But in America the money was handed out to ordinary people. There was a $1,200 Corona Virus stimulus in April 2020 with direct payments made to the many.
In Britain we do things differently. A £37 billion stimulus (otherwise known as Test and Trousered) went in large part to consultants who were paid as much as £1,000 a day. I imagine many of them were Tory supporters.
That works out at about £500 per UK resident, and perhaps twice as much per income tax payer (or about the same as the American stimulus of April 2020).
It has long been clear that this experiment with closing down the economy, never used to combat any disease in the past, was going to have severe life changing consequences for millions .
As the various stimulus measures unwind, it is starting to be evident just how profound that slump will be. The evidence is all around you. Look at the high streets.
In my view we needed to do a cost benefit analysis of lockdowns since Covid 19 is hardly the plague: the mortality rate in 2020 was average. It certainly didn't look like a plague year.
But Britain has a government that is so corrupt that its practices would make any tin pot dictator blush if practised in some third or fourth world country.
So what was the alternative? In October 2016 the UK government ran a national pandemic flu exercise, codenamed Exercise Cygnus. The report of its findings was not made publicly available, but the then chief medical officer Sally Davies commented on what she had learnt from it in December 2016. "We've just had in the UK a three-day exercise on flu, on a pandemic that killed a lot of people," she told the World Innovation Summit for Health at the time. "It became clear that we could not cope with the excess bodies," Davies said. Despite the severe failings exposed by Exercise Cygnus, the government's planning for a future pandemic did not change after December 2016( SOURCE: New Statesman.)
Billions could have been saved if the NHS had been properly funded going into this crisis. But the Tories are ideologically opposed to the NHS and believe in never wasting a crisis. The Covid crisis is the best opportunity they have ever had of destroying the NHS as a functioning national system.