Pictured: the UK right now.
The way these government people talk makes it seem as if they had no idea that preventing most of the country from working and forcing people to stay at home would be an unsustainable situation that could lead to the total collapse of the economy.
In a few months from now, they may start making statements about how they didn’t know that destroying people’s lives would lead to widespread civil unrest.
The response to coronavirus has proven that governments are either incompetent or malicious.
There’s no other way to explain what they’ve done to people.
More than half of British adults are now receiving money from the state, it emerged today – as Chancellor Rishi Sunak warned the situation is ‘not sustainable’.
The scale of the impact of the coronavirus lockdown is becoming clearer after the government revealed it is subsidising the wages of 6.3million workers under its furlough scheme.
Meanwhile, more than 1.8million new claims for Universal Credit have been received, as people find their incomes slashed by the crisis.
If the unemployed, 5.4million public sector workers and 12million pensioners are taken into account, the state now pays just over half the 52million UK adults.
It came as new data suggested the UK economy is on course for a downturn deeper than anything seen in living memory as the service sector plummeted to a new record low.
The closely watched IHS Markit/CIPS purchasing managers’ index (PMI) for services dropped to 13.4 in April, by far the worst score since the survey started in 1996.
In an interview last night, Mr Sunak tried to reassure workers and businesses that they will not face a ‘cliff edge’ of subsidies being withdrawn immediately when lockdown measures are eased.
But amid signs of strains within government about the huge burden on the country’s finances, Mr Sunak pointed out that the furlough scheme could soon be costing the same as the NHS budget.
‘I’m working, as we speak, to figure out the most effective way to wind down the (furlough) scheme and to ease people back into work in a measured way,’ he told ITV.
‘As some scenarios have suggested, we are potentially spending as much on the furlough scheme as we do on the NHS, for example. Clearly that is not a sustainable situation.’
Nothing about the lockdown is sustainable. It’s not just about the economy.
What they did to people, making them fear the flu and enter a state of hysteria and paranoia over viruses, is going to be hard to undo.
True coronavirus believers will regurgitate and attempt to enforce every talking point that the hysteria-promoting media and the government have been putting out this last couple of months, because they’ve been made to believe that their lives are on the line, and it is their own self-preservation instinct that is being leveraged against them.
The only way to break this hysteria spell is to use the facts and data that the media plays down or completely ignores, like the fact that coronavirus is as dangerous as the flu.
It is also important to remind people that the initial stated purpose of the lockdown was to prevent too many infections from happening at once in order to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed. We now know that hospitals weren’t overwhelmed, because doctors and nurses spend most of their workday dancing for social media, and that countries without any lockdown, like Sweden, were not overwhelmed either.
There is no reason for the lockdown to continue.