![]() The next Labour government will not rejoin the EU, the single market or customs union. In a speech at Best for Britain’s Trade Unlocked conference, he said: (See 2.47pm.)ĭavid Lammy, the shadow foreign secretary, has said that Labour will not try to rejoin the single market or the customs union because it needs to be “pragmatic”. George Osborne, the former chancellor, has said he completely rejects claims that austerity weakened the UK’s health and social care capacity before Covid. I’m not clear that would have made for a better furlough scheme than the one we actually saw.ĭowning Street has refused to say if Rishi Sunak believes Boris Johnson misled MPs, declining repeatedly to express any view at all on a Commons vote that censured the former prime minister.īritain’s whole system of critical national infrastructure remains “wildly under-resilient”, the Covid-19 inquiry has been told by Oliver Letwin, who was responsible for emergency planning in the coalition government. Planning could have been done in advance, he says. In the event, he says it turned out to be relatively easy to put schemes like furlough in place. If the Treasury had been asked to prepare for a lockdown lasting months, it would have prepared policies like furlough, he says. ![]() He says no other country had planned for that either. The Treasury had the capacity to deal with that, he says.įor example, he says it had considered supply chain issues.īut Osborne says no planning had been done for the impact of the entire population being asked to stay at home for months. The Treasury had looked at the impact of that – the hit to GDP, and the impact of people being off work for a week or two. Osborne says the UK had an influenza plan. Q: Do you agree that the Treasury had not been planning for external shocks that could affect the economy? George Osborne says it is hard to imagine a crisis like Covid not also turning into a financial or fiscal crisis. ![]() 11.58 BST Osborne says Treasury had not planned for long lockdown - but says furlough scheme would not have been better if it had
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |