Tag Archives: Eat Out to Help Out

Covid inquiry spotlight turns to Rishi Sunak – and he’s trying to squirm out of it

Rishi Sunak: this little howler pushed up Covid infections massively. If Rishi Sunak didn’t consult scientists before making it happen, he could be in serious trouble with the Covid inquiry. Is that why he’s trying to hide information from that investigation?

Allegations that the government ignored scientific advice during the Covid-19 pandemic have shifted the focus of the inquiry into its actions at that time onto Rishi Sunak and his ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ fiasco.

Here’s the gist:

The article says the inquiry will focus partly on Sunak – particularly over the way the Treasury failed to involve scientists in decisions and the formulation of policy.

Inquiry chair Baroness Hallett has sent questions to then-prime minister Boris Johnson, asking if scientific evidence and opinion was sought before ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ was launched…

which appears not to have been the case.

The Observer article states:

Prof John Edmunds of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who was a member of the Sage committee of advisers to ministers and who has submitted written evidence to the inquiry, said the controversial Eat Out to Help Out scheme – which gave people discounts for eating in restaurants and pubs – was never discussed with scientists.

Eat Out to Help Out was launched in August 2020. It allowed diners to claim 50% off more than 160m meals at a cost to the Treasury of about £850m. In the process, it also drove new Covid-19 infections up by between 8 and 17%, according to a study carried out by Thiemo Fetzer, an economist at the University of Warwick, a few weeks later.

“If we had [been consulted], I would have been clear what I thought about it,” said Edmunds. “As far as I am concerned, it was a spectacularly stupid idea and an obscene way to spend public money.”

That’s interesting, because Sunak himself is on video record as having insisted that he spoke to scientists about ‘Eat Out to Help Out’:

Another critical decision set to be investigated by Hallett was made in September 2020, when the government was urged by Sage to impose a mini-lockdown to dampen rising case numbers, with both Johnson and Sunak opposing the move.

“I said then that the question was either do it now and get on top of the epidemic and keep it under control, or be forced into doing it in a few weeks’ time, by which time the epidemic will be much worse,” Edmunds said.

“There will be many more hospitalisations and deaths, and you will have to take more stringent action. Unfortunately that is exactly what happened.”

Considering the accusations against him, it may be no surprise that Rishi Sunak’s government – through the Cabinet Office, is trying to deny the Covid inquiry access to WhatsApp messages between government ministers.

The claim is that it would be an invasion of privacy to let the inquiry have (for example) all of the WhatsApp messages Boris Johnson sent via his personal phone because they would include “unambiguously irrelevant” material.

But Sunak and the government want to be the arbiters of which material is relevant and which isn’t –

-and that creates a serious credibility problem: why should the organisation under investigation dictate what evidence is permissible or not?

The Cabinet Office – on behalf of Sunak’s government – has launched a judicial review to keep some of the WhatsApps (and other material) away from the inquiry. Apparently this is going to cost you, me and the rest of the UK public a fortune:

(Again: it won’t cost taxpayers’ money – it will cost public money. We then pay tax according to what the Treasury reckons is needed to keep inflation from going through the roof. You can probably tell that the current mob aren’t very good at making that prediction.)

(Oh – and we’re also funding the Covid inquiry, meaning we’re footing the bill for both sides in the dispute.)

But here’s a twist:

… Or is it?

It seems to me that it is actually reasonable to withhold the information on ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ from the Good Law Project – for the time being. The Cabinet Office has said it is handing “all relevant material to the Covid Inquiry – and ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ is definitely relevant to the Covid inquiry.

The claim – by the Cabinet Office – is that it has given all relevant information to the inquiry, so we would be justified in expecting the ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ stuff to have gone there already.

Refusing to hand other information to the inquiry on grounds that it is not relevant does not contradict this claim.

But it makes the result of the judicial inquiry all the more important.

Because if the government wins in court, but doesn’t hand over information about ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ over to the inquiry, it will have no excuse not to hand it over to the Good Law Project.

Right?

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Mainstream media have discovered Sunak’s ‘Eat Out’ scheme spread Covid-19 – two years too late

Profiting from death: after he served up this little howler – and pushed up Covid-19 infections massively, Rishi Sunak became prime minister. Shouldn’t he be paying for the consequences of his actions?

Watch the video summary:

Congratulations to Metro* for discovering that Rishi Sunak’s ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ scheme of summer 2020 actually spread Covid-19 and may have caused thousands of deaths. Better late than never!

