In business, we make decisions on facts; if the facts are lacking, you test & measure. If the data isn’t there, you wait to make decisions, and you delay, you pause while the KPI (Key Performance Measure) becomes available.

Most of the thousands of SME business owners who have heard me speak will testify to  my views on how to prosper. The decisions we need to make to drive our businesses forward. The methods of obtaining a commercial advantage. The areas of opportunity that many companies miss. Or too swamped with the pressures of the day to day to make the most of the opportunity.

So to examine the UK Conservative governments actions, the shared western democracy panic as the first wave of the Covid 19 pandemic hit. Would have been premature.

In SME business, the benefit of being small is the ability to be light of foot, to be able to respond as the facts become clear.

My initial reaction, as all my clients know, was for us to plan for what may be about to happen. What was starting to come our way? We all worked hard to establish a SWOT response to the emerging pandemic.

I will be the first to admit I got one crucial part of the planning wrong. Reviewing over 30 business SWOT plans over the early days of March, we didn’t plan for the Threat that the UK government would take the unprecedented decision to shut down the UK economy!

In the first week in March, many of us planned for an impact, we figured lost trade, supply chain disruption, a recession, and the inevitable decisions on redundancy, but no one thought the economy could be shut down.

My table above shows the estimated UK population of 67 million people. 69,700 people die in the UK each month. that would average 488,582 in every seven month period. That would be of all ages, so a direct comparison is limited. But the fact that 29,908 have died with covid is worth considering. If however, we consider that we now know so much and that 2,558 people under 60 have died should make us consider the actions of the Government to the economy as disproportionate.

To be clear, this is not to say this is Economics v’s health. The economy is health the loss of income, loss of tax-raising and subsiquent economic depression does produce a massive health impact.

Speculative and unfair criticism wrong before is now justified. Now we can take the data and pass some judgment. The UK Government have got this horribly wrong.

To be clear, this is not—pure hindsight criticism. The Government did get it wrong, and hindsight tells us that. The main criticism is we are allowing extreme, ignorance of the facts now available and paranoid fear, to continue to make the wrong choices.