Finally, in the past 24 hours, media talk has shifted away from supporting the NHS and nothing else. It is beginning to focus on the unfolding financial disaster that is hoovering up businesses viable before the Lockdown was imposed and is set to cast millions of us into unemployment in days and weeks ahead.
Watching the Tory supporters club lauding everything that Boris and Chancellor Rishi Sunk have done as being heaven made since the travesty of the Lockdown began, is enough to make an objective observer’s stomach churn.
It should have been obvious from the start that the Lockdown was itself a very dubious way to address a Pandemic where so many unknowns and variables were involved. The response to the impact of the Lockdown on jobs, incomes and businesses was never considered in the depth that it should be or even really thought through.
Telling the Country’s workforce and business owners in March immediately following the Lockdown being imposed that nobody would be left without help sounded great to those who were listening and trusting, rather than questioning at the time.
But for those who have been left to fall down the very sizable gaps in the Government’s provision, the potential fallout from this Conservative Chancellor’s failure to understand the very nature of how business works and think through how his decisions will affect them first, and ultimately us all, looks increasingly bleaker by the day.
Some of the most simple problems in life are in fact so simple, they are simply too obvious for some to understand.
In this case for politicians, it has been the absence of the basic understanding that throwing money around at only the most obvious groups of people to have lost their income because of the Lockdown was never going to fix the problem for everyone else, nor help the whole UK economy in any meaningful or balanced way.
Instead, the Government and the people who advise them have opted to create complicated solutions that were only ever destined to complicate rather than simplify what was always needed by People and Business to be a very simply result.
The problems caused by the Lockdown at the start are still today only going to be addressed by putting a temporary halt to ‘normal’ monetary flow.
Bringing a a halt to normal monetary flow means suspending the need for all people and businesses to pay bills for normal services or products unless they continue to operate normally during the Lockdown.
Stopping ‘normal’ monetary’ flow was and remains the simplest way to treat everyone fairly and in the same way during the Lockdown and the period of recovery thereafter. Because the impact will always be relative to what those people have and what they earn – as any policy that is supposed to work for everyone universally always should.
It was and remains within the power and the reach of the Government to enact such a policy now.
The Government can and should mothball the financial situation for all those who are about to lose jobs or businesses and put life on hold for them so that it can be resumed, once normality has returned.
It can surely only be an unforgivable lack of understanding of how business, the economy and monetary flow works by the Government, or a deliberate move on the part of politicians and their advisors – whose first loyalty is to the world of finance and the banks – that the ‘solution’ we have to the impact of the Lockdown has been created and rolled out in the way that it has.
With things unchanged and left as they are for the duration of the COVID-19 Pandemic, you only need to follow the Taxpayers money that the Government is pumping out through these policies to see who it is who will still be doing well and profiting out what has continued to be business as usual for them during a time of national crisis for everyone else. They are the ones who are still getting paid exactly the same – if not more – as they were in ‘normal’ times.
Addressing the realties of the crisis that will accompany any pandemic would never please everyone. Some will feel they have less. Some will want a lot more. But there is no excuse for our political leaders to fail to enact decisions and public policy which is fair and treats everyone like they are valued by Government and Society as being in need of exactly the same help when the experience we are all living through is exactly the same.
When considered fully in context, the Chancellor’s latest warning there will be tough times ahead is ridiculously after the fact. Especially when it is his own and the Government’s Policies in response to Coronavirus that were the beginning of the real problem the UK is now facing, rather than the Pandemic itself being the cause.
The stupidity, self-interest or mixture of both that has led to this situation is of such magnitude that it would be justified and reasonable to demand that the Government resign.
The problem is that a Labour administration under Kier Starmer could not offer us any better and would potentially create an even bigger mess than the Conservative Government as the champions of business are doing with an 80-strong majority all on their own.
We are stuck with a Political class that is so out of touch with the lives of the people it governs, it is going to make a very bad situation for us all considerably worse.
We can only hope that if civil order breaks down as a direct result of what the Government has done, the void that will be created will be filled by someone or something that knows how to turn this all around and make things right.
Adam Tugwell 