I’m wondering if the dominoes have started falling? My loyal reader has probably been in despair at my grim warnings about the economic crash to come. “Yeah, yeah, yeah: project fear all over again,” he probably thought. “In Boris we trust!” Why anyone could ever trust Boris Johnson about anything is beyond me. People still do but the evidence is piling up to suggest they need an urgent rethink.
The job losses announced today were shocking but this is just the beginning. Companies large and small have now come to the fork in the road. Do they continue to furlough staff in the hope that things might get better, or will they make decisions in the here and now to save their businesses? We now have the answer and it’s grim.
People who know far more about these things than I do suggest that with some of the larger companies, the redundancies announced to date are but an opening salvo. With over nine million people being furloughed from their jobs and in the pay of the government, many people still have money. They are at the golf courses or the beaches during the week, from Saturday many will be in the pubs. I’d imagine these disastrous job announcements pass many of them by. But the furlough will soon be wound down and there’s another reason to be concerned. Things are not going to be like they were before.
Even with the shops and pubs reopening and the flights from our airports resuming, the numbers using them will not be as high. Pubs cannot be rammed like they were before, neither will shops. They will be as safe as possible, but they won’t be totally safe. That foreign holiday will look very different, with masks worn everywhere and the same social distancing at bars and restaurants. The economy will recover, but by how much?
Yesterday, Andy Haldane from the Bank of England talked up a quick bounce back from the recession and he knows more about the economy than I do. (Who doesn’t?) But it’s like when Tory PM Harold MacMillan was asked about the thing in politics that most worried him, he replied simply: “Events, dear boy. Events.”
What if the first wave of COVID-19 doesn’t go away? Our death total today was a staggering 186, which is many times more than almost any other country. Leicester is already under a renewed lockdown and 36 more towns and cities are not far from being in the same position. Now the daily briefing has been ended by Dominic Cummings, we don’t get to hear the actual statistics or the wise counsel of Chris Whitty, Jonathan Van Tam and Sir Patrick Vallance. We hear the lies and bluster of Johnson and the shifty machinations of the inevitable scapegoat for the COVID-19 disaster, health secretary Matt Hancock, but they are politicians with political agendas.
Then, we have the end of summer and the cooler, then cold, nights where we stay in much more. The second wave could merely pile in with the first one still in place. What then? Keep shutting everything down to save lives or keep everything open and leave it all to the theories of Charles Darwin? (It is important to note that Darwin’s ‘theory’ of Evolution doesn’t tell the full story. Evolution is a scientific fact.) And through all this, the jobs market becomes a desert and the economic recovery was a mirage, an oasis that wasn’t there.
A friend asked the other day, in a friendly way, I hasten to add, “What if your mate Corbyn had won the election? Would he have handled COVID-19 any better?” I could have accused him of whataboutery, but I had to face the question head on. Corbyn was never my mate, he was the worst Labour leader ever; hopelessly out of his depth, not terribly bright, with some unpleasant views and friends and not fit to run a whelk stall, never mind a country, particularly one almost overrun by a terrible coronavirus. So, no, he wouldn’t have done any better because, like Johnson, he’s useless. And no, I don’t think Diane Abbott would have done any better as home secretary than Priti Patel but there you have a very low bar of competence. So the question is irrelevant. My point is that Johnson has been a disastrous prime minister and turned Britain, quite literally, into the sick man of Europe and in so doing it meant our economic hit would be the worst in the civilised world, on top of presiding over one of the highest death totals. Some record.
Now the jobs are going. Dominic Cummings comes up with a new slogan for Johnson which is ‘Build, Build, Build’. As we gaze in wonder at his sheer genius – we don’t, actually – we hear more mature voices, like the leader of her majesty’s loyal opposition calling for a policy of ‘Jobs, Jobs, Jobs’ because the spectre of mass unemployment shines cruelly through the gloom. And when I think of spectre, I always think of James Bond. Spectre are the bad guys.
More than ever, we need serious women and men to be in charge of our country, with compassion and vision. Not some clown ‘squashing the sombrero’, a woman or man without a plan. Cummings and Johnson have no plan. They are the disruptors, believing in the power of chaos. The illiberal elite for whom the Great British Public are little more than the lumpen proletariat.
The illiberal elite will escape the worst aspects of the coming economic meltdown, as they shall escape the dire effects of our inevitably calamitous departure from the transition period with the EU, now that we have left. There will be a recovery but only in the sense that some things will not be quite so bad for some people in the months and years ahead. But for the workers, especially those blue collar workers and many from the middle class, things are about to take a very nasty turn. And from listening to the actual words of Johnson and co, they are not for turning. Welcome to hell.
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