The claim, branded “horrific” by bereaved families, emerged from notebooks kept by Imran Shafi, Johnson’s private secretary for public service, during the UK Covid-19 Inquiry, an investigation that has been set up to examine the UK’s response to and impact of the pandemic.

The inquiry heard that Johnson had earlier said the “biggest damage [from Covid will be] done by overreaction” during a meeting on 28 February 2020 where lockdown restrictions were discussed.

Shafi said under questioning that Johnson “definitely did not want a lockdown” in March 2020, despite being aware that the worst case scenario of hundreds of thousands of deaths was becoming increasingly likely. But he agreed by 2 March 2020 that “control had been lost” and that “nothing short of a lockdown would suffice”.

It would be another three weeks before a UK-wide lockdown would be announced.

    • DieguiTux8623
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      1 year ago

      Did he really? Compared to the economic data of the rest of the EU, it seems that UK is still doing reasonably fine.

      • Jaccident@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Well it depends. There may be a small number of industries doing really quite well in light of Brexit, but there are thousands of businesses that have had to skew or close due to loss of access to the single market, and 2023 is the worst year on record for company liquidations since the collapse in 2009. So clearly not going swimmingly everywhere.

  • sadreality@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Why are we destroying the economy so boomers can retire while rest of are condeomned to endless labour?

      • sadreality@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Correct… Fuck young people is their motto… Sold out their own kids to the rich over their houses and retirement accounts.

        Then rheeee when called out on it.

  • jsdz@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    More evidence that all political leaders need someone whose job it is to sneak up on them and whisper “remember, you too will die” whenever they seem in danger of forgetting it.

  • Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    There are two things all Tories need to be 7 feet away from at all times: children, and power.

  • magnetosphere@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    I’ll admit, at one point during the height of the pandemic I thought that vaccinated people should have priority over voluntarily non-vaccinated people when it came to medical care. Why waste resources on people who were spreading the disease? If there was only one respirator available, and two people needed one, then give it to the vaccinated patient and fuck the conspiracy theorist who relied on horse dewormer.

    Of course, exceptions would be made for people who were medically unable to be vaccinated.