How Covid-19 permanently altered Britain's economy and daily life

Britain is still paying a heavy price for Covid lockdowns

Six years on from the first lockdown, Britain hasn't returned to its pre-Covid path - instead becoming a high-tax, low-growth less free nation, says Alex Pugh

A little over six years ago, 27m people watched UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson tell them to 'stay home' to tackle the spread of coronavirus. Johnson said you should only leave home to exercise once a day, travel to and from work where absolutely necessary, shop for essentials and fulfil medical needs. He also ordered the immediate closure of shops selling non-essential goods. These rules constituted some of the most far-reaching curbs on personal freedom in modern history. Arguably, we have still not yet appreciated the full cost of these unprecedented measures.

Over 2020/21, Britain endured 185 days of civil disruption across three lockdowns. Forgetting the direct human cost of these policies - by shuttering its economy, Britain is, now more than ever, a low-growth, high-tax nation where the state is too broke to fix many of the problems the country faces.

The UK economy has not returned to its pre-2020 path. Even allowing for Brexit, Britain is now materially poorer than it was expected to be before the pandemic. That missing wealth has been replaced by a debt-servicing bill that now consumes more of the national budget than the ministry of defence.

The Covid response prompted shopping habits that favoured global digital platforms over local brick-and-mortar high streets. Internet sales jumped from about 20% of retail sales in 2019 to 28% in 2020, peaking at 37% in February 2021. Amazon's UK revenues surged from £13.7 billion in 2019 to more than £23 billion by 2021. The spike did not last, but online shopping has remained higher than before Covid.

Lockdowns reoriented the relationship between citizen and state. Democracies now have in their back pocket the mandate, when needed, to suspend hard-won freedoms. The Covid era proved that an appeal to collective safety is an effective tool for mass compliance.

There was a meme doing the rounds in the early days of lockdown: a group of dinosaurs looking up at a world-ending meteor, asking, 'But what about the economy?' It was meant as a gotcha for anyone questioning the wisdom of shutting down society. But it missed a fundamental point. Material security is not divorced from life and death. Poverty kills. Economic harm has measurable implications for mortality, from 'deaths of despair' to fuel poverty and homelessness. Wealth is health.

Pandemic control relies on millions accepting small private sacrifices for the greater good. That tends to sit more easily in collectivist cultures than in highly individualised ones. Research during Covid did find collectivism was associated with stronger compliance.

But even in authoritarian China, compliance was never total. Zero-Covid provoked visible public resistance by 2022, and support varied depending on where people lived and how hard the restrictions hit their work and daily lives.

Culture was only part of it. State competence and prior epidemic experience mattered as much, if not more. Cross-country studies found higher trust in government was associated with better outcomes, while East Asia's early success has also been linked to stronger administrative capacity and lessons learned from earlier outbreaks.

So, what was our government supposed to do?

Britain's pre-Covid pandemic strategy posited something far more proportionate: testing and tracing, clear guidance, local closures and normal life continuing where possible. The 2011 UK Influenza Pandemic Preparedness Strategy was explicitly against blanket measures such as transport controls and bans on gatherings.

Then came the WHO-China Joint Mission to Wuhan in February 2020. When leader Dr Bruce Aylward returned praising China's response, 'What China has demonstrated is, you have to do this', what was once authoritarian became acceptable.

Other countries did, in fact, try different strategies. South Korea leaned hard on testing, tracing, isolation and public cooperation. Japan relied more on softer restrictions. Taiwan bought time with border controls, quarantine and aggressive case management.

Sweden's approach was the most stark of all: no lockdowns, no mask mandates, and primary schools remained open, relying instead on voluntary social distancing, for example. Sweden was not the disaster its critics predicted. In some Europe-wide excess mortality comparisons it performed relatively well, though not as well as the best-performing Nordics.

There's an irony here, adopting our Covid containment strategy from China. The outbreak began in Wuhan, the home of China's leading institute for bat coronavirus research. The idea that Covid-19 escaped from a lab is no longer a fringe internet conspiracy theory. Multiple US three-letter agencies believe a laboratory-associated incident is the most likely explanation, even if with low confidence. The UK has not gone that far, but it has joined allies in pressing China to be more transparent and to cooperate with an investigation into the virus' origins.

US intelligence has said some of the work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) had inadequate biosafety precautions. But there is no proof the lab had SARS-CoV-2 before the outbreak, and no evidence of a specific accident that released it.

But absence of proof is not proof of absence, especially when the files, databases, and notes that might clarify matters remain undisclosed. China has refused to provide the records that would settle it, according to the World Health Organisation. Without accountability, there can be no learning.

In an alternate reality where the pandemic never happened, Britain would still have its fair share of structural issues. But lockdowns were a major accelerant. They widened the asset divide, deepened state backlogs, scarred a generation, entrenched corporate concentration and normalised emergency rule. The state's own inquiry says the lockdown era left lasting scars on society and the economy.

Be in no doubt, there will be another germ. Whether it comes out of a lab or a wet market or outer space, we will be told there is no alternative. There is. Emergency powers should face a much higher bar. Children should be last in line for disruption. Work, enterprise and everyday life should be preserved where absolutely possible.

The real danger isn't just the pathogen, but the state apparatus and strengthened policy muscle now ready for it, primed like a trap ready to spring shut: close, ban, suspend, borrow, print. Six years on, Britain is still paying for a policy initially sold as a mere three week fix.