. Therefore, if the Government is going to suspend them, it needs a really good reason for doing so. It did not have a good reason when the first lockdown was imposed in March and it doesn't have a good reason today. (I made this argument in discussion with Prof Michael Levitt.)
  2. Quarantining the healthy as well as the sick to stop a virus spreading has been proved not to work historically and, for that reason, was advised against in the UK Influenza Pandemic Preparedness Strategy 2011. More recently, Dr David Nabarro of the WHO cautioned governments to treat lockdowns as a "last resort".
  3. There's little evidence that lockdowns reduce Covid mortality. The evidence on this is plentiful, but to give just one example the per capita Covid fatalities in the eight US states that didn't shut down (North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Wyoming and Utah) was lower than in the 42 states that did. (See this piece in the WSJ.) The main argument for locking down - and the one we heard yesterday - is that it prevents healthcare systems becoming overwhelmed, something which means more people dying from COVID-19, as well as other diseases. But in those US states that didn't shut down, the healthcare systems weren't overwhelmed - and nor was Sweden's. A group of researchers at Uppsala University plugged Sweden's numbers into Neil Ferguson's Imperial College model in early April, hoping to persuade the authorities to abandon its mitigation strategy and impose a lockdown. According to the model, if the Swedish Government continued to pursue its "reckless" policy the capacity of the healthcare system would be overwhelmed 40-fold. Needless to say, it wasn't even overwhelmed one-fold. In any event, we've already built additional critical care capacity into the English healthcare system to mitigate this risk - the seven Nightingale Hospitals, for instance, as well as all those ventilators the Government procured in March and April. Oddly, they weren't mentioned in yesterday's Downing Street briefing. As for overwhelmed healthcare systems being unable to treat other diseases, isn't that already happening in our underwhelmed, Covid-ready NHS? One argument Patrick Vallance made yesterday was that if Covid admissions continue to rise at their present rate, the NHS would have to start turning away other patients in need of critical care. But that's a sliding scale not a binary choice and the NHS has been turning patients away since March.
  4. Interrupting transmission among those who aren't vulnerable to the disease, i.e. everyone under 75 and in good health, delays the time it takes for the population to reach herd immunity and that, in turn, prolongs the period in which the vulnerable have to be shielded and causes needless collateral damage to those who aren't at risk. (See the Great Barrington Declaration.) Given that we're going to have to learn to live with this virus, and that the "vaccines" are only likely to reduce the severity of the symptoms, what's the point of continually kicking the can down the road?
  5. Lockdowns cause more loss of life than they prevent. This is contested, obviously, because the number of lives they've saved depends on a counter-factual generated by shonky computer models, and, on the other side of the equation, we don't yet now how much loss of life has been caused by the lockdowns. (For instance, unnecessary cancer deaths will occur over the next five years.) But given that the average age of the people whose lives are supposedly being saved is 80+ and given the tens of thousands of people who will die unnecessarily as a result of cancer screening programmes being postponed, cancer care being delayed, strokes and cardiovascular disease being untreated, elective surgeries being postponed, out-patient care being cancelled and the long-term impact of job losses on mortality, it seems overwhelmingly likely that lockdowns cause a net loss of life. (The Department of Health and Social Care, Office for National Statistics, Government Actuary's Department and Home Office have tried to calculate the collateral damage caused by the first lockdown and estimated it could be as high as 200,000 deaths. But they claim the lockdown was still worth it by contrasting the Government's suppression strategy with an "unmitigated" scenario in which they claim that ~1.5 million lives would have been lost. That's about 420,000 to COVID-19 and a further 1.1 million non-Covid patients dying who wouldn't have been able to access health care in our overwhelmed NHS. You can check their sums here.) I'm just talking about the domestic impact of the lockdown here. Sceptics can easily show that the loss of life caused by all the lockdowns, collectively, is greater than the lives supposedly saved by pointing to the catastrophic impact of the lockdowns on the developing world. (See point 8 below.) Prof Sunetra Gupta estimates that 130 million people will starve to death as a result of the global economic recession triggered by the lockdowns. Zealots - even neutrals - argue that the pandemic would have caused the same economic damage in the absence of the lockdowns because people would have naturally adjusted their behaviour. But that's implausible. The UK economy contracted by 20.4% in Q2, while Sweden's only contracted by 8.6%.
  6. Lockdowns wreak havoc with people's mental health and cause a rise in suicides. The Centre for Mental Health estimates that up to 10 million people in England (almost 20% of the population) will need either new or additional mental health support as a direct consequence of the crisis. 1.5 million of those will be children and young people under 18. The UK Government hasn't released any data about the number of suicides in 2020 yet, but anecdotal evidence from GPs suggests it's increased significantly, particularly among children.
  7. Lockdowns cause catastrophic economic damage, destroying businesses and throwing millions out of work. Boris announced yesterday that the furlough programme would be extended for another month. But how do you compensate those people who won't have a job to go back to? 750,000 people lost their jobs as a result of the first lockdown. How many more will lose their jobs as a result of the second? According to the Office for Budget Responsibility, which keeps tabs on public spending, the Government will have to borrow £372 billion for the current financial year (April 2020 to April 2021), compared to £55 billion in a normal year. And that's before the cost of new lockdowns and support measures announced yesterday are factored in.
  8. The global economic recession caused by the lockdowns will likely reverse the progress that's been made in the past 25 years in lifting billions of people out of poverty in the developing world and will cause huge loss of life. From "The Coming Post-Covid Global Order" by Joel Kotkin and Hügo Krüger: "In its most recent analysis, the World Bank predicted that the global economy will shrink by 5.2% in 2020, with developing countries overall seeing their incomes fall for the first time in 60 years. The United Nations predicts that the pandemic recession could plunge as many as 420 million people into extreme poverty, defined as earning less than $2 a day. The disruption will be particularly notable in the poorest countries. The UN has forecast that Africa could have 30 million more people in poverty. A study by the International Growth Centre spoke of "staggering" implications with 9.1% of the population descending into extreme poverty as savings are drained, with two-thirds of this due to lockdown. The loss of remittances has cost developing economies billions more income."
  9. Lockdowns are fundamentally undemocratic in that they involve the arrogation of power by the executive branch of government at the expense of the legislative branch, rule by decree, postponing elections so politicians remain in power after their term of office has expired, suspending the right to protest, censoring the fourth estate (see Ofcom's 'coronavirus guidance') and restricting travel. What guarantee do we have that things will return to normal when the pandemic is over? Will the powers-that-be ever declare victory in this war, given that it will mean a diminution of their power? As Milton Friedman said, nothing is as permanent as a temporary government programme.
  10. Lockdowns require police forces to enforce arbitrary, illogical rules in a draconian, heavy-handed way (e.g. fining students £10,000 for hosting parties). That undermines the rule of law and destroys policing by consent.
Stop Press: Matt Ridley in the Telegraph has come up with six reasons why a second lockdown is a mistake.