Austerity, the homicidal present, and the probable Russian future

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On 18 June, I presented a webinar with this deliberately provocative title as the inaugural event in Fuse’s Covid-19 seminar series.  I think the provocation is fully justified by the most recent summaries of the UK’s failed response to the pandemic, notably from The Economist, the Oxford Research Group and Reuters.  (A superb one from The New York Times unfortunately appears to be behind a paywall.) 

You can find an archived recording of the presentation here.  My particular focus, as in an earlier posting to this blog (in which I pointed out that the Adam Smith Institute and the leader of the Labour Party were agreed on the importance of a coherent post-lockdown economic strategy), was on what can be learned from the experience of Russia in the generation since the implosion of the Soviet Union about the possible health and health equity consequences of drastic economic collapse. 

Fuse have kindly collected the questions submitted by audience members, not all of which could be addressed in the available time, and I’ve provided brief answers in italics below, under several topic headings.

(This post was updated on 30 June to add a reference to the excellent Reuters report on the UK’s coronavirus response.)

Economic inequalities and uncertainties

Just an observation- what to do about inequality is known, what we lack is the political will to act.

On the other hand… I think we have a generation who will no longer stand for inequalities and injustice. In the words of the late Whitney- I believe the children are our future…

I am also concerned about this issue being compounded by the uncertainty of Brexit when the economy was already in jeopardy pre-Covid 19

A perfect storm – austerity, Covid and Brexit

Agreed that much of what to do about inequality is known … as a small example, researchers at the University of Warwick recently showed that just requiring everyone earning more than £100,000 a year to pay an alternative minimum income tax rate of 35 percent would raise around £11 billion per year, without changing the ‘headline’ tax rate.  Raising the rate on high-income earners would further increase fiscal capacity, as would such measures as a one-off wealth tax of the kind proposed by Thomas Piketty as a way of paying off Europe’s rising debts after the 2008 financial crisis … and, of course, curbing tax avoidance by transnational corporations.

Agreed as well about the added uncertainties associated with Brexit.  For example, what happens to the economy of the North-East if the Nissan plant in Sunderland cannot remain viable?  The one bright spot may be what could be done, but probably won’t be, in terms of national economic redevelopment once EU rules on state aid no longer apply.

What we need to do is convince those in power that the health of the poor actually has implications for their wealth and wellbeing.

Ah, but does it?  COVID-19 would appear to prove the point, but consider how much easier it has been for Mr. and Mrs. Range Rover with a house, a garden, high-speed broadband and professional occupations to work from home and reduce exposure risk … meanwhile, the poor and marginalised in service sector occupations that require in-person work and presonal contact are obviously unable to work from home, whilst in many cases more vulnerable to the various comorbidities that appear to increase the severity of infection.

A Basic Universal Income … a ‘healthy response’ to economic and social sustainability?   

Maybe, if it is not seen as a substitute for investment in in-kind social provision (e.g. social housing, public transport, public health programming).  If used as a substitute, a Basic Universal Income could function as a subsidy for private landlords and dodgy second-hand car dealers, with recipients acting as the intermediaries.  I believe a better response is a basic living income floor, delivered to those eligible by way of a refundable tax credit. 

Do we have economic evidence to argue the case for tackling inequality? For example if we introduced a Basic Universal Income does this have a cost benefit analysis that could convince the rich that it is a good idea?

Here, the answer is an emphatic yes – as the OECD, for example, pointed out in 2015 in a report called In It Together: Why Less Inequality Benefits All.  Researchers at the International Monetary Fund have made a similar point about the need for inclusive growth.  The political problem, as economist Branko Milanovic has shown, is that ‘the rich’ may have much more to gain from promoting policies that redistribute income upward, of the kind we have seen in the UK post-2010, than from promoting economy-wide growth.  Building coalitions around the idea of inclusive growth will be absolutely essential if the pandemic is not to have the effect of ratcheting up inequality.

How many gold-plated Lear jets can one have?

Can’t speak to private aircraft, which is not a market in which I window-shop, but readers who love the sea and want to get really frustrated may want to check out the 200 largest yachts in the world.

Rebuilding economy and society: ‘Building back better’

The areas hardest hit economically seem to be in the North, Midlands, coastal areas etc.  Do you have any insights on the impact of governance structures on preparation for and response to the pandemic?  Do countries with more genuinely devolved powers respond better?

A very good question; I’m sure PhD dissertations will be written in the years to come on precisely that topic. 

