Why is anyone surprised? You cannot lock down an economy and a society, pay millions of people to do nothing, spend, borrow and print tens of billions of books, and expect there to be no consequences, no days. judgment, no bills to pay.

Britain’s inflationary tsunami, rail strikes, airport chaos, incompetence, decay and decline, can all be directly attributed to Covid and lockdowns. Even before Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, inflation had already soared out of control, with the consumer price index hitting 6.2% in February.

Remember when Boris Johnson promised to put his “arms around every worker” by funding 80% of their salaries? Or when Rishi Sunak subsidized our lunches during that absurd summer? We are now paying for it via a stealthy and brutal pay cut worth 5-10% in real terms, and a multi-year 15-20% drop in the value of money.

What would have happened to support for the lockdowns if voters had known repayment would be so quick, that Johnson’s donations were a loan with exorbitant interest, not a gift?

The World Health Organization’s seminal study of excess death rates shows Britain fared much better than previously thought, beating Germany, Italy and America . Our rate of 109 per 100,000 would have placed us 15th out of 28 EU member states if we had still been part of that awful corpse.

Yet Sweden, which imposed considerably fewer restrictions, recorded only 56 more deaths per 100,000, a little worse than its Nordic neighbors but much better than us. For the vast majority of the world, it would be difficult to find a correlation between the speed and severity of the lockdowns and the excess death rate. (Australia, New Zealand, Japan and China are separate, but in at least three out of four cases their lockdowns have resulted in obscene costs).

The lockdowns had some benefits but were, on the net, a calamity of historic proportions. Lives have been saved, not least thanks to the speed with which the vaccines were deployed. But it came at a disproportionate price that was neither acceptable nor moral. A proactive Swedish approach would have been immensely preferable, even if more people had died. It is a stain on our national politics that we never conducted a proper cost-benefit analysis of lockdowns then, and that the establishment refuses to honestly reassess the issue today.

Yet those of us who warned of the economic costs of lockdown were dismissed as naïve ideologues at best, and mass murderers at worst. Why could we not grasp that the exact same reduction in GDP would have been suffered in the absence of mandatory restrictions on activity, we were asked. The only economic impact of the shutdowns and accompanying economic support would be an increase in the national debt of around 10-15% of GDP, establishment economists insist. We could easily absorb that, they argued: interest rates were low and we would be paying off the debt over decades without even realizing it.

Lockdowners even claimed that Covid had enabled a breakthrough in economic engineering: officials had figured out how to put free market economies into hibernation, to suspend activity at will. It was the economy of Sleeping Beauty: the private sector would rebound as soon as Dishy Rishi chose to revive it. The Hayekians who believed that capitalism was a complex and fragile spontaneous order that could not be disrupted with impunity were ultimately proven wrong. Even if the economy struggled to continue exactly where it left off, we could just trigger more QE or Joe-Biden type government spending to fix everything.

It was dangerous and delusional nonsense. Everything that could go wrong has gone wrong, starting with soaring inflation and a myriad of other unintended consequences. The insane amounts of cash injected into the economy through zero rates, money printing, furloughs, testing and tracing and subsidized lending have driven out too few goods, services, homes, stocks and cryptocurrencies, driving up prices drastically and destroying the credibility of central bankers.

Supply chains have still not recovered around the world, labor supply has collapsed in many countries, many industries, such as airlines, remain dysfunctional, there have been a massive cultural shift in favor of working from home even when bosses deem it unsuitable, customer service has regressed by 20 years, and all the hard work to reduce joblessness has been set back decades. To add insult to injury, the lockdowns were designed to protect the very old at the expense of the young – and now wages are being cut in real terms, while pensions are rising by around 10%.

Covid and the lockdown have wrecked this government, erasing the centre-right’s biggest opportunity in 40 years to remake Britain. The energy that could have gone into reforming the public sector, solving the housing crisis or making the country more competitive after Brexit was trying to survive a pandemic. Johnson fell seriously ill. Operation No 10 tore apart and the heart of government lost its moral compass, partying as the country was socially isolated. Sunak, a brilliant techie, rebuilt the entire welfare system in just a few weeks to provide furlough, instead of focusing on tax reform or many other great free market ideas he loved to discuss. Conservatives have embraced big government, statism and paternalism.

In the absence of a full Tory stimulus, Labor is now well on its way to taking power. That would count as another serious cost of the lockdown, especially as the party has also been thoroughly discredited by its approach to Covid. A false and destructive ideology had captured much of the left: they believed in modern monetary theory, which posits that budget deficits don’t matter and that the state should just print money to pay for it. that he wants. Well, we tried that during Covid, and now we have inflation expected to hit 11%.

Labour, if it wins, will either trigger a pound crisis and require an IMF bailout or have to rediscover austerity, high interest rates and caution. Given how fanatically Sir Keir Starmer and his cronies have defended extreme lockdowns, this would at least add an ironic twist to an otherwise nightmarish prospect.