Get on your bike and back to work
YOU CAN’T have missed the headlines last week. Story after story after story detailing the dire financial straits into which we are descending at the sort of speed Lewis Hamilton will be looking to achieve at Silverstone this afternoon.
From the Treasury Minister warning that workers will “start to lose their skills” if the furlough scheme is extended, to the news university graduates face a “jobs disaster” this summer as firms impose a freeze on hiring, to the scarcity of work experience opportunities or internships this year to the truly startling news that the furlough scheme has already cost more than £30billion, it is a deeply distressing and seemingly endless litany of employment woes as jobs go.
All of which makes it even more baffling why so many major employers have already committed to allowing their staff to continue to work from home, this despite yesterday being the day the Government ditched its official guidance that you should all “work from home” if you could.
The numbers involved in the roll call of shame are dizzying. Financial consultancy KPMG has said most of its 16,000 employees will not be expected to return until 2021 and RBS has similarly instructed nearly 50,000 staff. Cocacola and Vodafone are expected shortly to confirm the same directive to their staff not to return until next year and Google made the mind boggle with the news its staff don’t need to come back until next July! In some instances, that means it will have been sixteen months since some were at their actual desks.
This is plain, economic suicide. While all the companies I’ve listed are more than big enough to take care of themselves, it is the associated businesses that will suffer. They’re not just the ones that rely,
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TEACHING unions are calling on the Government to give fresh instructions on the wearing of masks prior to schools reopening in England next month with one union leader saying current advice is “out of step” with official public health advice.
For a group who are supposedly all about trying to find solutions, teachers do seem to require an inordinate amount of guidance, don’t they?
And mark my words: this will be the battleground to prevent many schools getting back to business in just a few weeks. as suppliers, on the larger companies, but think of all the newsagents, cafés, bars, restaurants, sandwich shops, pubs, dry cleaners and other local firms, that will wither without any trade if no one is coming to work. In the City of London, footfall in some areas is down to just 15 per cent of what it was, which means even survival is a tough enough prospect, let alone growth.
All this as health officials disclosed that one day last week there were just seven deaths from Covid-19, the lowest number since the middle of March. In reality, providing you’re not in one of the vulnerable groups, you’re more likely to be struck by lightning or win the lottery than be laid low with Covid – but why isn’t the Government getting that message across? We will soon be drowning in more than £300billion of debt – as I’ve said countless times, to put that into some kind of perspective, it would be enough to run the NHS for two years! – and a day doesn’t pass without more people being laid off. We’re currently paying millions of people billions of pounds to stay at home and not go to work but the stark truth is many of these poor folk are actually already out of work, they just haven’t been told yet. Young people who have paid as much as £40,000 for three years of university tuition and living costs have been told not to expect to easily get a job due to a jobs freeze and those just starting out have to gain what workplace experience they can by taking part in Skype calls with bosses who are probably still in their pyjamas. Instead of banging on about cycling, Boris Johnson needs to grab hold of this, or he risks being remembered as the prime minister who presided over the economic collapse of the nation. Bosses need to be instructed to put in the necessary social distancing and cleaning regimes to get people back to work. After I launched into a similar tirade on my radio show last week, more than 500,000 people downloaded the video and although I can’t pretend support was universal, many agreed the situation was becoming perilous.
Having vowed to “fire up the turbo-chargers” for the nation, the PM needs to act on this. Otherwise coronavirus will claim yet another victim: the nation’s economy.
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