Economic woe is ‘payback time’ for lockdowns, says former Northern Ireland Finance Minister Sammy Wilson

Mr Wilson said he was "pilloried" for warning about the long term impact of lockdown measures imposed during the coronavirus pandemic but is now insisting the financial hardships faced by households across Northern Ireland are a direct result of those policies.

He was speaking to the News Letter after the Bank of England announced the single largest interest rate hike since the 1980s and warned that the longest recession in a century could be on the horizon.

In a sign that the government under the leadership of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Chancellor Jeremy Hunt is now seeking major public spending cuts, it was revealed on Friday that major infrastructure projects - including a high-speed rail line in northern England - are now on the chopping block.

Business Secretary Grant Shapps hinted Northern Powerhouse Rail between Liverpool and Hull would be scaled back from a grander vision for the project committed to by former Prime Minister Liz Truss.

The DUP's Mr Wilson, meanwhile, said he is against a return to the policies of austerity pursued by the Conservative Party in the wake of the 2007-09 financial crisis but said the government are in a difficult position.

"The Chancellor has made this quite clear, that the budget will have tax increases," the East Antrim MP told the News Letter.

"Whether that's in a stealth form by simply not raising thresholds or whether it's a percentage increase, we don't know. You're going to find people hit in three ways - higher utility bills, some with higher mortgage bills, and all of them with higher tax bills."

He continued: "Unfortunately, we've got to accept that this is payback time now for the year-and-a-half when we weren't at work, the government was spending money on furlough and everything else. Now, we're having to pay the price for all of that, because that's what this is all about."

Asked if he or his party is in favour of a return to austerity, Mr Wilson said: "I don't think so, no, because that's only going to make the recession worse. But unfortunately, the markets are saying we're not allowed to borrow any more and that if we do borrow we're going to pay much more interest than what we would have paid before. And you've got the inflationary pressures that the Bank [of England] is trying to stamp out."

Mr Wilson, a former economics teacher who served as Northern Ireland’s Finance Minister from 2009-13, continued: "Where does the inflation come from? It came from the Bank printing money like mad during the lockdowns. It all comes back to one of the points I made at the time and got pilloried for it - lockdowns will, at the end of the day, impact on us all in the long run. It was a bad move, it was unnecessary, and will cause more pain overall."