Everything is still weird. I’ve thought this every single day since our semi-lockdown began. As it has almost continuously since March, the sun shines brightly today. Given that there have been well over 60,000 excess deaths so far this year, shouldn’t the skies be cloudy and grey? But they aren’t and they haven’t been. Given what’s to come, well, it’s weird.
As we have said, people still have money at the moment. Some have even more money than they had before because of the government’s furlough scheme and because for many people it’s been hard to spend money with almost everything closed down. That’s weird, too, because a financial meltdown is coming. It will be the rain after the sunshine.
Boris Johnson’s official spokesman, almost certainly Dominic Cummings, today leaked the news that pubs are likely to reopen earlier than expected, on 24th June. That’s almost certainly not based upon science, it’s to do with the news conveyed to Johnson that if the hospitality sector was not up and running by July then 3.5 million jobs might be lost. “Christ!” was Johnson’s reaction when he was told. Christ, indeed.
3.5 million jobs in hospitality alone, that is; not including God alone knows how many others as thousands of companies go bust and millions of people lose their jobs. Yet it still seems a world away. A few thousand jobs here, a few hundred there – it hasn’t felt much like a recession yet, but it’s coming.
The killing of George Floyd and the subsequent reaction around the world appears not, on the face of it, to be related to everything that’s happening around the country, yet it is. People from the BAME community have been dying in disproportionally large numbers due to COVID-19 compared to white people. There is considerable evidence that the death rates of poorer people compares unfavourably with the better off. I think you can probably work out for yourselves the group at greatest risk: the poor BAME community. This could well translate into how people react to the coming economic meltdown.
During the austerity years under David Cameron and Nick Clegg, David Cameron on his own and then Theresa May, the poor and the vulnerable suffered the most. There is little doubt that the poor and the vulnerable will suffer most as the economy crashes. But this time, the size of the recession will take in people who never dreamed they might lose their jobs and get in the line at the local Jobcentre; the comfortable middle classes. The latter group will surely be staggered at how small the social security safety net actually is. A recession that turns into a great depression would carry major risks, not least in terms of social unrest.
We have been down the road of mass unemployment before, back in the 1980s. The post COVID-19 world has the potential to create unemployment figures that dwarf those. What happens when people can’t put bread on the table? What happens when they can’t meet the mortgage repayments? What happens when people simply get desperate? Your guess is as good as mine, possibly far better, but we saw what happened after the killing of George Floyd. People rose up to fight racism. These things can have a momentum of their own. I know I am in the world of what might happen, but I don’t think that in a great depression people would do nothing.
That’s why it’s all weird. Hard times are coming but hardly anyone seems to realise it. The economic crash has the potential to wipe out entire sectors, not just vast numbers of jobs. Of the eight million people being furloughed, the next step could be the dole office. I mean, it really is going to happen and it’s going to be very sad when it does.
For many people, the COVID-19 nightmare is only just beginning.
