Change is upon us but we still get to decide on the future

The coronavirus crisis is changing the way we live but we should choose which changes we keep, says Brian Monteith

After approaching one week of the Covid-19 lockdown we can already see that our lives are changing and are unlikely to go back to where they were before the virus arrived.

The way we are now having to live will make us all ask questions about how we lived before – and some of the new ways we are adopting, or may yet adopt, will replace the old think, becoming the new normal.

The introspection and reassessment that temporary forced change shall undoubtedly generate could be a force for good – but only so long as a proper debate is had and people’s voices are heard. What we must avoid is vested interests that tend to be well connected, well financed and well organised rushing us into judgments that we later come to regret and serve no useful purpose in dealing with future pandemics.

The lockdown may yet get tighter if the current regime is not deemed to be having enough effect; greater restrictions on our liberty may follow, more limits to our economic activity may be put in place, some truly dystopian scenes may develop that we thought were only likely to be found in science fiction movies.

This is not alarmist; we need to be prepared to adjust – but we also need to remember that what might be required as short-term measures are indeed temporary and should be repeatedly reviewed. On that note we should be glad that the UK Government accepted the requirement for a sunset clause in its Emergency Powers Act so that measures introduced must be reviewed in September before carrying on.

Nor can we simply say that because the state has now found it necessary to take actions that we have never judged desirable or even possible before, that they should therefore be carried on. The most obvious example is the vast extension of public sector spending that is required to ensure we have an active economy left to go back to. It should not need to be said but I believe it necessary to remind people that it is the economic activity of the private sector that finances the economic activity of the public sector. Spending huge amounts of money through borrowing is a tax on future generations that have had no say in our decisions – it is essentially generational theft.

Such an extreme form of borrowing is only justifiable in such times as these when our ability to live through a threat to the lives of tens, or possibly hundreds, of thousands of people threatens the very existence of future generations in the first place. Such circumstances require immediate financial burdens that would otherwise be impossible to take on through the self-defeating policies of higher taxation (that few could pay) or printing money (that debases the currency).

Wars are an obvious example of such an off-the-scale economic challenge and provide the lesson that the UK only managed to repay its massive borrowing from the US during the Second World War in 2006 – and its debt for the First World War in 2015. Seeking to base our future economic policies when we are past the coronavirus pandemic on the exceptional spending now being undertaken is the stuff of fantasy and requires politicians to be honest with themselves as much as with us the voters.

I am at the stage in my life where I am enjoying seeing my grandchildren arrive and grow – but I have no wish to burden them or their children – and subsequent generations