This morning, Andrew Marr interviewed Chancellor Rishi Sunak. Marr quoted various experts who have said that over three million people were already unemployed and that doesn’t take into account the nine million people currently being furloughed, as well as certain self-employed people getting government assistance. Sunak didn’t deny this. He said: “Despite our unprecedented actions… there’s no way I can protect every single job and business. There is going to be hardship ahead.” None of this bright and breezy bullshit about ‘bounce-back’, as Boris Johnson keeps banging on about. We are in a lot of trouble. It just doesn’t feel like it at the moment.
I suppose it’s our own current life experiences that shape our views and feelings about where we are economically. In my social circle, the cold wind of unemployment has not directly registered. People are still in work or are being furloughed. They are not generally short of money and in some ways are better off than before because there has been little to spend money on. In other people’s social circles, experiences will be different. The increasing number of failing businesses means many thousands are losing their jobs every day. When we (the royal we: not me) return to the shopping malls tomorrow, they may notice some stores are closed down for good. When pubs and restaurants are allowed to reopen, not all of them will reopen.
Large manufacturers have already launched warning shots about future job losses but no one seriously believes those numbers so far announced represent the end of job losses. The fear, indeed the likelihood, is that the current trickle will become a flood. When Sunak says, “There is going to be hardship ahead”, he isn’t kidding. Hardship, heartbreak, shattered dreams, broken lives. Even in early summer, we are back to mass unemployment. By autumn, we could be facing an economic wasteland.
No one will be exempt from the pain that is to come. Unquestionably, the initial anguish will fall on those in the private and third sectors. But with decreasing tax returns and rising government debt, there will certainly be a bonfire of the public sector. It would happen anyway, given the desire of Dominic Cummings to dismantle the civil service, but with an economy in meltdown, as it already is, the axe will fall everywhere, even, I fear, in the most essential areas of all, meaning health, social care, education, law and order (as usual) and defence.
It has been strange to say the least to see a hard right Tory government switching on the money taps to stop people losing their jobs, but that’s what has happened. They had to in order to prevent the collapse of much of our economy. But in truth, much of Sunak’s spending has represented mere sticking plaster. The wound in the economy is vast and expanding by the day. The light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming express.
Johnson has ‘kick-started’ the economy at a time when there are 40,000 new cases of COVID-19 every single week. Far from defeating the virus, the government has only managed to suppress it to what remain high levels. It is entirely possible that the second wave will be delayed until next year because the first wave is still with us.
There are no reasons to be cheerful. The worst is yet to come and today, for once, a government minister actually admitted it.