I think we can only depend upon the local communities. Take Grenfell: Government stood back, community rushed in to support.

The third sector have traditionally always stepped in when the statutory sectors have cut back support/resources.  I’m interested to know what it is that enables the third sector to do this and what are the barriers that prevent the government.

I would agree that a communitarian approach is key. Hoping to appeal to the conscience of the rich seems wasted energy. For those of us in the academy could we try to make the case to our HE [higher education] institutions that working with charities, mutual aid groups and the third sector is part of our civic duty? There are groups, such as APLE and ATD Fourth World, pushing and campaigning hard against the worst effects of inequality.

What does the best response to avoid the potential Russian pitfalls more specifically look like at a local level?

Surely we created a North of Tyne Combined Authority and Northern Powerhouse to take control of our assets and our future. 

Again, all important points.  There are at least two different issues here: (a) local control over priorities for building back, which is essential, and (b) local resources for building back, which are hopelessly inadequate thanks in part to the fiscal evisceration of local government under post-2010 austerity. 

Local governments and entities like NTCA simply did not have the revenue streams or revenue-raising capabilities they needed even before the pandemic, as I pointed out in the presentation. 

I am convinced that the most likely approach to succeed at the national level is a national development bank, with a multi-billion pound initial capitalisation, empowered to lend on concessional (nowadays,  zero-interest) terms and offer direct grants to private businesses and, especially, local authorities for green rebuilding projects, under a streamlined planning process.  (Such rebuilding in war-ravaged Europe was, in fact, the original mission of the World Bank.)  Think what such an institution could achieve with the resources that would otherwise have been committed to HS2 and the road infrastructure necessitated by the third Heathrow runway …

At the international level, a remarkable pre-pandemic blueprint for a global New Deal was produced in 2017 by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.  Good ideas are not thin on the ground.

Age and ageing

How do we challenge the ‘othering’ of the elderly and those with pre-existing health conditions? There seems to be a tacit agreement that this is an expendable group.

Do you think ageing populations and care homes being in the spotlight during the pandemic will change how our society sees ageing?

Yes please to an ageing and Covid webinar!

Why have we [collectively] allowed the crisis in the care homes to accumulate over the past few decades?

There’s a cultural ‘groupthink’ that only other people grow old and get ill – ageing is ‘nothing to do with us’. How can we influence people to make the connection to the fact that it’s their own future care that’s in jeopardy?

All excellent points, and it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the elderly have been regarded as expendable, whether infected in care homes (and this has been a scandal throughout most of the high-income world) or effectively, in some countries like the UK, placed under house arrest.  In Canada’s two largest provinces, Ontario and Québec, no one familiar with the long-term care sector’s decades of underfunding, patchwork public/private provision, casualisation of personal support workers and under-regulation was surprised when some facilities turned into charnel houses.  Will this change?  I am sceptical, although encouraged by the creative response of organisations like the International Longevity Centre here in the UK. 

Fighting back, building ahead

How can we ensure that the public health community don’t shy away from the inherently political nature of inequality and its impacts?

How can we come together as a PH community – and bring about change in a meaningful impactful way without falling into a purely political debate which is a distraction from the key debate?

Public health is everyone’s business it will take all sectors working together.

Good questions, although I can’t agree that ‘purely political’ debates are necessarily a distraction.  Choices about who gets how much of a society’s resources, and on what terms, are at the core of politics, and public health risks irrelevance by ignoring them. 

Are we hindered because the Public Health community does not have a collective voice? This completely reduces our influence in the system.

I think the fact that we separate health from public health is part of this problem.  All health is public health. It is a sleight of hand to suggest otherwise.

I’m not sure that the public health community lacks a collective voice.  It has, in the UK, both the Faculty of Public Health and the Royal Society for Public Health.  The problem seems to me rather that highly accomplished public health professionals have been deeply divided about such issues as the unequal distribution of health damage and long-term economic risk associated with the lockdown … which has meant that the political executive can cherry-pick the ‘science’ it wants.  COVID-19 is hardly unique in this respect!  But in the course of spending far too much time reading media coverage of the pandemic, I’ve been struck by the extent to which The Telegraph ‘got’ the issue of unequal damage from lockdown, and The Guardian didn’t. 

I have a question following on from above – what do you see as the key points and forms of resistance to this?  Especially given the positions of many governments, not least in the UK.

I’m very concerned that these stark inequalities are fuelling reactionary far right wing populism / nationalism / patriotism – and the current government are happy to let this narrative run. Any ideas of how this can be challenged?

