Talk of L, U or even W shaped recoveries for the UK economy from the crisis that we are now in all seem wildly optimistic.
At best our economy is going to be in an L shaped recovery, with a very long period of flatlining followed by a very slow uptick, maybe.
And we are nowhere near the bottom as yet. This is a chart from the Guardian of the UK claimant count, which is because of the wholly inadequate way in which unemployment is appraised in the UK the best measure that we have right now of the immediate impact of the coronavirus crisis on employment:
That upward kick is unprecedented. And it does not take the 7.5 million people who are furloughed, many of whom might not go back to work, into account.
I have for a long time thought that fundamental disruption to our economy was inevitable, and would be the precursor for change. My 2011 book, The Courageous State, was based on that idea. Except I was not nearly radical enough.
The chance that we can come out of this crisis in anything like the shape we were in before it is very remote.
The future will be green, of course. But what else it will be has now to be imagined. I have been asked to write a book on that issue. There is, of course, no funding attached to the request. But it does, somehow, seem to be the most pressing thing I could do.
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Last night on the BBC I was told that taxpayers were paying for people to be furloughed.
Honestly.
It’s a pity the BBC doesn’t furlough its economic and political editors. They deserve it.
It sounds like the Government line – build up resentment (tax payers bearing the brunt), create panic about the economy (thanks Rishi) all to get people back to work prematurely.
It’s embarrassing to be English at the moment – I’ll have to look deeper into my Scottish and Irish roots and stay there.
I almost dropped my coffee cup when Faisal Islam claimed on the BBC’s News at Ten that the wages of furloughed workers are being “paid by the taxpayer.”
No longer the familiar line that their wages are being paid by the government, so taxes will need to rise. Which would be bad enough. But “paid by the taxpayer”, as if money is being taken from our bank accounts in real time., plumbs new depths.
This has to be deliberate scare mongering.
He should know better
And bizarrely – that also means they are paying themselves – since their wages are taxable
The pressure of it all is beginning to show in new ways on the media. BBC Newsnight has had some good interviews with Government critics like Sir David King, or Professor Devi Sridhar in recent days, but I suddenly noticed that Emily Maitlis ‘out of the blue’ took Rottweiler mode in her questioning of mid-ranking teachers representatives in England, in defence of the Government’s plan to open schools (by a specific date*); which turned into something of a savaging rather than questioning. The interviewed nobly kept their cool.
This might be taken as the nature of ‘balance’, at least that is the slippery BBC intention; but it was nothing of the kind. The BBC attempts to play this greasy game by reference to the text; but the reality is in the tone, the inflection, the non-verbal communication (which the BBC thinks it can just deny exists); but such are the times, the cracks in the edifice; the shadow-show, smoke-and-mirrors nature of the, will-o’-the-wisp nature of the whole BBC ‘imaprtial news’ artifice, are I think beginning to show.
* The British Government has no plan for anything. It just presents very simple goals to make the PR simple, and then act as if the job is done – the great success of Conservatism; number of tests (100,000, 250,000); Phase Two date to open schools. The planning is ex-post, with virtually no consultation or co-ordination; Dunkirk spirit; muddle through. Failure is everyone else’s fault – scientists, teachers, scroungers…….whoever is to hand……..especially if the can’t easily defend themselves.
The BBC have got form for misleading the public about things like this https://positivemoney.org/2019/05/battle-with-the-bbc/
Don’t they have a duty not to misinform?
Agreed on all counts there PSR. The lazy ‘taxpayers money’ argument is still being trotted out by people who should know better. If ever there was a time to properly investigate how government is funded, and where money comes from, and how the household budget analogy does NOT apply to government’s that issue their own currency, this is it.
We’re facing the greatest economic hit for 300 years, and that’s before the approaching disaster of a no-deal Brexit which this government of talentless ideological fanatics is trying to engineer. As with every other aspect of this government’s handling of this crisis, the premature shift back to work is very ill conceived. Like Richard, my partner and I are convinced we’ll see a second spike in the virus fairly soon. This government can’t even give a lead on social distancing, let alone get testing, contact tracing and isolating sorted out.
A neighbour said she went past a local park yesterday, and it was packed with large groups of people sunbathing. I saw a group of 5 teenagers in the field where I walk our dogs yesterday; again, very little in the way of social distancing.
Like you, I’m embaressed by the stupidity of English politics at present. The more this hopeless government continues, the greater the prospect of the UK breaking up. In terms of both personal and leadership qualities, I don’t see how you can put Johnson or Nicola Sturgeon in the same sentence.
Although apparently more and more people are realising just how hopeless Johnson is, so maybe there’s some hope, even in England?
I’ve been trying to work out why the UK was so ill-prepared to deal with this coronavirus pandemic given that the UK was supposed to be the second best prepared nation after the United States. My conclusion is the Conservative government didn’t want to spend the money on appropriate preparedness despite pandemic report recommendations stressing the importance of diagnostic testing, adequate ICU beds and PPE. Quite cold bloodedly the Conservative government opted for a herd immunity strategy whereas Asian countries in particular took the opposite approach with a very big emphasis in particular on diagnostic testing. Here are the articles that make me drew this conclusion:-
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/pandemic-response-test-delayed-two-21909251
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/344695/PI_Response_Plan_13_Aug.pdf
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/04/18/covid-19-strategies-britain-planned-herd-immunity-asia-intended/
If the Thatcherite dogma “government has no money of its own” underlies the adoption of a herd immunity strategy it reveals very clearly the importance of educating voters why the country has a reserves based monetary system and how it really works so that the public good can never again be sacrificed for reasons of ignorance or deliberate mendacity.
Thanks
Ten years of austerity systematically and quite deliberately stripped out Britain’s preparedness; from the local organisation and resources of public health that existed for central government to call on, to the £831m of PPE stock built up by 2009; down to around £321m a few years later; and when called on, had multiple layers of out-of-date stickers attached. This was done in the name of ‘household budget’ accounting, and spite of being warned a flu-type pandemic was the principle security risk the nation faced.
The current lack of Government planning, ministerial day-to-day lurching from failure to failure is not essentially about failings today; but because we are having to build everything from scratch in zero time, (hence, test, track, trace, isolate isn’t ready – because it can’t be done ‘just like that’ – 250,00 per day, 24,00 tracers – without organisation and training and detailed local knowledge; it takes TIME and expertise) because we destroyed what we had.
Ten years of Conservative austerity government is responsible for this fiasco; that is where the buck stops.