This site, and others on the social media, broke the story in December 2020.

This is the reason people should be reading Vox Political. They should be reading Another Angry Voice, Skwawkbox, The Canary and all the other independent news-related websites because that’s where they’re going to find out the things they need to know, at the time they need to know them.

And this is the reason you should be telling everybody you know.

Rishi Sunak may be responsible for killing off thousands of UK citizens – including your relatives, perhaps – and what’s his punishment? He’s now the prime minister. He’s already the richest man in the UK. Doesn’t he deserve to be in prison for dreaming up a scheme that killed many people?

He might have been, if enough attention had been drawn to what he had done at the right time.

But it wasn’t. The mainstream media ignored it – and that meant most people did too.

And now it has been (re)discovered via Matt Hancock’s leaked WhatsApp messages:

The Prime Minister is under pressure over his ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ scheme during the pandemic with claims of a ‘cover up’ and that it spread Covid.

Leaked messages show … concern from then Health Secretary Matt Hancock about how Eat Out to Help Out was spreading the virus.

Mr Hancock told [then-Cabinet Secrtary Simon] Case that the scheme was driving up Covid cases in some of the worst hit areas and that the problems it was causing were ‘serious’.

But he added that he had ‘kept it out of the news’, according to the Telegraph.

Those WhatsApp messages were sent in August 2020. I published my story in December that year, as follows:

Tory Chancellor Rishi Sunak made certain that thousands more people caught Covid-19 than would otherwise have done so, with his Eat Out to Help Out scheme.

Research by the University of Warwick has shown that the initiative is likely to blame for 17 per cent of infections – one in six outbreaks – between August and early September (when it was overtaken by outbreaks linked to schools that had reopened at Boris Johnson and Dominic Raab’s insistence, we may conclude).

People will have died from catching the virus after taking part in Sunak’s crackpot plan.

But nobody has been asking him any hard questions!

Isn’t it time these Tories took responsibility for the fatal consequences of their decisions and left public life for good, under a cloud of shame?

Note that I quoted the Daily Mail, which seems to have done as little as possible about the story.

Obviously, nobody involved has left public life for good under a cloud of shame.

They’re all still here, rubbing our noses in their ability to get away with – if not murder, then possibly mass manslaughter.

*In this instance – I’m sure other mainstream media outlets are also covering this story now, at long last.

Source: Rishi Sunak’s Eat Out to Help Out ‘spread Covid but was covered up’ | Metro News

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Hancock WhatsApps: he hid the life-threatening danger of ‘Eat Out to Help Out’

After he served up this little howler – and pushed up Covid-19 infections massively, Rishi Sunak became prime minister. Shouldn’t he – along with Matt Hancock and then-Cabinet Secretary Simon Case – be facing punishment for endangering the lives of many thousands of people?

Eat Out to Die Out, I called it.

The scheme by Rishi Sunak was introduced in July 2020 to get people to eat out. It provided vouchers supporting half the price of the meal – and was initially criticised because many people did not have enough spare cash to support paying for the other half.

But worse was to come when research by the University of Warwick published in December that year showed that the initiative was likely to blame for 17 per cent of infections – one in six outbreaks – between August and early September.

And now we know that Matt Hancock – Health Secretary at the time – knew about it and conspired with then-Cabinet Secretary Simon Case, and Sunak (who is now prime minister, remember) to hide it from us.

Because these then-ministers – and the then-Cabinet Secretary – hid the evidence, Eat Out To Help Out continued for several months and was only shown to have spread the virus much later, when it was too late to do anything about it.

Look at his WhatsApp messages from the summer of 2020:

News outlets like The Independent are reporting that Hancock ridiculed the scheme, calling it “Eat Out to Help The Virus Get About”.

Clearly the scheme should have been halted as soon as the concerns became apparent to Hancock. Instead he made a bad joke about it.

Who knows how many people died because they weren’t told about the danger? And shouldn’t Hancock, Case and Sunak be punished for allowing those deaths to happen?

Quick footnote: the BBC’s big story about the Hancock WhatsApps today is all about his reaction to the publication of a photo showing him kissing then-aide Gina Coladangelo.

Don’t we deserve better service from our public-service news provider? Is it because the BBC’s Chairman, Richard Sharp, is a Tory and a friend to Tories?

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