 On Thursday, Matt Hancock gave evidence to the Health and Science Joint Select Committee on the COVID-19 pandemic. The session was highly anticipated because it followed two weeks on from Dominic Cummings levelling extraordinary allegations at Hancock. Now the Health Secretary was helped by this opening statement from Committee Chair Greg Clarke. Now we took all evidence from the Prime Minister's former advisor Dominic Cummings on the 26th of May. Mr Cummings agreed at the hearing to provide written evidence to substantiate various verbal claims that were made at that hearing. Mr Cummings was asked to provide this evidence to the committee by Friday the 4th of June in good time to inform our questions today to the Secretary of State. We have not received that evidence nor any explanation as to why that has not been available. Now as Jeremy Hunt and I both said in our last hearing, it's important that if serious allegations are made against an individual, they should be corroborated with evidence and it must be counted as unproven without it. Now that opening statement essentially meant the session was a little bit less dramatic than many of us had been expecting because it was basically giving Matt Hancock a bit of a get-out saying yes Dominic Cummings may have levelled all of these claims at you but we're not going to push too hard on them because he didn't back them up. To my mind though there were still lots and lots of interesting statements made by Matt Hancock in his testimony minutes over four hours long and much of it was not very convincing. So these comments on the government's failure to pay people to self-isolate was probably what was most telling. The very specific thing we're trying to understand because this is a lesson to learn exercises is why in that middle period of last year we weren't successful in preventing the second and third lockdowns and when Baroness Harding gave that evidence in February we were in the middle of our third lockdown. Now just on that point of financial support some people say that one of the reasons people didn't isolate is because we didn't just give a simple promise that if you isolate because you're asked to by Test and Trace we will make up as the state any salary loss that you have. Would that have helped? Well the challenge that we had with that proposal is the extent to which it might be gained because after all a contact gives Test and Trace their contacts that is what contact tracing is made of and so you wouldn't want a situation in which you if you tested positive you could then list your entire friendship network who all get a £500 payment. An extraordinary explanation from Matt Hancock. So he's saying there was this policy which maybe could have worked to limit the spread of Covid-19 but we couldn't we couldn't adopt it because it could be abused and some people could use their friendship networks to get money. Where was a policy area where people were able to use their friendship networks to get lots of money? Basically every other aspect of policy when it came to Covid-19 so when it came to PPE what we saw is people who were in friendship networks with the Conservatives were able to charge charge way above the odds for PPE which often didn't work. Matt Hancock didn't say oh well we won't be able to do this because some people in friendship networks might be able to abuse the system and get money. He said no I'm going to do that and by the way when you point out that people in my friendship networks abuse the system to get money I'm going to say yes well even if that risk was there this was so important because this pandemic was deadly and we saved lives by doing it for some reason that logic doesn't apply when it comes to this hypothetical that some people might have claimed £500 by gaining the system. Obviously the difference here is they wouldn't have been in the friendship network of Matt Hancock they would have been you know probably working class people in the country for whom £500 means a little bit more than it does to Matt Hancock and his friends. Now you might say look I've misunderstood he wasn't saying the problem was that people would unjustly claim money and it would be a waste of money and we'd be rewarding cheats. You could say no his worry was that what would happen is that people would get Covid-19 on purpose and so the policy could backfire instead of reducing the transmission of Covid-19 these payments could actually increase it. Now for this one I'm not going to give my own argument I'm going to go to a behavioral scientist on this and one of the advisors to Sage it's Stephen Riker he sits on the spy B group so that's the body which gives behavioral advice or behavioral science advice to Sage. Now Riker replied the following under the clip we've just shown you so he says it was Tory anti-welfareism which determined the decision the old discredited notion that the problem is benefit cheats when a far greater problem is lack of benefits and of benefit take up it reflects an elitist mistrust of the masses the same ideology which led the government to delay lockdown because of a supposed behavioral fatigue and to delay testing and masks on the ground that people wouldn't wear it. They were wrong on every count and we paid for it in lives and economic devastation it shows that the failures of this government aren't coincidental that it isn't a matter of a few incompetent individuals or baddens or of narrow-minded groups it is dialed deep into their ideology it is expressed in so many interlic ways and it comes down to the fact that they see the public as a problem when the evidence shows that collective solidarity is the best asset in a crisis I think that last sentence is what's so important there Steven Riker is someone who has studied how the public behave in pandemics and he said actually what the government should do is draw on people's collective solidarity that is the best way to contain diseases it's not to assume that everyone is incredibly cynical and is going to try and gain the system even if that's what Matt Hancock's friends do it's not what the general public are going to do that's according to behavioral scientists who have studied pandemics in lots of different environments but instead we have a government who assumes the worst about the general public and assumes the best about their own friends or at least accepts the worst from their own friends and what we have is a situation where 40 percent of people who are contacted didn't self-isolate because of this this quack idea that if you introduced some kind of benefit to make life more livable for ordinary people they would go out lamppost to get COVID-19 on purpose Aaron we've been complaining for months that the government hasn't paid people to self-isolate this is such an obvious gap in their pandemic response and it's almost inexplicable while they haven't why they haven't