Remember March 2020? The world seemed to stop overnight. Streets emptied, shops shuttered, and suddenly everyone was an amateur epidemiologist arguing about flattening curves. Here in Britain we eventually got the first lockdown on the 23rd of that month, and five years later we’re still paying the bill, literally.
When Spending £200 Million Only Buys You Scapegoats
Last week the second report from Britain’s official COVID inquiry finally landed. At over a thousand pages and costing the taxpayer roughly £160,000 every single day it has sat, you would hope for something definitive. Instead we got a familiar British ritual: identify a handful of villains, label the atmosphere “toxic”, and insist everything would have been fine if only we had acted sooner and harder.
Four people, apparently, created an entire culture. A culture so powerful that it overrode half a million civil servants, dozens of ministers, and an army of scientific advisers. You have to admire the efficiency, four individuals managing to poison an entire government machine. Almost makes you wonder why we bother with structures and processes at all.
The Missing Cost-Benefit Analysis Nobody Wants to Talk About
One moment in particular stuck with me. The former Chancellor (now Prime Minister, funny how that works) openly admitted there was never a proper cost-benefit analysis done inside the Treasury on lockdown. Let that sink in. We’re talking about the biggest peacetime restriction of liberty and the deepest economic plunge in three hundred years, and the people in charge of the nation’s finances didn’t run the numbers.
Even Dominic Cummings, hardly anyone’s idea of a cautious bureaucrat, complained about the same thing at the time. Yet the inquiry quotes him and then… moves on. No follow-up questions about why Britain’s pandemic planning seemed to forget that actions have trade-offs. No curiosity about whether the cure might cost more than the disease.
“We are making decisions with enormous consequences without any serious economic analysis,” one senior figure reportedly said in 2020.
– Leaked Whitehall messages
That quote didn’t make the final cut for some reason.
The Strange Worship of “Following the Science”
Another curious feature is how the inquiry treats scientific advice. The Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) isn’t just presented as one voice among many, it’s practically elevated to the status of oracle. When ministers hesitated or asked awkward questions, this is framed as failing to “follow the science”.
I’ve always found that phrase slightly chilling. Science isn’t a monolithic entity you “follow” like a sat-nav. It’s a process, often messy, frequently revised, and almost always uncertain at the bleeding edge. Treating it as revealed truth feels more religious than scientific.
- Scientists disagreed with each other constantly in 2020
- Many early recommendations (surface transmission fears, outdoor transmission risks) were later walked back
- Some advisers went to the media when they didn’t get their way
- Ministers were accused of “not following the science” were often following… different scientists
The inquiry seems uncomfortable with all of this complexity.
Those Pesky Words: Could, Might, and Possibly
Count the hedging language if you have a spare afternoon. “Could” appears 151 times. “Might” another 70. “Possible” or “possibly” nearly as often. Meanwhile “unlikely” limps in with just two appearances.
This matters more than it sounds. When your entire case for earlier, harder intervention rests on what might have happened in an alternate timeline, you’re building on sand. An asteroid could hit Earth tomorrow. That doesn’t mean we should all move underground today.
The report’s headline claim, that locking down a week earlier would have saved 23,000 lives, comes from exactly this kind of modelling. The same models, incidentally, that were consistently over-predicting deaths throughout 2020. But we’re supposed to treat this particular output as gospel.
What Actually Happened Before the Government Acted?
Here’s something the inquiry mentions only in passing: people were already changing their behaviour dramatically before the legal lockdown. Google mobility data shows movement in Britain dropped sharply from early March. Retail and recreation visits were down over 40% by the time Boris Johnson made his announcement.
In other words, Britons didn’t need the police to tell them to stay home. They saw what was happening in Italy and China and acted. This voluntary response is barely examined. Instead we’re told that only “stringent restrictions” could have prevented full lockdown.
It’s a strange argument. If people were already staying home, why was legal coercion necessary? And if legal coercion was necessary, doesn’t that suggest the voluntary response wasn’t enough after all? The report wants to have it both ways.
The Swedish Elephant in the Room
Sweden took a different path. No hard lockdown, schools open for under-16s, restaurants and shops largely stayed open. The inquiry dismisses this approach in a couple of paragraphs, suggesting Sweden prioritised economy over lives.
Except when you look at the actual outcomes, things get murkier. Sweden’s excess death rate through the entire pandemic was lower than many lockdown countries when adjusted for age. Their economy took a much smaller hit. Children lost less education. Mental health statistics held up better.
None of this means Sweden got everything right, they had a dreadful first wave in care homes, but it does suggest the lockdown-or-bust framing might be overly simplistic. The inquiry wasn’t interested in exploring this.
The Measures That Didn’t Quite Work As Promised
Let’s run through some of the “stringent restrictions” we’re told would have prevented lockdown if introduced earlier:
- The contact-tracing app, months late and barely functional
- Home testing kits with significant false negative rates
- Cloth masks that real-world studies later showed had minimal impact
- Self-isolation rules that some people ignored spectacularly while others suffered extreme loneliness
One former adviser reportedly admitted in mid-2020 that masks had “no meaningful effect” but should be mandated anyway to “remind everyone we were in a pandemic”. That kind of honesty didn’t make it into the final report either.
The Real British Disease
Perhaps the most depressing aspect is how familiar this all feels. British public inquiries have been blaming “toxic culture” for decades. Healthcare scandals, railway crashes, financial crises, always the same diagnosis: bad culture, plus a few scapegoats for the cameras.
Never the structures. Never the incentives. Never the fact that complex systems run by generalist lawyers and career civil servants might not be optimal for handling rare but catastrophic risks.
We spent £200 million to be told, essentially, “Don’t hire those four people again and lock down earlier next time.” It’s not exactly sophisticated governance reform.
In my view the real lesson is simpler and more uncomfortable: our governing class isn’t very good at governing. They prefer performative action to careful analysis, consensus to difficult trade-offs, and scapegoating to genuine accountability.
Next time a crisis hits, and it will, we’ll probably get the same performance with different actors. Unless, of course, we start asking harder questions about how Britain actually makes decisions when the stakes are highest.
Until then, we’ll keep paying £160,000 a day for inquiries that tell us what we want to hear rather than what we need to know.
