10 Predictions from the Pandemic
Only a fool would make predictions. Only a complete food would make predictions in the middle of a global pandemic. So, here we are.
I know as much as the next man and, as I live alone, the next man is some way away and I cannot ask him. Here then are some predictions for life after the global pandemic. They may come true, they may not. I may yet delete this blog and replace it with a gif of someone repeatedly beating their forehead with a rubbery wrist rest. However, for what it is worth, here are some predictions.
1) We're going to be more divided - Forget Brexit, these divides are going to be worse. I think that we will roughly divide into thirds. One third of the country will be desperate to return to pre-pandemic 'normal'. This will include those Conservative MPs who are already telling the press that government intervention in the economy was a one-off and now the state must be shrunk even further.
One third of the country will make adjustments to a new kind of life. These are the kinds of people who will now carry hand sanitizer everywhere they go and worry about whether they should go back to everything that existed before. I compare them to how I was when I had lived without a freezer for six months. Suddenly I started questioning why I needed a freezer though paradoxically I still felt as though I needed a freezer.
Finally, there will be those who think that the time has come to change everything. For them there will be no going back to 'normal', there will only be the possibility of building something better. I should note that these will not just be younger people, though younger people have less reason to value the society that we had before COVID19. Similarly, it will not just be older people who do not want to change.
2) Brexit's coming - talking of Brexit, prepare for a hard Brexit at the end of December 2020. The coming economic disruption will be blamed on COVID19 and the lack of a trade deal blamed on the EU. It will take a long time for a lot of people to realise just how badly Brexit damaged the UK, so prepare for years of delusional "I'm backing Britain" nonsense. Oh and get used to chlorinated chicken. If you think that the USA is going to be doing any special favours for anyone and putting its own interests second ... have you heard of Donald Trump? Even Barack Obama expressed more interest in the Asia-Pacific region than Europe - the UK needs to seriously get the message.
I am sorry to say that the more extreme effects of Brexit are yet to come. If you do not believe me, then ponder this one. Our agricultural sector is in huge trouble when faced with cheap imports farmed to lower standards than ours and we no longer have the foreign labour force for seasonal farm work (those promoting the 'pick for Britain' scheme to get furloughed workers to pick fruit seem to be missing the point that that solution will not exist next year). Here is the thing to remember though - just prior to lockdown, Rishi Sunak's Chief Advisor wrote a policy paper reacting to these challenges by saying that the UK does not need an agricultural sector. You think that we are in trouble when we already import over 40% of our food. It is going to get worse ...
3) The EU is not going to collapse - someone recently did a really good compilation of UK journalists predicting the end of the EU from 1955 onwards. Surprise, it is not going to happen. Greece has more reason to dislike the EU than any other country and yet you can find opinion polls there showing an approval rating of 83% for EU membership. That Hungary and Poland have been kept inside the EU despite their slide towards autocracy is a sign of the EU's strength, not weakness. As for the Euro, this is now one of the world's leading reserve currencies, it is here to stay. Twenty years after its launch, the Euro was trading at about the same level against the dollar as on its launch day. That is a very stable currency. UK journalists will continue to predict the EU's collapse and the EU will continue as a dysfunctional group of 26 squabbling countries, but it will always pull a rabbit out of the hat when one is needed.
Oh and the main reason given by Greeks for staying in the EU in that opinion poll I mentioned? "No-one wants to end up like Britain." Next time anyone wants to leave, the UK will be the cautionary tale.
4) The UK itself will split further apart- it has been interesting to watch how badly the UK government has handled relationships between the four parts of the UK, but not surprising. What has been surprising is how the UK media has finally noticed that the UK government tries to steamroller the other governments and fails because it does not have authority over devolved areas. 'It is like Boris Johnson is only Prime Minister of England in some areas' wrote one journalist in The Guardian. That would be because he is, sorry it took you twenty years to notice.
The different responses to COVID19 across the UK have made English people more aware that they are only one part of the UK and it has made some changes to how the news is reported too. However, it is the changes within the non-English parts of the UK that will be interesting to see. The idea that the devolved governments have shielded their population from the extremes of the UK government has taken hold and if it spreads, could be the final unravelling of the UK.
Six years ago I wrote that the UK was finished, after going to a Girlguiding Cymru event. My observation was that the guides talked about 'Wales' and 'the UK' as two separate entities, as if one was not part of the other. I wrote that I had heard this all the time in Scotland, but when it becomes the psychology of Wales that we are not part of the UK, the union is in trouble.
Six years later, what did Dominic Raab warn against in a press conference? 'Driving from the UK to Wales'. Now, I am sure that that is because Raab is not a particularly bright man, but psychologically, things are changing and if I were a unionist, I would be worried.
