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September 11, 2024 - 10:00am
Liz Truss has admitted that “it would have been better if we’d gone for the Swedish model” in response to the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in early 2020. Speaking at a live event at the UnHerd Club on Monday evening, the former UK prime minister claimed that Sweden’s management of the virus, which involved limited containment measures rather than full lockdowns, “was a better approach”.
Asked whether she felt that lockdowns were wrong at the time, and whether she now thinks they were wrong, Truss said: “I accepted at the time it had to be done.” She added that “I had no idea what this thing [Covid-19] was: I think we’d all seen the frightening pictures from Italy. In retrospect, I think it was a mistake.”
When the UK entered lockdown in March 2020, Truss was International Trade Secretary, becoming Foreign Secretary in September of the following year. During Monday’s interview, UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers asked the former prime minister: “If freedom is your central value, where were you during Covid?” Truss responded that “I was mainly travelling, to be honest […] I spent a lot of time at airports,” and stressed that “I was pretty much excluded from any decision-making about Covid.”
I asked Liz Truss: if freedom is your central value, where were you during Covid? There was no freedom.
She: “In retrospect I think [lockdowns] were a mistake. I think the Swedish approach was a better approach.”
Full interview here:https://t.co/KdEqbp72ED pic.twitter.com/9iOk3Ai7TJ
— Freddie Sayers (@freddiesayers) September 10, 2024
In the early stages of the pandemic, the Swedish model now advocated by Truss was variously denounced as “deadly folly” and “the world’s cautionary tale”. However, in the years since, the Nordic country has recorded a well-below-average tally for excess deaths, a common metric for measuring Covid-19 fatalities. Sweden’s former state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell has since claimed that the Government’s decision not to impose mandatory lockdowns or close schools saved the country from a higher number of Covid deaths. The Swedish model has since been praised by senior epidemiologists in other European countries, while British politicians from across the spectrum have acknowledged that the UK could learn from it.
Truss claimed that, despite her exclusion from the decision-making process, she attempted to dissuade colleagues from additional pandemic-era closures. “When I had an opportunity, I argued against closing schools or closing pubs. I was generally in favour of opening things up,” she said. “I was generally on that side of the argument.”
While campaigning to become Tory leader in 2022, Truss argued that the lockdowns went too far, adding that she would not implement similar measures in office in the case of widespread virus and that Boris Johnson’s Covid-19 policies had been “draconian”. At a leadership hustings in August of that year, she stated that “when Covid happened we were all hugely shocked” but that “in retrospect, we did do too much.” During Monday’s event at the UnHerd Club, she also claimed that Johnson “made a massive mistake in who he chose as his chief of staff” in picking Dominic Cummings.
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SubscribeLiz went wrong in throwing her lot right in with the neocons.
When the time came for tax cuts, the war had thrown the UK energy market into a pit of misery.
At the time, commentators speculated that subbing British households their £3,000 p.a. gas and electricty bills could cost the Exchequer up to £200 billion…
This interview with Truss , hot on the heels of the utterly incoherent Yarvin appears to signal a move towards the loony right for Unherd. I hope not as many of their pieces are thoughtful and pretty balanced. But giving Truss the time of day is a mistake
The idea of Free Speech is what it says on the tin. Any ideas should be welcome. However bad Truss was, she is an ex-PM of the UK.
Free speech and lack of censorship does not mean that every newspaper or online equivalent is obliged to print the views of any fool who comes along. Even any fool who was, briefly, the prime minister.
Not obliged certainly, but certainly not prohibited from doing so…
Look at the thread – nobody was suggesting prohibition. That’s why the “free speech” responses are so odd.
Much of what Truss said about the failings of government machinery explains a lot, and it provides plenty of leads for those attempting to return Britain to being a wealth creating nation.
She needs to continue: I’m sure there’s plenty more to reveal.
Would you care to actually offer some meaningful comments on the article ? Or just appoint yourself as an unelected censor on our behalf (and without asking anyone) ?
At least make the effort to justify what you’re saying.
Totally agree, the woman’s a clown. But you seem to be getting a lot of downvotes.
Hardly a surprise is it ! But I think it is still worth making these points even on these comment boards which are likely to be hostile. What is important is whether UnHerd can retain its reputation as a forum for informed and intelligent debate. Interviews like this imho don’t help.
Some people on here behave as if they are in some sort of fan club. Happens with Liz Truss and some of the less interesting feminists. They just come on here to say they agree and attack anyone who disagrees. Very odd behaviour for adults.
sCj,
You are a twit. Clueless at that.
Ah. The quality of debate on Unherd. And from someone who is too cowardly to use their real name.
Why on earth would an UnHerd subscriber give you a downvote for this comment? Baffling.
