George Osborne and Lord Daniel Finkelstein
How the COVID Crisis Will Change the World

I think what I would now be doing is setting out a roadmap for the future, giving people some clue that, yes, Britain, you know, is aware of the fiscal costs that are mounting, but we’ll come back to that, that Britain wants to attract international business and investment to the UK. You know, the government actually didn’t go ahead with the business tax cuts that I had legislated for to take the corporation tax down to 17%. I would have that, you know, to make Britain a sort of standout place to go after all this.

I’d do more to make the tech sector an attractive place to invest in the UK, and personally, although I have to say I know I’m in a minority on this, I think, you know, introducing all these immigration rules is a bit bonkers at the moment when you’re trying to attract talent into the country.

And, finally, you know, you’ve got to avoid, although I think they will, so this kind of cliff edge of leaving the EU’s regulatory regime at the end of this year. We’ve already left the political construct of the EU, but we need to find a way out of the regulatory regime, and threatening to depart in the middle of the deepest recession in our history is probably not a, you know, sensible thing to do.

I think the World Health Organisation, you know, is not the best of our global institutions. It was found wanting in the Ebola pandemic in West Africa, and in the end the UN had to create a completely parallel structure to go in, and people might remember that America military and the British military and the French military went in to basically help those countries deal with it. It has in the past worked well. It worked very well 10 years ago with SARS where it kind of called China out and then was pretty effective in helping deal with that epidemic. You know, it has not been brilliant in this for a number of reasons.

I think there are questions about whether its policy, which I understand, which was if we criticise China, we’re just not going to be let in the country and we’re not going to be heard in Beijing. So we’re going to be very, you know, nothing other than sort of informing towards China. I question whether that was really the right approach. I think you could have had Chinese cooperation without going as far as the leadership of the WHO did.

Second, it’s immensely kind of bureaucratic and inflexible, whichever everyone thought they’d solved after Ebola and they haven’t. But, and here’s my big but, we don’t have anything else, right? So we have a global pandemic and we set up an organisation to deal with a global pandemic.

So either someone is going to go and build some brand new institution in the space of a week, which I think is unlikely, or we need to make the WHO work.

I introduced a sugar tax in 2016 and everyone who worked for me told me I was mad, that I was going to tax Coca-Cola, and, you know, here I was, you know, from a well-off background, and what did I know how ordinary people lived and I was going to tax their sugary drinks, and that was all the political advice I was getting.

And I remember, I just said to David Cameron, “Look, it’s the right thing to do. Obesity is a huge problem in the West. You know, this is not going to damage Coca-Cola. They can just reduce their sugar content, and other, you know, soft drink manufacturers, and it’s the right thing to do.” And our biggest opponent was someone called Boris Johnson, right? He thought it was ridiculous and interfering and the nanny state and so on. But we went ahead, took the risk.

It was amazingly popular, we would’ve planned for it, we were planning for it to be very unpopular and it’s had a huge impact. All the manufacturers reduced the sugar. And the real test was Boris Johnson, who’s always got an eye for what’s popular. He, in the last few days, has said he’s a big fan of the sugar tax. Well, we always welcome the zeal of the convert. So that’s the one I’m proudest of.