 Basically, what we're seeing is a profound split in the Tory party about when and how to lift the lockdown. You've got Rishi Sunak wanting to lift it sooner than others. You've got Matt Hancock wanting it to stay in place. This should be from the times. Taxpayers will pay the wage of a million people that cost them more than $1 billion after 144,000 companies hit by coronavirus applied for government support in a single day. Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, said that employers receive grants in six days to pay staff who have been furloughed as the government opened its coronavirus job retention scheme. Experts believe the unprecedented intervention will eventually cost the government more than £40 billion that 8.3 million people could apply. Basically, on one day yesterday, the number of people on the government payroll increased by 20%. As a result of this furlough scheme, by the end of it, many, many more people will be on the furlough scheme than probably are on government payrolls. We'll see how many adopt it, but that's how it's looking right now. They said $40 billion, but then Rishi Sunak said last week it was going to be extended by a month, so now we're probably looking at about $50 billion. Then you look at weird stuff like the global downturn in regards to oil prices. Do you think, Michael, that the Tories are looking at... Then you look at the data around a global... a UK downturn of 35% economic contraction. Do you think the Tories look at the deficit they're going to run? They look at the state of the economy, the other side of this. They look at global variables and they think, actually, you know what? Okay, 100,000 people might die, 200,000 people might die, but hey, the health system might collapse, but we'll take that of the alternative of a 20% deficit, you know, debt to GDP going to 140, 150%, China taking great swathes of the global market. Do you think there's a calculation going on there right now inside the Conservative cabinet? Because that's how it seems. Well, I doubt there's anyone in the Conservative cabinet who is willing to allow for a situation where the NHS collapses. I think the big turning point for the government when they decided to move from their herd immunity, let's let it run through the population and kill 100,000 people, which seemed like that was their original estimate, was one, there was a bit of pushback from the public, but also they realised that actually, you know, older people and vulnerable people dying earlier is one thing, seeing RICU capacities overflowing, you know, seeing hospitals in absolute crisis and our health system on the brink of collapse, I think they decided actually that would not be, that would not be politically... Isn't that a short-term thing though? I mean, so you could basically say, okay, we're going to have 200,000 people die, but you can massively increase RICU capacity by the ventilators, by the system. I'm not suggesting they're going to give up on that. I'm not suggesting they're going to just adopt herd immunity wholesale. What they could be thinking is, okay, because this furlough scheme goes through to June, which is several months, we build multiple more NHS nightingales, we get all the testing kits, you know, we do a bit of track and trace or quite a bit of track and trace, but ultimately, given the scale of the potential economic kit, actually we're going to prioritise the economy over minimising human casualties. Do you not think that calculation is being made? That's being made. Yeah, that's being made. I don't think any of them would want to let it run right to the degree that the NHS is overwhelmed and collapses. That's all I'm saying. So I think the debate is between the people who want to flatten the curve and the people who want to, which has always been the government's official policy, but they've never been quite clear about what they mean by that and people who want to stop transmission altogether so that we can introduce some sort of test and trace system. And the differences between these two are, you know, the big policy debate, which is going on throughout the world at the moment, and the technical way I'm talking about is whether you want R, which is the reproduction rate of COVID-19 to be very close to zero, or whether you're happy so long as it's below one. And for the transmission rate of it to be below one, you need social distancing measures until there's a vaccine, but you don't need to completely destroy the disease. So a lockdown that we've got now is probably having the transmission rate, a fair bit below one, but not really close to zero. And so what Rishi Sunak and people will be arguing is that we can open up much bigger sections of the economy than we currently are, so long as to keep the transmission rate below one, which means that we'll see basically a steady amount of infections and a steady amount of deaths. So we could be seeing 200 deaths a day for a year even. That's quite possible on the sort of, let's keep the transmission rate steady. The other argument, and this is what's, the hammer and the dance strategy, is you say we have a really serious lockdown to try and get transmission almost at zero. So barely any transmission in the community whatsoever. And after that, we introduce a very sort of aggressive test and trace system, which means that wherever COVID-19 pops up, we try and surround it and contain it. And I think that's the debate going on in government, whereby, and the argument for the second one is that you could actually have more economic growth in that one because you don't need much of a lockdown at all if you've got an aggressive test and trace system. But the argument that Rishi Sunak and people, I presume we'll be putting forward, is to say, yes, that's lovely in theory, but for us as a state to be able to develop a system of test and trace, which is effective will take us a few more months and we can't handle a few more months trying to keep the transmission rate close to zero. I also think, I mean, James's point was incredibly prescient, which is, I think this probably isn't about what's gonna be the ultimate bill, but it is about international competitiveness. So what you hear from the people who want to basically just end the lockdown and go for herd immunity and sort of fuck the dead, is to say, look, if we continue this lockdown, that's gonna necessitate a sense, like there's gonna be no choice, but to have austerity afterwards, which is gonna mean lots of poor, miserable people. And obviously that is something you have to push back against because austerity is always gonna be a political choice. And I think, James's point that this is actually about who gets to come out of lockdown first because then they get a competitive edge against other countries or their competitors. That's the real beef that they're having in cabinet at the moment. But of course that's wrong because you come out too quickly and you don't deal with it