Shoulda, woulda, coulda. It’s not like her life was turned upside down. The lockdowns did what they were designed to do, as the WEF itself has admitted: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/09/my-carbon-an-approach-for-inclusive-and-sustainable-cities/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Look at point #1 – “A huge number of unimaginable restrictions for public health were adopted by billions of citizens across the world.”
Point 1 in full:
“1. COVID-19 was the test of social responsibility – A huge number of unimaginable restrictions for public health were adopted by billions of citizens across the world. There were numerous examples globally of maintaining social distancing, wearing masks, mass vaccinations and acceptance of contact-tracing applications for public health, which demonstrated the core of individual social responsibility.”
“Individual social responsibility” !!! What they actually mean is the opposite of individual responsibility. Strict conformity and compliance and no thinking or acting for yourself whatever.
Indeed, this is shocking. The lockdowns are not going to be a useful learning experience from which we can learn how to handle these things better in future (I can accept going through all that once if we can avoid it in future). No, they’re a template for future policy. And seen as a success, rather than a [perhaps – opinions vary] necessary and temporary evil.
Yes you are absolutely right!
It is also a template for imposing untested, probably dangerous, extremely expensive, treatments on a frightened population.
All for the benefit of….
Of whomever benefits from the next “global crisis,” be it environmental, biological, racial, theological, sexual, or ontological.
Which is to say, political.
“A huge number of unimaginable restrictions for public health were adopted by billions of citizens across the world.”
These restrictions were not ‘adopted’ by billions. They were forced upon them.
Mindnumbing nonsense. Sweden and the UK have completely different population dynamics and cannot be compared in this manner. A more relevant comparison is with their nordic neighbours who suffered considerably lower deaths by orders of magnitude during the pandemic.
If the UK had taken the same approach (which would have been politically impossible anyway) hundreds of thousands of people would have needlessly died between 2019 and 2022.
An opinion with no basis in fact. Covid is a respiratory virus, not Ebola.
It’s a fact Sweden had considerably more covid deaths in those years compared to Norway and Denmark, I’m curious as to why anyone would think otherwise. It’s a fact the UK has 232,000+ covid deaths and none from Ebola.
It’s a fact that the UK and other places have deaths WITH Covid, which is not the same as FROM Covid. Those heavily-vaxxed places also continue to have excess deaths.
According to this – https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ – the third world, without the jab fetish or the perpetual lockdowns, faired much better than the West did.
Not that old chestnut again. No one dies from a car crash on a death certificate, they die from the injuries.
So…no one dies from AIDS they die from the results…
Robbie we should have taken Sweden’s approach (esp in hindsight), plus after the first lockdown we knew that it mainly affected the elderly and those with comorbidities. Part of the issues we have now are due to the bad decisions post July 2020 and I would say even the decision to shutdown from 23 March 2020. The evidence was available that people were being cautious and avoiding crowds. The current Covid enquiry has not really examined why we shutdown and continued the shutdowns. It should also look at the influence of the media in this decision (and the Labour Party). It’s very rich that Sir Keir was a great enthusiast for lockdown and now he’s saying that the Tories spent all the money. If Labour were in power we would not have opened up in December 2021. All very forgotten now, but the media. Similar point can be made on the energy support schemes. Labour great enthusiam and critical of Govt for not doing enough.
Excess deaths is the only relevant measure. The mandates were a total disaster that caused more deaths than Covid and massive societal harm we will be dealing with for decades. The statistics on Covid were always cooked. It was no different than a bad flu year – it is just that the media went full hysteria mode. Kudos to Liz for admitting they were wrong – so many won’t.
You mean it’s the relevant measure to your crazed narrative.
Good for Truss for admitting error. That’s more than most politicians will do.
She makes a lot more errors than most politicians!
Probably not, but gets a worse press…
Well, she probably didn’t have a chance since she was outlasted by a supermarket lettuce – but she sure made a mess of things in that short time!
It was the BoE actually…
Typical politician’s non-apology: I was wrong. But I wasn’t there most of the time. When I was there, I argued against lockdowns, although on the other hand “I accepted at the time that it had to be done”.
The evidence shows that Sweden made the right choices. Long after the event LT agrees. Ergo LT is a smart person. Too bad she was stuck at the airport for several years.
Nuremberg violations trials and penalties for the lot of the deadly killers.
The general contention may be correct, esp for Lockdowns 2 & 3. Lockdown 1, when much less was known and the surge overwhelming, somewhat different and more understandable.
Stage 3 of the Public Inquiry will now focus on how the NHS coped and should illuminate more why LDs were thought necessary to ‘save the NHS’ and whether hindsight supports that.
We can then return to Mad Liz and ask her if she feels her support for a Govt that reduced health and social care ability to withstand pandemic shocks also something she has reflected upon. We’ll see if Freddie happy to ask such questions too.