Ministers are rolling the dice with the economy
“Extraordinary. I’m quite dumbstruck by that,” is how Meg Hillier, chair of the House of Commons committee investigating Britain’s Covid-19 preparations, described the revelation that no planning was done for the enormous economic upheaval that’s now with us.
I’d argue that Hillier was speaking for the nation, except that her words may represent something of an understatement. They knew something like this was coming. The warnings were all there. The lights were flashing in bright blue and red while the sirens wailed. They just didn’t know when.
To that end, Exercise Cygnus was conducted in 2016. It simulated an influenza pandemic, and concluded that Britain was not adequately prepared. For example, it predicted the horrible crisis that ultimately unfolded in Britain’s care homes. But while it looked at the health service, and local government’s ability to cope, no attention was paid to the economy and to the impact on companies large and small of having to shut up shop for an indeterminate period.
That’s a bit like a local council conducting a risk assessment of a climbing wall at a children’s adventure holiday place and failing to consider the state of the handholds as part of it. What? Little Billy fell off and broke his leg? Because the plastic handholds broke off in his hands when he got near the top? Ooops.
If you wanted to know why, say, the loans schemes to help companies weather the storm had to be tweaked, and tweaked some more, well now you have your answer. If you wanted to know why the self-employed looked like they’d been forgotten, and the schemes designed for them that emerged then looked full of holes, well now you have your answer. I could carry on in that vein. And on and on and on.
What has become very clear is that the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, and his team have been making it up as they go along. That being the case, it’s really rather remarkable that it’s worked out as well as it has. And I know that’s not saying very much if you look at the state of the economy, which the OECD thinks will take the worst hit in Europe.
What has become very clear is that the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, and his team have been making it up as they go along
They basically rolled the dice, and then they rolled them again, and eventually they hit a double that’s just about got us past “Go” on the Monopoly board, but without the £200. This might go some way towards explaining the clamour to reopen the shops, and then the other parts of the economy, even when the scientific and medical case for doing so is shaky.
In the background, of course, is the threat of a no-deal Brexit that Boris Johnson and his chums seem hellbent upon crashing down on the heads of the British people to keep their fruit loop backbenchers sweet and their extremists quiet-ish. They surely won’t have modelled what that looks like on top of the pandemic, perhaps because it scares the few sensible heads in government witless.
Sunak and co have done some sensible things – the job retention or furlough scheme being one example – but they’ve come at a high cost. Meanwhile, they’re going to need to throw quite a few more doubles in the months ahead. And yes, I know. Roll three of them in Monopoly and you end up in the clink.
This is why Hillier’s adjective, “extraordinary”, is arguably underplaying it as a description of the government’s lack of preparedness. Try bonkers. Astonishing. Staggering. Even if you preface one of those with an expletive, the one beginning with “F” and ending with an “-ing” would seem appropriate, it still doesn’t quite get there.
“If businesses have been waiting out for the government’s guidance on the best route forward, they don’t have a chance in hell of actually putting the right measures in place to build their way back to profit and prosperity in these turbulent times,” said Rupert Morrison, an economist and CEO at OrgVue, a data and analytics firm.
His quote is a tad self-serving. He’s trying to flog his company’s product, after all. But that doesn’t change the fact that he’s basically right. When it comes to the economy, it’s been amateur hour under successive Tory governments. You lot in business? If you didn’t realise it before, you should do now. You’re on your
own kids.