I wish I had better answers; hopefully the important dialogue that Fuse has initiated will contribute to developing them, as will a revival of critical thinking in UK universities.  As a political scientist, I have to observe that one of the undesirable characteristics of Westminster-style parliamentary systems is that a government with a legislative majority is so impermeable that it functions as an elective monarchy, in this case with a term of office that runs until the end of 2024. 

What can universities contribute to the resistance of this future in terms of our teaching?

Education has been commodified and is not about transformation. We need to address who can access education and what is provided when they get there … thinking Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

These are of course critically important questions, about which (in particular) Stefan Collini and Lawrence Busch have written brilliantly.  More recently another Canadian (like myself), retired legal scholar Philip Slayton, had this to say:

‘A curious and well-informed mind is a free mind, and a person with a free mind is a free person; creating this free person is what education, particularly postsecondary education, is meant to do. Universities need to reject a corporate consumer-driven model; a student is not a “client.” Universities must eschew misguided vocationalism, emphasize the development of critical thinking – in particular, the ability to distinguish between a good argument and a bad argument – and recognize that society needs dreamers at least as much as technicians. They need a fee structure that makes postsecondary education available to all without career-distorting long-term debt. And they need to welcome the expression of all views, even extreme ones.’

More important reads from across the web: Bank Holiday edition

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A sobering look at what the pandemic is likely to mean for efforts to control HIV, tuberculosis and malaria in sub-Saharan Africa, by a McGill University communicable disease epidemiologist

A United Nations Development Programme report envisioning the first worldwide decline in the Human Development Index since UNDP started calculating the index in 1990

Human development is facing an unprecedented hit

Source: United Nations Development Programme

University of Warwick researchers point out that including capital gains in estimates of income inequality means that income distribution in the UK is even more unequal than previously thought

A list of heavyweight social scientists argue, rather optimistically, for democratizing work in the post-crisis world

A preview of a new book on the 1965-66 US-backed mass murder carried out in Indonesia by supporters of Suharto

And an intriguing argument by David McCoy, from Queen Mary University London, that in the post-pandemic world ‘we need a manifesto’, not just a coronavirus disease control plan

Superb virus reads from around the Web – 10 May update

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A Canadian Broadcasting Corporation news team – yes, a state broadcaster that still does real journalism! – takes a look inside the slaughterhouse that has produce one of Canada’s largest clusters of cases, and the working conditions that virtually guaranteed its spread.

A team of Scottish researchers and Martin McKee point out that the pandemic response itself will have negative health effects, which seems bleedin’ obvious, but for some reason most of the health research community prefers to ignore the point, and indeed much else about the post-pandemic future.   

Naomi Klein points out that big technology firms in the US are using the pandemic as a platform for new systems that will ratchet up inequality, making the billionaires even richer and expanding the precariat.  (The Intercept, where this piece appeared, is proving indispensable for truth-seekers in these times.)

Two articles in The Atlantic, which is making its coronavirus coverage free at the moment, are also valuable.  One offers a succinct description of how South Korea dealt with the virus, and what should be learned from its experience.  The other is a searing examination of the racism revealed in multiple ways by the US response to the pandemic.  For anyone still under the impression that it’s a civilised country, this is a must-read.

Finally, The Times – unfortunately behind a paywall – offers a thoughtful take on the question ‘Supermodeller Neil Ferguson: should we trust his science’?  One might question the description of what the Imperial College crew do as science in the first place, but that’s a topic for another day. 

More in good time.  Meanwhile, stay safe.

Realism versus Monbiot: Thoughts on possible worlds of post-pandemic reconstruction

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George Monbiot is only one of many commentators who have argued the need for a post-pandemic programme of economic reconstruction that will address environmental concerns as well as the imperative of restoring and securing the livelihoods of literally hundreds of millions of people. The importance of this latter imperative cannot be overstated. In the US alone, unemployment by the end of April quadrupled to 14.7 percent, with 20.5 million jobs lost.  In the UK, the Bank of England has warned of a doubling of unemployment to nine percent and a shrinkage of the economy’s overall output to a 300-year low.   The UK unemployment figures are less horrific than they otherwise would be because of a massive debt-financed programme of wage and salary compensation that the Chancellor of the Exchequer has correctly characterised as unsustainable. 

