Britain must get back to business

Normal life as we know it has been suspended in the UK, and nobody knows for how long. Today is Mother’s Day, but most families will spend it apart, meeting virtually, rather than face to face, to protect the elderly and the vulnerable. It’s also a Sunday, but parishioners can’t attend the usual services. There will be no lunch in a pub, no glass of wine in a restaurant garden, no getting ready for school in the morning and, in most cases, no preparing to commute into the office either. Our way of life has been put on hold by the coronavirus, capitalism along with it; the change is as enormous as it is terrifying.

Britain is doing this in order to save lives, and it’s absolutely the right thing to do. We must control the spread of the contagion: as the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, warns today, unless we dramatically change the way we live, the NHS will soon face an Italian-style implosion.

This is why most of us are showing patience and charity and are happy to do their bit to help. And the sacrifices, short- and long-term, will in many cases be gigantic.

The economic hit will probably be even greater than the worst of the early forecasts. Many people have already lost their jobs, despite the Chancellor’s historic interventions; good businesses will go under; at best, millions of our fellow citizens will be furloughed, in many cases with savage wage cuts. It’s worse than a typical depression or even a war, because in normal downturns bad businesses go bust, while in this case everybody does; and at least in a war certain kinds of production go up and labour is reallocated. What we’ve now discovered (which is what our ancestors worked out long ago) is that the only real way to get through an epidemic is to button down the hatches and ride it out.

The Government’s measures thus far have been radical, yes, but also proportionate: an enormous boost in spending, tax holidays, expansion of welfare, grants and a guarantee to pay 80 per cent of the wages of employees who cannot work, up to £30,000 a year.

More will be necessary. The self-employed urgently need additional help and the Bank of England desperately needs to make corporate loans available to all sections of the corporate world, not just super-safe giants. Crucially, the Government, so far, has understood that this isn’t about nationalising the economy. That would wreck the economy for decades to come. Instead, this is about social insurance: it’s about putting the economy into an induced coma, and then revitalising it once the epidemic is under control. The Government is there not to take over and manage the private sector but to provide guarantees, so that when this crisis is finished Britons still have jobs to go back to. The UK has to proceed with this rescue package on the clear understanding that it is temporary. In fact, it must be designed to ensure that the eventual recovery will be as sharp and protracted as possible, and led by a revitalised private sector.

In some senses it’s true that life “will never be the same again” after the coronavirus – particularly when it comes to public health measures, the use of technology or attitudes towards just-in-time, ultra-dense living. But nevertheless, what most people want (and more of them will want it the longer this goes on) is to get back to business as usual as soon as we can. The thought of this situation continuing for 18 months is ruinous on both an economic and a human level. No society can possibly sustain being locked down for that length of time without sustaining immense damage, material and psychological.

That’s why energy and money has to be poured into developing methods of easy mass testing, as well as vaccines. Ultimately, what’s going to save us is technology and innovation.

The Government is there not to take over the private sector but to provide solutions so that Britons have jobs to go back to