The Institute for Government has published this chart of unemployment statistics for five countries this morning:
Note that the UK is lowest on the chart.
But that's only because around 25% of the UK's employees and self-employed people are on job protection schemes right now.
No one knows precisely how many jobs will be lost as a result of coronavirus in the UK: the proverbial has yet to hit the fan due to furlough. But Rishi Sunak is prematurely pulling the rug from under that scheme now. The truly torrid nature of our real likely unemployment rate is going to be revealed over the next few months and there is no reason to think we're not on a par with Ireland. The likelihood that our unemployment rate will exceed 30% is very high.
We need four things:
A government committed to full employment, come what may;
A government committed to the environment, come what may;
A government committed to a sustainable economy, come what may;
A government that truly appreciates that in a crisis like this wealth really is created by the state.
I am not convinced we have a government that understands any of those issues. If it had ti would be talking about a Green New Deal now.
I am terrified that we are easing lockdown from coronavirus too early.
But I am as worried that what follows may well be worse.
And it need not be. All the funding to address these issues is available. But the government is not willing to address them.
Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:
You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.
And if you would like to support this blog you can, here:
Agreed.
The first step is to understand that the official unemployment data serves little purpose. It is NOT about who can claim benefits. Rather is is about under-utilisation of an important resource. I don’t care about how we pay people without jobs…. I AM concerned that we have (and will have ) people standing idle when there is so much to do.
Precisely
Well, it seems that 25,000 people have been recruited to staff the “world-beating”* track and trace system. So that is a start. Pity they don’t have anything to do. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/30/boris-johnsons-test-and-tracing-system-britain-lockdown
* Beating the world how exactly? Is this a competition
It will be interesting to see some numbers the first week of track and trace. How many people’s contacts have been tracked? How many of the contacts have been traced, and then actually spoken to and accepted they will self-isolate?
The scenes from the beaches and parks are simply frightening. Have people forgotten we were still recording thousands of new cases each day *while we were locked down*, and then perhaps many more thousand unrecorded? From each thousand, several will die.
Please, everyone, just stay at home as much as you can.
I completely echo the last sentiment, and am doing just that