June 28, 2024 - 10:00am

After the Sunak-Starmer clash over Covid policy during Wednesday night’s debate, what impact has it had on the polls?

None whatsoever, because it never happened. In fact, the pandemic — by far the most important event of the last five years — has barely featured in this election. Yesterday, Reform UK’s Nigel Farage bucked the trend by claiming that “the second and third Covid lockdowns were the biggest mistake ever made by a British government in peacetime”, but the main party leaders remain reluctant to revisit the recent past.

Not only has the pandemic been broadly ignored, almost every commentator has ignored the fact it’s been ignored. One of the very few exceptions is the comedian Geoff Norcott, who tweeted: “Imagine telling your early 2021 self that the management of Covid would not be a discussion at the next election. Aside from partygate the policies and positions the main parties took just haven’t been discussed. Weird.”

“Weird” is the word. Between March 2020 and May 2023, 227,000 people in this country died with Covid-19 listed on their death certificates. The distinction between dying of and dying with isn’t always clear, but excess death figures show a toll of tens of thousands every year during the first three years of the pandemic. If, say, flooding had killed as many of our citizens, we’d be intensely interested in the adequacy of the political response.

Of course, there’s also the issue of the balance struck between protection and liberty. Lockdown was supported by the majority of the population, but the cost to personal freedoms and wellbeing was extreme, while the economic damage was crippling. Something like £400 billion was added to our national debt, and that’s before the losses incurred by households and businesses.

This campaign, then, would be a perfect opportunity to hold our politicians to account for the life-and-death decisions they made at this time of national crisis. But the media — beyond its dutiful reporting from the slow, expensive sideshow that is the Covid inquiry — seems astonishingly uninterested. Even those who think the vaccine rollout was a massive achievement and still believe that lockdowns and mask mandates were, on the whole, a rational response to the first months of the pandemic must admit the silence around Covid is rather odd. We have every right to ask hard questions about the things that were expected of us and, all too often, taken from us.

For instance, why did ministers allow substantial movement across our borders while restricting our freedoms at home? Was it really necessary to disrupt our children’s schooling to the extent that it was? Could we have opened up society earlier? Above all, what was the origin of the pandemic and how do we stop the next one before it kills millions of people and burns through trillions of pounds?

With our politicians currently begging for votes, why aren’t they facing these crucial questions? After all, Rishi Sunak was chancellor at the time. He was responsible for the massive furlough scheme which is estimated to have cost around £70 billion. Some form of job retention scheme was necessary, but did it need to balloon to that amount? Could we have had more lenient distancing policies and opened up the economy? Regardless, Sunak spent a lot of taxpayer money and the interest on the debt is not cheap.

Sir Keir Starmer led the Opposition during Covid, so where was his scrutiny of the Government’s severe restrictions on civil liberties and personal freedom? We may be charitable and give him a pass for the first six months of the pandemic, but after that he should have been holding the Government to account. Instead, the Labour leader advocated for harsher lockdown measures and all the economic and social costs that came with it.

There will never be a better general election to put the key players on the spot — and yet they haven’t been challenged. It may not be some vast establishment conspiracy, but there is still a collective desire to memory-hole the entire episode. It’s easier to move on with our lives than to admit that some of the sacrifices we made were a waste of time. It’s easier not to delve too deep into the causes of the pandemic, because if the virus did leak from a Chinese lab, what do we even begin to do about it? Perhaps it’s easier to forget the Covid years altogether than to acknowledge that our world is that fragile.

Many of the decisions made during that time were, quite simply, the wrong ones. It’s obvious we haven’t had the whole truth but, then again, do we really want to know?


Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.

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