If we had hatches, we’d be in the early stages of starting to batten them down. There is a storm coming and I have seen it. It’s an economic storm, a severe one, perhaps worse than most of us have seen before in our lifetimes and I fear that many people will not survive, in some cases literally.
The coming recession – some say depression – has the potential to drag into poverty people who never dreamed they would be struggling to put bread on the table. Rocketing inflation, average fuel bills of around £4500 by the spring of 2023 and mounting job losses, as people rein in spending, suggests there may be trouble ahead.
The unusually pleasant summer of 2022 has perhaps obscured bad times ahead. There is no doubt that many people are spending money as usual, often on big ticket items like houses and new cars. Many will be get through the economic downturn with ease and the worst that might happen will be one less skiing holiday, but the depth and breadth of the coming crisis – and a crisis is what it is going to be – will, I fear, catch many people unaware.
We usually manage okay and I hope and believe we will be able to ride out the storm. But for all that, we are going through our expenditure with a finer toothcomb than we did before. We have already cut back, somewhat dramatically, on our weekly online shop; on the basis of the back of a fag packet calculation somewhere between 25% and 40%. Our leisure and hospitality spend is significantly down and if I fancy a pint – and our spend on booze due to economic and health reasons is down massively, during most week days to literally nothing – I’ll crack open a supermarket bought bottle at home at a cost of around £2 rather than spend upwards of a fiver in many hostelries. That is to say that I am still spending some money on what might be described as luxury items – more of a treat in my case – but far less.
I don’t think we are the only people making plans of the recession to come and if I am right, and millions of us cut back on spending, the future for the leisure and hospitality industry will be utterly grim. And while the tills in pubs and restaurants are happily ringing as the summer makes its final bow, when the cold night air and dark evenings of September set in I fear that unless the government acts decisively to help people and businesses, we could be facing economic carnage. Everything is linked. If people don’t go to pubs, pubs will shed jobs, maybe even close. That then hits suppliers and producers. If people don’t travel, airlines lose money, aircraft manufacturers ease back on production. You can find examples in any business you think of.
All of this makes the contest to be the next Tory leader and prime minister so very weird. The actual prime minister, Boris Johnson, is on his second overseas holiday in two weeks and having done very little work as prime minister since 2019 is now doing nothing at all. Pound Shop Margaret Thatcher tribute act Liz Truss and super smooth, super slick and utterly vacuous Brand Rishi Sunak are engaged in a frantic war of words to try to convince the 150,000 pensioners who comprise the Tory membership that they are the most horrible towards Johnny Foreigner and they are the ones to remove as many basic human rights from Britons as possible. But barely a word about poor people choosing between heating and eating, of the NHS falling to pieces before our very eyes and public services barely on life support. Nothing seems to work in Britain at the moment and there appears to be no brake on the handcart that’s taking us to hell. Perhaps, worst of all, no one seems to have noticed.