effectively and you have a second wave where it could potentially be far worse than the first. So I suppose there's a calculation then. From what it sounds like to me, they're not really airing on the side of caution though. Like you see with China, you had the lockdown, you then had this traffic light system, which is being touted here as well. And basically everybody on their phone, hundreds of millions of people within the Alipay mobile payment system was given a QR code based upon their age, who they've been in contact with, where they were situated and so on, and whether they could use trains, buses, go to work and so on. If you had red, you couldn't really move. If you're orange, you're sort of similar-ish, but you can do necessary things and if you're green, you can kind of go where you like. But it sounds to me, there's a few things here. So firstly, I think Britain doesn't have the technological infrastructure to do a lot of this stuff as quickly as the Chinese. That's the first thing. I mean, I was saying about a month ago, we probably need a universal online payment system to sort of back end a lot of this stuff. It was, oh, we haven't got the time to do that. We could have started to build that with the furlough scheme, for instance, and had the kind of the big data sets that you're gonna need to deal with tens of millions of people and so on. But anyway, so we haven't got the capacity to do that. But secondly, it just seems like, it just seems like there's not a political leadership to be that, to take a decision of that scale and against public sentiment, which as you've highlighted so many times, is this is like the most, I don't know the word popular because nobody actively wants it, but people are actively consenting to it more than, pretty much more than anybody could have ever expected in terms of it prohibiting their sort of their lives. What do you think quickly before we got to questions? What do you think the Labour Party should do? I mean, this is a very popular policy. People really like it. It's clearly gonna minimise loss of life. But at the same time, there is gonna be a major economic downturn. Many people are gonna lose their jobs. Many businesses will go out of business, frankly. If the state and place still say, September, October, there's lots of businesses that go to the wall. What does big ones, small ones do? So what do you think Labour should do? I mean, the emphasis has been on the exit plan. I've disagreed with that. I think it's a bit vacuous personally. Other than the health stuff, which obviously there's loads of easy wins, track and trace, PPE, ventilators, what else do you think Labour could be sort of going big on? Well, I think the Labour Party should be going big on test and trace, right? And saying an aggressive enough test and trace policy that we are able to essentially suppress this disease until a vaccine comes about. And so to not go for slow, hard immunity. The other thing is to push the government on precisely what their plan is. And this is where I think Labour have been kind of weak because they're basically just saying, can you tell us what your exit strategy is instead of pointedly asking, is this your exit strategy? And so one exit strategy, which isn't insane, and it's sort of what Sweden are doing, is you say, look, if we have moderate social distancing measures, which are currently in place in Sweden, we can keep the transmission rate at around one, which means that it will move through the population steadily, but not in an exponential way, which means that we can remain within the capacity of our health service. But quite a lot of people will die. So a lot of people will die, but the system won't collapse. That might well be the Conservatives policy. And if it is, they should be forced to lay it out. The other option is that their policy is to say, we're going to suppress this virus and have aggressive tests and trace. If I was the Labour Party, I'd be saying, look, the aggressive test and trace one is the right policy. And we should then, we should therefore remain in lockdown until we have the capacity to do an aggressive test and trace system, which means that we don't have thousands more people or hundreds dying a day until a vaccine is found. We're going to get a question very shortly. I just want to say, I was talking about this before that we started the show. Do you know how long it took to develop the most rapidly developed vaccine in human history, Michael? Four years, because I heard you say it, yeah. Four years for months. And every single 18 months, as if it's already happened, which is quite a concern. And then another really interesting story is the fact that, okay, it's one thing to create the vaccine, but given obviously the global demand for it, 8 billion, 7 billion people, we don't want 7 billion doses. Britain doesn't actually have domestic manufacturing capacity to generate 40, 50, 60 million doses of vaccine. Even the US, which has domestic pharmaceutical companies that could do it, is going to really struggle. And people might say, well, you've got GlaxoSmithKline. Apparently GlaxoSmithKline doesn't manufacture its vaccines in the UK. So, you know, it's quite a major thing that again, it's kind of like labor identifying, okay, well, if you want to talk about an ACE strategy, okay. Well, even if there is a vaccine developed in two years, there's absolutely no way of diffusing it quickly enough to the population at large. How are we going to do that? Nobody's talking about it. And that's precisely why the Conservatives, you know, favored policy and people still, many people still think it is their policy, is herd immunity, which is to say, let's let it move through the population, but much slower than they were led to get moved through the population before. And I suppose the argument that you could make, you know, as Rishi Sunak as well for that is to say that unless we go for a herd immunity strategy, everything we do is going to fundamentally undermine our world view. So the longer we stay in lockdown, the more people are receiving and relying on government support. I think one of the reasons the lockdown is popular is because, you know, everyone wanted to live through the Blitz, you know, when people always talk about this Blitz spirit, everyone wanted to live in a society with some purpose where they got to sort of like think, I'm in the same struggle as my neighbors. And that's kind of happening and it's dependent on a lot of state support, which is a threat to the kind of, you know, economic policy that Rishi Sunak might want to implement. And the same thing with the test and trace system, it requires a level of government intervention, which a country like China and a country like South Korea and even Germany are comfortable doing. But I think there are people at the top of the conservative party who think that, you know, it's not worth saving 100,000 lives if it means undermining our whole economic world view.