introduced it what did you make of that explanation from Matt Hancock it's quite a vanilla sort of neoliberal argument you know we saw this repeatedly actually towards the beginning of this crisis and this is where you saw cracks in the kind of neoliberal economic orthodoxy because there's very same people who said well austerity would be a really good idea 2009-10 the the exact same people some of the exact same economists were saying well look we can't pay people not to work because it doesn't create the right incentives that'd be a terrible thing actually for the economy and clearly that is the stupidest thing you know aka by the way we don't want to disidentify as work no that's absolutely what we want to do we want to we want to have a demobilization of the economy to get on top of a pandemic right the public health argument was you want to definitely not have people having the incentives to work absolutely that's absolutely correct we basically lost as a as a country as a society we've basically lost 13 years because today I mean we're we're still using losing years but in terms of life expectancy in terms of child poverty in terms of access to buying a home you know in terms of being above the sort of the poverty threshold 60 percent of the average wage we've basically lost 13 years debt's going up because of these idiots and I think we should be grateful that actually people are beginning to realize it's not entirely all it's cracked up to be and actually they shouldn't be listened to and actually yes when you hear them and you say well that doesn't sound like common sense you're entirely right it isn't common sense you shouldn't listen to them a lot of them are idiots and ideologues and zealots and fanatics and I think Hancock summed up pretty well I actually want to go to to something else from Stephen Reich which relates to to what you're saying because I mean essentially you're saying you know all of these people who say our theories are how the world works they've been outed as essentially like quacks people people who are sort of making it up on the on the back of an envelope it's not tested in real life over and over again it's proven to be wrong and Stephen Reicha who as I've introduced he sat on spy b he was one of the behavioral scientists who was advising sage is saying these quacks were portrayed by the government as the science and that was used to justify their own terrible mistake so I want to go to another thread from him that he put out on on Thursday after that testimony from from Matt Hancock so here he's screenshot it an article from Sky COVID-19 Matt Hancock says an earlier lockdown would have gone against scientific advice and in particular in the testimony he gave he was asking why didn't you lock down earlier he said well because all the behavioral scientists were telling me that we'd that the public would get behavioral fatigue and therefore who was I to override them now Stephen Reicha responds to this I well recall the moment we first heard the argument that lockdown had to be delayed because people wouldn't abide it for long we had no idea where the idea came from and we were horrified first and foremost because we felt it was wrong and would do great damage he goes on I had joined the government advisory structures because of previous work I had done with professor John Drury on behavior in emergencies where the consensus debunks the notion of panic and shows how people act in far more orderly reasoned and supportive ways than usually assumed this notion was a return to the old folk psychology myths about the frailty of mass behavior it was the triumph of myth over evidence it went against the general scientific consensus it certainly went against what we were advising the government we were horrified also because if this idea gained traction it would discredit behavioral science and suggest it was part of the problem not the solution we felt that it would be used subsequently to blame the scientists for the government's failures now over a year later we realized that we were more accurate than we feared Hancock argues he was stopped by the scientists from acting quickly against covid this is an inversion of the truth if this were a proper inquiry Hancock would be guilty of perjury we talked at the time about you know back in March back in March 2020 about how this this concept of behavioral fatigue seemed to be absolute nonsense I remember showing images of the the Italian military driving through a town with bodies on the back of their their trucks the usual undertakers couldn't handle the number of deaths and we had in Britain people say oh no people will get behavioral fatigue seriously you've got all of these bodies piling up the hospitals are overwhelmed and you think people are going to be like no we demand going outside and going to the pub the government was saying the behavioral scientists say this now we're hearing the behavioral scientists saying we were not saying that two possibilities here Matt Hancock is a pathological liar or there were some behavioral scientists e.g the people in the nudge unit the neoliberal nudge unit who were telling them these quack theories and they only listened to the scientists they wanted to believe this has been going on for a couple of hundred years like seriously people have been dying at the hands of British government in the name of science and I'm not saying this lightly if you look at the famines that were inflicted on the Indian subcontinent by successive British governments you know about 35 million people die in India British India under British rule between the 1760s 1948 30 35 million huge numbers now you think well famines happen okay well hold on a second when a gentleman called Richard Temple to Richard Temple tried to get grain to sort out the Arissa famine do you know what the economist said Michael I think it was in 1866 they said it's not the job of government to stop people dying the economist magazine right because what he was doing was interfering in the full functioning of the free market lasso fairy economics the exact same story in Ireland in the 1840s 1850s millions of people died in famines because the science was you shouldn't interfere that that's the economic orthodoxy you shouldn't do that actually this is the right thing to do so we're in a really old story here Michael of British elites white powerful wealthy men allowing people to suffer purely for greed purely because of of commercial business interests and dressing up as scientific this is not new right okay this isn't the Bengal famine in 1943 it's not the Arissa famine it's not the Bengal famine of the 18th century but the fundamental basis is the same so you know screw the working class we're going to look out for the elite we're going to put the economy first but we're going to dress up with these pseudo scientific theories some things don't change