Predictions

They say making predictions is a mug’s game, but I’m a mug so here we go on what I think may happen to the UK in the next year or so. If for no other reason than my own curiosity, I want to come back to this in the future and see how much I got right or wrong.

Unemployment will keep climbing, perhaps peaking around five million in late spring of 2021. I think by Christmas we may not quite reach the four million some economists like Liam Halligan are predicting, if only because of the desperate measures the government is putting in place to slow the rate of job losses (which ruinously deplete the nation’s finances, of which more later). Despite these stop-start lockdowns (more start than stop in most cases) having a catastrophic effect on pubs, restaurants, cinemas, theatres, events, retail and more, there will be be a few more jobs on offer in the lead-up to Christmas, not least weary Amazon van drivers criss-crossing the land due to customers being too scared or uncomfortable with masks to go into shops. (Btw, a friend recently told me that Amazon drivers are expected to complete 150 deliveries in a nine-hour day.)

Obviously, furlough comes to an end on November 1. Mid-November’s unemployment statistics will be painful to behold. The Chancellor, willed on by a prime minister who appears not to have a basic understanding of fiscal responsibility, is already crafting other schemes to assist struggling firms, but these will be useless to many. I recently received an email from Cineworld, where I did part-time work, and it was essentially a list of employment agencies and other places to try and find work. Miserably, for many, the dole queue is the only option.

In January the jobless numbers will soar as the Christmas part-time workers are let go. In the late summer and early autumn of 2020, households’ saving to spending ratios had rocketed - chiefly because there was little to spend your money on - and it is true that for many, savings will still be healthy in January, but there will be a different mood. People will be looking around at the economic carnage and thinking “maybe I’m next” and will rein their spending in, further depressing demand. Remember that these will be very short, very cold days and serotonin levels will be low, and people stuck inside more will pick up more viral infections. This will delight Sage and epidemiologists, already having the most fantastic year of their lives, and will mean that restrictions on freedom will be harsher than ever. Because banging your head against a wall is of course the surest way to cure a headache.

What of the public mood? I predict that it will gradually change over the coming months, as it has been doing in the last few. Support for the government will ebb away, and more particularly, support for the government’s policies to combat the virus will deteriorate. Unemployment figures will be a factor in this but surely - surely! - more of the media will draw attention to statistics such as:

• 3 million people in the UK missed cancer screenings this year as a result of coronavirus
• 2 million patients have been waiting more than 18 weeks for routine hospital treatment
• 1 in 10 mental health patients has been waiting six months for help
• 50 per cent drop in heart attack A&E attendances
• 38 per cent drop in emergency heart surgery in London in the second half of March

Oncologists warned this month that there could be 50,000 premature deaths from cancer, due to deferred treatments and diagnostic screening failures. Last week a report by Edinburgh University argued that clumsy use of lockdowns and social distancing could cost between 149,000 and 178,000 lives over the course of the pandemic - far more than have died from Covid - by preventing the establishment of herd immunity. By early next year these things will be becoming much more real. Yes, the BBC won’t do a daily count of cancer victims or suicides in big red type, but we can be confident that more attention will be being paid to non-Covid fatalities. The words ‘biggest scandal of the century’ might be heard quite often. 

There might be a suicide of a famous creative, driven to despair by the destruction of their art - in our celebrity-obsessed culture, this could really shift opinion. Crime will rise, particularly violent street crime committed by young people, as they will have no jobs to occupy their hours. And social media frenzy will probably increase yet further as the young have more time on their hands to get angry and shout about perceived wrongs - combine the two and there’ll be many more violent ‘social justice’ protests.

One of the few growth industries will be nostalgia, as people crave the better times they only now distantly remember: expect fashion, music and other ephemera to reflect the yearning for old-fashioned normality. This will be in contrast to the new-fashioned, and ever more virulent, identity politics movement, and the conflict between the two will continue to burn an ever bigger hole in the communal fabric of the nation.

As the government is either mocked or ignored, its authority will continue to wane. There will be more flouting of rules and restrictions; this will in turn lead to more fines and more heavy-handed policing, which will lead to more divided, angry and unhappy communities. Those few still strictly adhering to the rules will be furious at those they perceive to be not following the rules; those who are not following all the rules will look with disdain at the ‘sheep’ who are. Neighbours and friends and families will continue to fall out, and the poison will linger for years. This is how civil society crumbles. With his U-turn in March, Boris Johnson, thanks to his credulousness over ‘Professor’ Neil Ferguson’s abysmal computer modelling, unleashed this hell.

The government will have been viciously turned on by everyone: its supporters on the libertarian right (as has happened already), the authoritarian left who always hated the Tory party anyway, Remainers parroting variants of ‘we are in a much worse situation to deal with this because we have left the EU’, the old left, seeing their towns collapse, and even the true bluers that lean towards the non-libertarian right. Who’s left to support Johnson and co? With the government crumbling and its poll ratings in free-fall, it will come apart at the seams. There will be resignations and sackings. Next May’s local elections will be a blue blood bath.