Against this background, Monbiot (and I am not picking on him here; he is rather the most articulate and best informed proponent of this perspective, and therefore the most difficult target) argues that ‘[g]overnments should provide financial support to company workers while refashioning the economy to provide new jobs’ outside the automobile, fossil fuel and airline industries.  It is now a commonplace that after the financial crisis of 2008, governments bailed out many of the financial institutions that had caused the crisis – that is, their shareholders, managers and workers – rather than those who bore the worst consequences.  Monbiot argues that: ‘This is our second great chance to do things differently’.  But with government debt and expenditure levels relative to GDP already approaching twentieth-century wartime levels, just to finance short-term remediation, the unavoidable question is:  do things differently with what? And where will the investment necessary for such new jobs, and the financing needed to support workers’ transition to them, come from?

It is nice to envision, as a team of luminaries including Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz and climate economics authority Sir Nicholas Stern has recently argued based on an expert survey, that post-pandemic reconstruction can contribute to reducing climate impacts through investment  in ‘clean physical infrastructure, building efficiency retrofits, investment in education and training, natural capital investment, and clean R&D’, whatever that is.  The authors do not explain where the money will come from, in a world where the estimated US$2.5 trillion annual investment needed to meet the Sustainable Development Goals before the pandemic was nowhere in sight.

It is possible, in theory, to envision mobilising the needed resources by way of income and wealth tax rates that were prevalent after the Second World War, responding to wartime government debt and expenditure levels.  Many of these are now probably infeasible because of the concentration of ultra-wealth in financial instruments and tax haven real estate, and because of possibilities for capital flight that can best be limited through transnational cooperation in a world where a corporate-financed US Congressional candidate has claimed that ‘[f]reedom and democracy are best secured when banking secrecy and tax havens exist’.

If the ultra-rich are probably beyond the reach of national public policy, then the menu of policy options shrinks considerably.  When many dividends have already been cancelled, whose income does Monbiot propose to reduce, whose assets to tax or seize, and how?  What happens to firms that cancel dividend payouts when investors flee their shares, making it impossible for them to raise new capital in response to lockdown-created shortfalls?  How can green jobs be created by seizing foreign oligarchs’ London property holdings, their financial assets having long ago been safely shifted elsewhere?  How many of the Russell Group universities’ 508 senior staff who were paid more than the prime minister in 2018-19 will agree to salary cuts or marginal tax rate increases for the greater good?  Will their response be representative of their broader posh demographic?  Will clinicians who own second homes be content with strongly progressive taxation of their increased value over the years?  What are the legalities of much-needed retrospective wealth taxation?

In short: How are these dreams to be paid for? 

These are not rhetorical questions, and they should be the starting point for conversations that substitute serious consideration of political economy for cheerleading. Even in high-income countries, the post-pandemic menu of policy options is likely to be circumscribed by the International Monetary Fund’s role as a gatekeeper to financial markets – a role that low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) have experienced with often bitter consequences over the past decades, with the impacts compounded by capital flight.  Given the dire situation of LMICs, what justification can the high-income world offer to the world’s majority outside its borders for not taking advantage of fossil fuel prices that have sunk to the pre-1973 levels that enabled today’s rich to get that way, unless its development assistance agencies and investors are willing to increase their commitments by at least an order of magnitude?   Such conversations may have begun, but I am not hearing them. 

Virus reads from around the web

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Intriguing looks at the Swedish approach to pandemic response from Vanity Fair and Nature

An argument that the pandemic is revealing varieties of ‘structural violence’ by government including the UK’s neglect of its health services under austerity, by two professors at Queen Mary University London (this is from Counterpunch, which has provided numerous valuable commentaries on the politics of the pandemic)

A debunking of the idea that UK government is ‘following the science’, pointing out that this claim doesn’t even make sense in the uncertain world of public health policy

And a fine, plain-language guide to the wonderful world of World Health Organization decision-making and finance

From tragedy to farce

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The Telegraph, whose coverage of the coronavirus pandemic has been consistently excellent, reports today (21 April) that UK firms are shipping millions of pieces of personal protective equipment (PPE) to Europe, while frontline NHS personnel do without; UK firms cannot get a reply to their offers of supplies; individual hospitals are ‘sidestepping the government’s procurement process’ (thank heavens); and central government longingly awaits imports from Turkey.

If accurate, the report confirms that the UK’s response to the pandemic has descended past tragedy into homicidal farce.  Sadly, having now observed British universities for seven years, I can understand what’s probably going on within the similar bureaucracy of NHS procurement: quality is a byproduct, although it may be achieved (and in universities, as on the NHS frontlines, it often is); the real concern is ticking boxes, Following Procedures and not annoying superiors.  Those managing the process have little stake in the outcome.

