Britain’s National Suicide, By Richard Miller (Londonistan)
The Telegraph has an article by Daniel Hannan, "Never Forget that Making Britain into a Broke, Repressive Dystopia was a Deliberate Choice."
Five years ago, Britain stumbled into what the Telegraph calls the most expensive mistake in its government's history—a series of lockdowns that gutted the economy, shredded civil liberties, and shattered public trust. The piece, penned with a bitter hindsight as the fifth anniversary looms, paints a grim picture of March 2020: a nation sliding into ruin not by accident, but by choice. It begins with a visceral lament—civil liberties trashed like never before, with house arrests imposed on flimsy guesses, property rights trampled, speech stifled, and borders sealed. Human rights lawyers, usually loud for migrants or convicts, stood silent or cheered, a betrayal the author finds galling. The state, meanwhile, spun a web of lies—three weeks became months, masks flipped from dangerous to mandatory, vaccines morphed from saviours to endless boosters, all punctuated by cries of "new variants" and "one last push."
The cost? An economy in tatters, kids robbed of childhood, a bloated state, and a generation saddled with debt—all, the article insists, for naught. Excuses abound—models were all we had, science evolved, maybe it could've been worse—but the author dismisses these as "pure cope." Reason crumbled under media hysterics, polls, and Piers Morgan's rants, drowning out sober voices like Jenny Harries, then deputy chief medical officer. In a forgotten No. 10 interview with Boris Johnson on March 10, 2020, she called Covid mild for most, nixed masks unless prescribed, and defended open events, citing a plan to let it spread gradually without swamping hospitals. She echoed the WHO's pre-2020 stance—lockdowns lacked evidence, as 1918 Spanish flu data showed no edge to confinement. Boris mused that politics, not science, drove global overreach, a nod Harries praised as Britain's strength.
Then came Neil Ferguson's Imperial College report on March 16—half a million deaths without action, built on shaky 2006 models and wild guesses (75 percent contact cuts here, 50 percent compliance there). Despite his track record of BSE and swine flu flops, Britain bought it. Why? The public demanded it—93 percent backed lockdown in YouGov polls, "Go Home Covidiots" signs waved, fear trumped logic. Boris caved, announcing curbs five days after Harries spoke, locking down a week later. Sweden, staying open, exposed the folly—Ferguson's 66,000-90,000 death prediction fizzled to 5,800 by August 2020, with low excess mortality and an intact economy. Yet Britain doubled down, sunk in a fallacy of costs too deep to ditch.
The fallout lingers—tax hikes, devalued savings, soaring debt from paying people to sit home. The article pins this on a collective failure—no one, bar a lone columnist, braved the stampede. Britain chose this dystopia, and it's still paying.
The UK committed national suicide with these lockdowns, a self-inflicted wound that's bleeding it dry. This wasn't a stumble—it was a deliberate leap off a cliff, driven by panic over reason, and the Telegraph lays bare the evidence. Start with the economy: locking down for nearly two years, shelling out billions to furlough workers, wasn't just costly—it was a guillotine to growth. National debt ballooned past 100 percent of GDP by 2021, per ONS data, and 2025's tax hikes—think 40 percent income tax bands creeping lower—suck what's left from a workforce already thinned by Brexit and aging. Savings? Inflation, sparked by supply chain chaos and QE floods, has chewed them up—£10,000 in 2020 buys less than £8,000 now. This isn't recovery; it's rigor mortis.
Liberty's corpse is colder still. House arrest on "conjecture"—Ferguson's back-of-the-envelope doom—ripped Magna Carta to confetti. Free speech? Gagged by edicts and fear—say "it's mild" in 2020, and you'd face a mob. Travel bans locked citizens in a prison island, a tyranny Harries' science never justified. Kids lost years—schools shut, mental health crises up 60 percent (NHS stats, 2024)—a generation maimed for a virus Harries pegged as mild.
This was suicide because Britain had options—Sweden proved it. No lockdown, yet fewer deaths per capita than the UK's 230,000 (ONS, 2025), with businesses humming while Britain's High Streets became ghost towns. The WHO's pre-2020 wisdom, Harries' plan—all ignored for Ferguson's fear hysteria, cheered by a public too scared to think. It's modernity's curse: wired to dread disease, we begged for chains, as Herbert Spencer saw in 1851's cholera panic. But this wasn't inevitable—leaders chose to bow, not stand. Boris knew the science; he folded anyway.
No fix now—the debt's baked in, trust's ash, repression's the new normal. Police powers swelled—2022's Public Order Act nods to 2020's playbook—and the state's bigger, hungrier. Britain's not just broke or dystopian; it's a husk, self-slaughtered by a decision to run from reason into ruin. The Telegraph mourns a deliberate choice, and the scars scream: this was suicide, plain andsimple. And I think Australia could fall behind the UK in the national suicide stakes.
"What the hell were we thinking? Five years ago, we were sliding towards the most expensive mistake ever made by a British government, a mistake that led to our financial ruin, the annihilation of our basic freedoms and the obliteration of public trust.
Never before had our civil liberties been so blatantly disregarded. We were subjected to house arrest on the basis of unsupported conjecture, our property rights were violated, our freedom of expression repressed, even our ability to leave the country denied.
Where were all the human rights lawyers when they were needed? Where were the Doughty Street types, so vocal in their defence of illegal migrants, convicts, and terrorists? The one time that there truly was a national human rights violation, they were cheering it on.