5) Higher respect for the NHS - I am not going to say that there will be higher pay or better conditions for NHS staff, but there will be a change in how the NHS is seen in comparison to other public services. The intention of the Conservative Party has long been to run down public services and demean their workers to try to make theirs an unattractive career proposition. This enables more privatisation, especially to companies that have lower standards of pay and conditions than public sector bodies. The news that nursing courses for 2020/21 are now oversubscribed suggests that the 'superhero' tag may go after COVID19, but people looking for a career will remember who they respected. Will these new recruits fight for better terms and conditions? Trade union membership has taken a jump during the pandemic too.
6) An end to the austerity lie - a friend of mine wrote on Facebook that her daughter would vote Plaid Cymru if she was old enough to vote. A friend replied, "Did you say that that was all very well but who would pay for their policies?". I will bet that that friend was middle-aged. It is a particularly middle-aged thing to think that the economics of a country is the same as the economics of a household. It is also nonsense, as you can demonstrate by printing your own money or trying to sell bonds to your credit card company.
I am going to be fascinated to see what the young people of the UK make of the country. Think of the twenty years that they have grown up in - we threw money at two wars in the Middle East, we threw money at the banking system, we threw money at the Olympics, we threw money at the DUP to keep Theresa May in power ... many of them were already realising that the 'where will the money come from' question makes no sense. Now they have seen the government nationalise much of the economy and spend trillions to keep businesses solvent. Our debt to income ratio has soared to 97%. In austerity economics this should be a disaster as investors flee to more stable countries like Japan... which has a debt to income ratio of 250% (as the UK did in 1947). Austerity is nonsense.
What makes it more interesting is that the world is waking up to this too. I did laugh when there were rumours that the IMF would not even interview George Osborne for the job of their Head because they 'didn't want to be associated with austerity'. David Davies, former Brexit Minister, was asked about how we would pay off the debts caused by COVID19 and he replied the same way as we paid off our World War Two debts, through increased growth over the next fifty years. If even he understands that, perhaps more of the public will do. We just need to make sure that we do not trash our most important trading relationships ...
7) Climate change will be back - the school strikes have not gone away, just because there is no school. This is linked to the previous point too. How many young people have been patronised with the argument that governments are too small to act and that no-one can take the mass action needed to address climate change? Now the answer is going to be 'but we did it when threatened with COVID19 so why not again?'
8) And talking of being green - a lot of people have realised in the last three months that they can work at home and run meetings over video chat software. I can see that our way of working may change. During lockdown, my mother has had hospital appointments over phone and video too. We may yet find new ways of moving about less.
Whether the wider effects will last, I am not sure. We are now in the situation where weeks of energy are generated by renewable sources and coal is down to 2% of our energy production. We are becoming greener. A Quaker friend made the observation that we now know that when people only buy what they need, the world economy collapses. Will we move to a greener economy and one based on need rather than greed? I suspect that we are going to be very much divided over that one - see point one again.
9) The internet becomes an essential - remember the General Election of December 2019? That was a long time ago now, wasn't it? The Labour Party came out with this policy of broadband for everyone. A friend of mine said that he thought that the messaging was wrong and that they should have said that as with the Health Service, access to the internet was needed to fully engage in 21st century society. If you have had the terror of the moment when your internet fails during lockdown, you would understand that argument now.
10) It will take a long time for the UK to get its standing back - before the 2016 EU referendum, I wrote about how the UK had done well at shaping the EU, especially with the Single Market and the expansion to cover Eastern Europe. Sometimes it was sheer bloody mindedness (as with making everyone else adapt to when we wanted to start daylight saving time each year), but often it was clever diplomacy and knowing how to play one country off against another. We were good at it.
It was not just the EU either. The UK had held on to its seat on the UN Security Council through a mixture of tenacity and claiming to speak for Europe. The Commonwealth was always a bit of a red herring, but the UK had a world image through TV, film and football. There will be a lot of people struggling to understand just how completely that has been trashed. Maybe when they try to book holidays abroad and find that UK citizens will be specifically banned from visiting some countries because they are seen as a risk to health the penny will drop. Perhaps not - perhaps it never will.
I remember a Brazilian woman I met saying that the joke in Brazil is to look at Portugal and say, "What on earth happened to you?" Brazil has not covered itself in glory with denying COVID19's existence and nor has the USA or Sweden for that matter, but that is the point. The UK will be part of a small group of countries that screwed up their COVID19 response and let thousands die. British people should prepare to be asked how on earth that happened for years to come ...