Five years ago, in the sweltering summer sun of August 2020, the British public experienced a period of peculiar jubilation: queues snaking out of restaurants; tables and chairs lining the sultry city streets; copious beverages were imbibed. Despite the Euros being postponed until 2021, the summer was one to remember for the average person. In the throes of the first half-year of Covid, when we mistakenly thought we were over the worst of it, before there were debates about scotch eggs and “significant meals”, we, the British public, were treated to dinner and drinks on behalf of the government.
Rishi Sunak, six months into his post as Chancellor of the Exchequer, delivered the news to a grateful, almost cheerful public. For the month of August, on three days of the week, the government would foot half of the bill for meals and drinks in cafes and restaurants, offering a lifeline to struggling businesses and a much-needed boon to the much-eroded mental health of the average person.
Eat Out to Help Out, quite possibly named after a Jilly Cooper book chapter, was born. Sunak rose to the top of the popularity polls, his apotheosis being a net favourable popularity rating of plus 49, miles ahead of the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, and then-Leader of the Opposition, Keir Starmer, whose plus nine rating puts his current appeal to shame. The Independent published an article calling Sunak “the most popular politician in Britain today”. The magic money saplings had been planted, and it would not be long before the trees were in full bloom.
And then, after a further nineteen months of restriction after restriction, we all awoke from the collective fever dream of Covid, and began undertaking the impossible task of paying for the past two years of handouts.
“What’s the damage?” the taxpayer asked the waiter.
“£849 million”, came the reply.
For 13 days of meals, the government handed over the best part of a billion pounds to restaurant owners, hoping to help them weather that economic storm. Their staff were paid more, too, in furlough payments; the total cost for the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme amounted to £70 billion, not least because the government accidentally set the upper limit payment £500 higher than they had intended to, at £2,500, as Sunak’s chief economic advisor recently admitted. There was also a VAT rate reduction for the hospitality sector, another of Sunak’s nice ideas, which cost billions further in lost tax revenue. For all the good it did; restaurant closures reached their highest ever quarterly total at the end of 2023.
The UK Space agency costs just over nine days of Eat Out to Help Out
These are only some of the innumerable wastes of money afflicted on us by our myopic government over the course of two long years, the majority of which have been memory-holed, brought to light briefly, if at all, through the farcical UK Covid-19 Inquiry. Even the Inquiry itself is a money-wasting travesty; earlier this year, the Inquiry tendered a contract for a polling company to glean insights of its public perception. The budget? £275,000.
In June, a new report commissioned by our current Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, revealed that contracts for failed, faulty, and unusable personal protective equipment (PPE) during Covid cost the taxpayer £1.4 billion. While the Chancellor is now working to claw back almost half a billion pounds of this from suppliers in an attempt to plug her fabled £22 billion black hole (how is it only £22 billion?), £762 million of this is unlikely to ever be recovered.
As Philip Aldrick recently wrote, the UK is suffering from an economic long Covid. We are now having to tax the country into oblivion in a futile attempt to pay for our Covid-era spending, while the fatal freebie-maxxing policies one-shotted those who realised the government is more than happy to give out money for nothing, leading to prospective unemployment rates of 5 per cent, an extra 1.3 million people on sickness benefits, and growth of the economy rivalling that of the white cedar tree for its slowness.
Earlier this year, a House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee report found that there were over a million more working-age people on health-related benefits than in the month before the first lockdown, despite there being no evidence that our national health is any worse off. As the Committee report stated, “work doesn’t pay”, but benefits do.
Compare this with the government of today’s penny-pinching parsimony when it comes to things that actually matter. Last week, it was revealed that the UK Space Agency will cease to exist as an independent organisation, being absorbed into the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology instead. Its budget for 2024-25? A measly £618.2 million. Or, in other words, just over nine days of Eat Out to Help Out spending.
So many of the problems currently facing the UK can be traced to Covid-era economic measures. What’s worse even than all of the money wasted on bailing out businesses and ensuring people were well remunerated for sitting at home without work to do, is that none of it even worked. Rather, the opposite happened; these policies put this country in the dire situation it finds itself currently.
From 2019 to 2024, UK government debt has risen more than that of any other G7 country, with data from the International Monetary Fund showing that national debt is now at almost 18 per cent of GDP.
None of this has been aided by the Boriswave, the unprecedented influx of immigrants as a direct result of policies implemented by Boris Johnson in his tenure as Prime Minister. Kemi Badenoch, as nominal Leader of the Opposition, does not appear to want to make amends for the sins of her predecessors, something which is necessary if the Party wants any chance of even remaining in Opposition in the next government.
Those who arrived during the Boriswave are on track to cost the UK almost £35 billion by 2028, almost exactly half the cost of the entire furlough scheme, and without the guise of adding anything worthwhile to the economy. Well over half a million people arrived in the UK between 2021 and the last general election simply because they were dependents of those in receipt of skilled worker visas or postgraduate students; the Conservative government told us the number would be between 5,000-20,000.
Britain is in a truly dark place. We are suffering from the results of the worst policy decisions in living memory, and instead of taking active measures to fix things, successive governments continue to teeter along, spending billions of pounds on things even less useful than failed PPE, like housing those without the right to work in luxury hotels. Confidence in the UK economy is now at its lowest level ever recorded, worse than during Covid, worse than during the 2008 crash, worse even than in the Winter of Discontent. Our current Government is doing nothing to reverse this trend. Can Britain afford to let this Parliament run the full five years, or will they once again hope that future politicians will come up with an answer?