Meanwhile, the British state told lie after lie after lie. Just three weeks! Facemasks are dangerous! One more month! Facemasks are essential! Squash the sombrero! Young people are at risk! Just two more weeks! Wait for the vaccine! Wait for the second vaccine! Your jab protects others! It's the third shot that really works! Dangerous new variant! One last lockdown! Just three more weeks!
As we approach the fifth anniversary, we don't like to admit that we destroyed our economy, took away part of our kids' childhoods, permanently aggrandised the state and indebted ourselves for a generation – all for nothing.
Because we don't want to accept such horrifying truths, we reach for excuses. We could only work on the basis of best-guess models, we tell ourselves. We followed the science as it stood. Who knows how much worse things might have been had we not locked down?
I'm afraid these justifications are, as the saying goes, pure cope. The careful protocols of our own scientific advisers, as well as of the World Health Organisation (WHO), counted for nothing when set against hysterical newspaper headlines, panicky opinion polls and feverish rants by Piers Morgan.
Five years ago this Tuesday, Jenny Harries, then the deputy chief medical officer, gave an illuminating, though now neglected, interview. It was not neglected at the time. On the contrary, it took place in No 10, and the interviewer was the prime minister himself, Boris Johnson.
Dr Harries – who has since become Dame Jenny, and been put in charge of the UK Health Security Agency – was impressively level-headed. She explained that, "for most people, it really is going to be quite a mild disease".
She advised against wearing facemasks unless told otherwise by your doctor. She explained why Britain, unlike many countries in Europe, was not banning large meetings or sporting events. There was, she reminded us, a plan in place, and it provided for the gradual spread of the disease through the population in a way that would not overwhelm hospitals. Try to suppress the spread too vigorously, she said, and there would be a peak later on (which, indeed, is exactly what happened).
Dr Harries was absolutely right, but she was only repeating the global consensus. A little earlier, the WHO had looked at lockdowns and concluded that they were "not demonstrably effective in urban areas". Its researchers had carried out a study of 120 US military camps during the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic, and found "no statistical difference" between the 99 camps that had confined men to quarters and the 21 that had not.
As recently as 2019, the WHO had declared that lockdowns as a response to respiratory diseases were "not recommended because there is no obvious rationale for this measure, and there would be considerable difficulties in implementing it".
Dr Harries knew all this. And so did Boris, who spoke what was, in retrospect, the most telling line of the entire interview: "Politicians and governments around the world are under a lot of pressure to be seen to act, so they may do things that are not necessarily dictated by the science," he said. Dr Harries responded that she was proud that Britain's response had remained scientific.
Five days later, Boris took to the airwaves to tell people "to stop non-essential contact and travel". A week after that, we were in lockdown (a term borrowed from prison, which I held out against using for as long as I could). What changed? Well, on March 16, Neil Ferguson and the team at Imperial College published an apocalyptic report based on modelling that estimated that if no measures were put in place deaths over the following two years could reach more than half a million.
Why was Ferguson taken seriously? A quick Google search would have revealed that he had a history of making ludicrously alarmist claims, including over BSE and swine flu. His study, far from being a cutting-edge simulation, was a rehash of a model he had published in 2006 using rough and ready estimates (home quarantine would mean a 75 per cent reduction in contacts with a 50 per cent compliance rate, social distancing would mean a
75 per cent reduction in outside contacts, offset by a 25 per cent increase in at-home contacts, and so on).
The grisly truth is that we wanted to believe Ferguson. Although we sometimes now imagine that Boris wrenched our freedoms from our unwilling hands, it was the other way around. We have forgotten the "Go Home Covidiots" banners, the terrified phone-ins, the YouGov poll showing that 93 per cent of voters wanted a lockdown.
Not for the first time, people were demanding, against all reason, that their politicians do something – anything.
The pioneering psychologist and anthropologist Herbert Spencer had observed the same phenomenon in response to a cholera outbreak in 1851:
"Citizens look grave and determine to petition Parliament about it. Parliament promises to consider the matter; and after the usual amount of debate, says, Let there be a Board of Health. Whereupon petitioners rub their hands, and look out for great things. They have unbounded simplicity, these good citizens. Legislation may disappoint them 50 times running, without at all shaking their faith in its efficiency."
Then again, in times of plague, citizens are driven by intuition rather than logic.
Human beings, like most mammals, are wired to be hyper-sensitive to disease. And so we reasoned backwards from our instincts, even as data came in that utterly disproved Ferguson's model.
According to Ferguson's forecast of March 2020, Sweden, which refused to lock down, should have suffered between 66,000 and 90,000 Covid fatalities by late summer. In the event, by the end of August, Sweden had recorded just 5,800 Covid deaths. Infections peaked and fell there in line with the countries that imposed lockdowns, and Sweden eventually came through, not only with an intact economy, but with one of the lowest (on one measure the lowest) excess mortality rate in Europe.
But, by then, no one wanted to look at numbers that challenged their prejudices. We were already in the grip of the sunk costs fallacy, and we've been stuck there ever since, unwilling to accept that the indignities and enormities we suffered were for nothing.
Suffered? No, we suffer them still. The tax hikes, the devaluation of our savings, the uncontrollable national debt – these things were inescapable consequences of paying people to stay home for the better part of two years. The rise in conspiracy theories, the belief that the world is run by Davos illuminati who aim to phase out cash, inject us with microchips and conscript us into the Ukrainian army: that came directly from the lies that we were told in 2020, above all the nonsense about vaccinating young people to prevent transmission.
For years to come, Britain will be poor, indebted and repressive because, in early March 2020, no one (with the exception of one brave Sunday Telegraph columnist, modesty forbids, etc) wanted to stand in the way of a stampede. We did this to ourselves.
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