With a brief hiatus after the initial shock of panic buying and lockdown, within days the shelves at Tesco and Sainsburys were filling up again: these and other companies, unlike the NHS, have experience with doing logistics on the fly.  As hard as it is for a committed social democrat to say this, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that turning PPE procurement over to private sector logistics contractors, with RAF aircraft at their disposal if necessary, would have produced a superior outcome and saved lives.*  The government will have to try this route if it is to have any hope of protecting professionals and the public as a step towards a lockdown exit strategy, before the economy collapses beyond hope of repair. 

And on that note Prof. Carl Heneghan of Oxford, one of British medicine’s most conspicuous overachievers, was quoted yesterday as having told BBC Radio 4 that ‘the damaging effect now of lockdown is going to outweigh the damaging effect of coronavirus’.  Indeed, the social science tells us precisely that.  The question now is who will listen.

* Update: The Times reported on 22 April, unfortunately behind a paywall, that the NHS has in fact simplified its PPE supply chain to involve both the armed forces ‘and Clipper Logistics, a private contractor’, but that the military are ‘appalled’ by continuing inability to procure PPE and deliver it where it is needed. Clearly managers cannot get even the simplified logistics right … the fatal farce continues.

Testing and tracing – not here

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So, here we are into week four of a lockdown that threatens to turn the UK into a Third World economy.  There is widespread agreement among those knowledgeable about public health that intensive testing and contact tracing are the least unsafe routes out of the lockdown.  In its 18 April issue, The Economist reports that to carry this out effectively in the US, more than 260,000 people would need to be trained and hired to do a job that is not especially demanding – “anyone with a secondary-school education can be trained in a day”.  It further reports an estimate that paying the first 100,000 hires paid for a year, after the costs of training, would cost US$3.6 billion – ‘a rounding error on the cost of shutting down the American economy’.

I’ve done a simple transposition of these numbers to the UK context.  The UK’s population is about one-fifth that of the United States, so the need is for 52,000 contact tracers, with an initial tranche of 10,000 – a small fraction of the number of people with requisite qualifications who have been idled by the mandated economic shutdown.  Assuming comparable wage costs, after training this first tranche would cost less than £600 million – again, a rounding error in the costs lockdown is now inflicting on the UK economy.

There is no indication whatsoever that the UK government is contemplating the basic measures that, on the best available evidence, would provide a safe route out of lockdown.  Instead, we get reports that: ‘A Department of Health spokesman said the UK was “one of the most prepared countries in the world for pandemics”’ – meaning only that anyone with an official connection to central government is lying, which we already knew. 

The lack of any semblance of preparation lends itself to one of three explanations:

1.  The government is incompetent and has no idea of what it is doing – troubling, since constitutionally it is almost impossible to replace for four years.

2.  The government is well aware of what it should be doing, but also aware that despite the sweeping powers it has granted itself, it lacks the administrative and logistics capacity in Whitehall and perhaps the basic intelligence at senior levels to organise tasks such as repurposing idled industrial capacity to produce protective equipment and setting up training programmes using existing educational institutions.  A government run by normally intelligent grownups would have started on these tasks weeks ago, bringing in private sector expertise as needed.

3.  The government’s objective is to create conditions under which current lockdown conditions will be extended for many months, using public health as a justification – meanwhile, distracting attention from all its earlier failures to take measures that would avoided the continuing crisis.

Take your choice – and if you are fortunate enough to have the choice, organise your own ‘exit strategy’ from what may become an unlivable jurisdiction if and when the lockdown ends.

No exit? The United Kingdom’s probable Russian Future

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As many governments are announcing strategies for ending lockdowns, we have the curious situation in which the leader of the Labour Party and the Adam Smith Institute agree that the UK government needs to set out such a strategy, but the government refuses to do so.  It says only that five tests must first be met, but gives no evidence of being able to meet any one of them.

This is dangerously irresponsible, and is likely to have long-term negative consequences for public health and health inequalities – consequences that most public health researchers and practitioners seem determined to ignore.  Look ahead, for example, to next January when new border controls (the UK imports 30 percent of its food from the European Union) create food shortages whilst economic collapse worsens fuel poverty that was already a substantial public health issue before the pandemic.