By this time oodles of data will be in. Perhaps it might take something as simple as a TV journalist sitting down with Matt Hancock, presenting him with ten graphs of deaths from cities/countries/US states that did or didn’t lockdown, or at varying degrees of severity, not telling him which places these graphs are from, and asking him to say which had the lockdowns and which didn’t. He wouldn’t know. They could then flash up a second series of graphs showing the economic impact of the lockdown/no lockdown locations (spoiler: those who didn’t lockdown will have suffered a lot less), perhaps a third with cancer deaths, a fourth with suicides, and so on. Maybe journalists would do their damned job properly for once in this fiasco. Hancock would be fully exposed as clueless, and his reputation would be shredded.

By next summer Johnson too will be fighting for his political life, and is likely to step down. No retrospective would ever be able to show his conduct in 2020 in a good light; costs and benefits will finally have been weighed up. The nation’s finances will have been obliterated, with tax take being a fraction of what it would be in a normal year, due to thousands of firms having collapsed, and most of those who have survived paying considerably less than before into the exchequer thanks to diminished profits that were in part due to having to instigate onerous regulations that deterred customers. Johnson’s reluctance to take on any form of short term unpopularity will have meant that he kept deferring decisions on how to furnish Britain’s soaring national debt. He said no to ‘austerity’ and he knows that tax rises would further destroy any chance of recovery, so what’s left? He’ll presumably leave that vexatious question to his successor. 

The new prime minister, probably Rishi ‘Eat Out To Raise Taxes’ Sunak, will know he has three years before the next general election, so would in theory have time to ‘go for it’, to at least try and get the economy revving again through lighter regulation and maybe even lower taxes, and a few more infrastructure projects. But this would only add to debt, and although interest rates are likely to remain very low for the next few years, what the government pays in interest on the debt will continue to dwarf the defence and education budgets. So we will just be moving problems further into the future (though that might be the least worst option compared to crushing the economy still further through tax rises and public sector evisceration, which could see unemployment go to something like seven million). I expect inflation to remain relatively low, simply because there will not be the demand in the economy to push it higher - although one way it could rise would be if we put up trade barriers with China and cut off our supply of cheap goods from the East; this is a possibility. No Brexit deal or a bad Brexit deal could harm our economy further still, at least in the short term.

An effective vaccine will not have arrived and the track and trace system will be only marginally less useless than it is now, even though more was spent on it than on the 2012 London Olympics. People will expect more and more ‘free money’, because that’s what they got used to in 2020, so expect more hard socialism and further job losses further down the line. Combined with more automation, job outsourcing abroad and AI, the mass unemployment of the 2020s will make the 1980s seem like a picnic in the park. We will be little more than Our NHS with a country attached to it.

If I’m to try and end on a vaguely optimistic note, I might say that much of the above, combined with the spring weather in 2021 and a general feeling of “Jesus, we’ve been enduring this hell for over a year now - for what?!”, might mean that parts of everyday life might - might - be getting closer to being some sort of normal by around then. Perhaps there will have been an enormous public protest that even the BBC couldn’t do down (demonstrations will grow in number and voracity over the next nine months); perhaps there will be mass ripping offs of masks to symbolise freedom; perhaps the proper, complicated science, as opposed to Sage’s one-dimensional, fear-mongering diatribes, will be more understood by ordinary folk; perhaps people kept from their elderly parents in care homes for many months will scream in real fury and properly become heard. Perhaps, just perhaps, by next summer the worst of this, in terms of social interaction at least, could be over. 

Having said that, it won’t be until at least 2022 that many facets of previous ordinary life - proper weddings, events, foreign travel, festivals and more - revert to anything like before. This will in large part be due to the government’s cataclysmic ‘second wave’ reaction in September/October, which smashed already battered businesses hard in the face as they emerged cautious, blinking, but a little hopeful into the apparent sunlight. There is no way that business owners will risk opening up with such alacrity as they did last summer - their innocence has been shattered; those that are still trading will be much more wary, and it will be an awfully long time before we see full confidence return to those businessfolk who make our lives that bit more pleasant.

Other scars - public distrust of officialdom, the effects of long-term unemployment and clinical depression, ruptured relationships, the diminishment of the once mighty West - will remain forever, though. The 21st century will now undoubtedly be China’s, with its influence stretching far and wide, with all that means for state surveillance, clamping down of free speech and control of movement - we might forever look back at the period of 1945-2019 as a golden age of international travel, freedom of expression and prosperity, never to be seen again. China is likely to cruelly continue to use the likes of Britain as a puppet, spreading division and disinformation over the internet.

As I have written before, none of this had to happen: it is only because our reaction to Covid-19 was so unbelievably deranged. The following words from Patrick Vallance on March 12 seem like words from long, long ago, from a better, saner time: “If you suppress something very, very hard, when you release those measures it bounces back and it bounces back at the wrong time. Our aim is to try to reduce the peak, broaden the peak, not suppress it completely; also, because the vast majority of people get a mild illness, to build up some kind of herd immunity, so more people are immune to this disease and we reduce the transmission, at the same time we protect those who are most vulnerable to it.”

What happened?