‘The SAGE committee persuaded the dimmest government we have ever had to lock up the entire population’

• WHEN your Remain correspondent, Dan Harper, writes of, “the current hard Brexit chaos that the country is experiencing”, it appears to have escaped his notice that the more recent and catastrophic decision to lock down the economy for two years is the cause of our economic woes and not Brexit, (A betrayal on Brexit, July 7).

Every country in the world is in the same state or worse and most of them had nothing to do with Brexit.

The SAGE committee – which I believe consisted of more communists and behavioural science weirdos than clinicians – persuaded the dimmest government we have ever had that, rather than quarantining the sick, the best way to fight a contagion is to lock up the entire population.

And, with the support of their carnival barkers in the press, they casually destroyed the economy, the health service, and the education service, and facilitated the biggest rip-off of public funds ever.

Far from “flattening the curve”, as we were laughably told, they flattened the entire economy. The “curve” was merely pushed down the road and happened anyway.

Every so often the human or animal kingdom is convulsed by a collective spasm of self-destructive hysteria, such as the one we have just experienced. To blame it on a referendum six years ago is beyond ludicrous.

As the dust settles from all these tender mercies we discover that not only are we bankrupt but also that there are more people dead or dying of other diseases on never-ending waiting lists than were ever likely to die of Covid-19.

MARTIN KENNEDY, W1