In the absence of a clear, credible and rigorously implemented exit strategy, the future may well resemble the situation in Russia after the collapse of the former Soviet Union.  The economy contracted by close to 50 percent, existing social provision mechanisms and large portions of the health care system crumbled, and life expectancy – especially for men, who now are hit harder by the coronavirus – plunged by several years.  Conventional wisdom attributes a substantial part of this transition to alcohol consumption, but from a social determinants of health perspective this is explanandum rather than explanans: that is, it demands explanation rather than providing one.  Twenty-five years on, Russian life expectancy still did not reflect the country’s economic recovery.  That recovery was accompanied by rising economic inequality, massive capital flight, and the emergence of a new stratum of politically connected billionaire oligarchs.

All this could be avoided, but there is no sign that either the UK government or the public health community are even taking these risks seriously. 

Additional sources on the Russian experience: 

Field MG and Twigg JL, eds. Russia’s Torn Safety Nets: Health and Social Welfare during the Transition. New York: St. Martin’s Press; 2000.

Field MG, Kotz DM, Bukhman G. Neoliberal Economic Policy, “State Desertion,” and the Russian Health Crisis. In: Kim JY, Millen JV, Irwin A, Gershman J, eds. Dying for Growth: Global Inequality and the Health of the Poor. Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press; 2000: pp. 155-73.

Unemployment and the dark future of the post-pandemic world

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I have previously mentioned Andrew Sorkin’s DealBook blog, which I regard as indispensable.  Here’s an example: The first paragraphs of today’s (16 April) update about the situation in the United States:

Think about the short- and long-term health implications of that last figure, and the situation in many other countries, which will no doubt be comparable.  If you take the social determinants of health inequalities at all seriously, you can’t ignore them, even though too many of my colleagues would prefer to do so.

Against Covid-19 fetishism, and other musings

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Herewith a few equity- and policy-oriented musings about the latest state of the pandemic world.

1.  Media, and many researchers who should know better, seem obsessed with the number of deaths from Covid-19, or associated with Covid-19.  Good reasons exist to want to know this over the short term, for purposes of tracking the spread of the virus, but apart from the fact that in most countries the current chaos makes it impossible accurately to determine this number, it is largely irrelevant in terms of the overall health impacts of the pandemic.

The most basic indicator that matters is the all-cause mortality rate (age-adjusted or not, and both figures should be presented), and the inequalities in this indicator amongst various age, class, gender, race/ethnicity and regional demographics. Over time, all-cause mortality rates will reflect not only the short-term health system dislocations and dysfunctions associated with the pandemic, but also the longer-term impacts on social determinants of health of the depression that will follow the lockdown. In a few years, those of us still alive will be able to compare the effectiveness of various national responses … and to restate a point it is all-cause mortality, and not the number of deaths directly attributable to Covid-19 or among people tested positive, that matters. Dead is dead, whatever the cause.

2.  In the UK, I continue to be baffled by the utter lack of comprehension among people professing a concern for equity of what economic downturns of the magnitude now apparently envisioned by Treasury – and of course these anticipations are all dependent on the assumed length of the lockdown, the nature of the exit strategy, and the economy’s subsequent response – will mean for everyday life and for the economic substrates of health inequalities.  The cynical me suspects that most people in a position to prognosticate with anyone paying attention have gardens and can comfortably work from home, unlike much of the rest of the population.

Let me suggest just one example of probable impacts:

Concern about the fate of high street commerce has long been unmatched by meaningful policy response.  Mr. and Mrs. Range Rover, who matter most in political terms, usually shop online or in the suburbs.   Post-pandemic, for hard financial reasons, it is likely that local authorities will simply cease providing services to low-occupancy commercial high streets, and utilities will be released from whatever obligations they have to provide services in those areas.  There will be few users, and fewer still who are able to pay their bills or council taxes. 

A fantasy?  Not at all.  A variant of this policy was partially adopted as “planned shrinkage” in New York City in the 1980s, and much more recently in post-bankruptcy Detroit.  There will be no-go high street wastelands of abandonment, at least until some far distant future when they will become attractive for reinvestment (beyond the lifetimes of many of us).

Alternatives can be imagined, in abundance (and will be the topic of a future post), but it is hard to think that any UK government will pursue them in the near future, especially as the country’s post-pandemic economic policy may well be managed jointly by the International Monetary Fund, as gatekeeper, and China, as the only external actor with the resources necessary to provide direct investment on the scale necessary.

3.  Even if the UK’s post-Brexit departure from the single market and customs union is delayed, as it should be, the full scope of the dislocations will become clear at the start of next winter, when it becomes clear how many Britons simply cannot afford to heat their homes.  Watch the all-cause mortality rate carefully as that happens. 

This post was updated on 15 April.