What does the future look like? Asking that question now is very different from asking it even six months ago. Six months ago, nobody would have thought that the majority of the world's population could be willingly confined to its homes for an indefinite duration, that businesses and shops would be shut down, grandparents denied visits from grandchildren, and that the UK Government would be paying people in the private sector a majority chunk of their salary for doing nothing.
I can no longer make predictions. This is because I am a sensible person. I know, along with most of the world's senior medical people and many of its doctors, that SARS-Cov-2 is an acute respiratory disease with minimal mortality (in the off-camera words of Russia's coronavirus Tsar) that does not justify quarantining us for our own good. I know nobody is at any more risk of anything unpleasant in a world with SARS-Cov-2 than they are in a world without it. The flu has killed more people this year. I have no idea how anyone can know that, and carry on with propaganda based on the idea that SARS-Cov-2 is so uniquely dangerous that it justifies us spending the rest of our lives two metres from each other, until, that is, we are all vaccinated.
I have no idea how the creatives at MullenLowe, who brought us the CoronaPropaganda, can look at themselves in the mirror. They set out to scare and confuse the British public, and they succeeded. In two years' time, they will be denying their participation in it, because they will be those bastards who lied to us. I have no idea how the print media could take its share of the £35m advertising budget, and provide many millions more in propaganda dressed up as news. Nor do I know how dozens of obscure academics could have allowed themselves to be used as instruments of propaganda, making unjustified predictions about the scale and virulence of SARS-Cov-2, and claiming that we might be living with restrictions for the rest of our lives. As if this was something real.
I am dismayed by the way that commentators, from preppers to Remainers, absorbed the quarantine into their views. The same way they are doing with the riots in the USA as I write this. They know the riots are mostly looters and other semi-organised Usual Suspects. Looting is not a political act. The commentators want to make sense of this. They can't.
Mistakes have no interpretation and make no sense, except as a mistake, a sign that someone did not know what they were doing, was short of the facts, listening to the wrong people. Mistakes tell us nothing about the world, except that it has people who are temporarily dumb. Persisting in the mistake has no other explanation but moral failure and practical difficulty. As the Swedes realised, quarantines of the healthy are too easy to get into, and too difficult to get out of. Interpretations of the quarantine, or of the riots, are futile.
There is nothing to understand.
Life does not go back to anything remotely like normal until we can get as close to each other in public as we need to. Because nobody is going to queue outside a supermarket, let alone a high street cafe, in the cold and rain in October and into winter. And nobody is going to open an office if they know only two people can get into the elevators at any given time, and nobody is going to go to the office if they know the queue for those elevators is going to stretch out into the street, in that same cold and rain.
Government propaganda says that SARS-Cov-2 is a uniquely dangerous virus against which we must be defended at all costs. That isn't true, but it's the Government Propaganda, and in politics, Propaganda is Truth, when you want it to be. The Teachers' Unions are going to hang the Government out to dry on that. Unless the creatives at MullenLowe pull off a staggering counter-propaganda coup before mid-August, the teachers will get their 15-pupil classrooms through 2021, and that will change the way parents organise themselves, and a lot will follow from that. I have no feeling for how that plays out, and it does not affect me.
The managers of large office estates will hibernate their buildings until the Government either abandons social distancing or gets it written into the Building Regulations. Nobody is going to spend money adapting to vague guidelines that might be abandoned sometime in 2021. That means laptop-jobbers are staying at home until at least the start of November, and a lot of them, especially in Zone 6 and beyond, won't be coming back to the office no matter what happens. We can do our jobs just fine from home. Less money for the railway companies; less money for the cafes and shops in London. I've lived the suburban working life: it's okay, but it needs visits to Town like bread needs yeast.
I could set out scenarios based on any number of variables, but it would not help. Scenario planning does not work when too many of the variables are on-off and don't have known odds of happening. Will the Government take away all the restrictions when it stops paying furlough? Will it allow 15-pupil classrooms for 2020/21? Will the crowds come back fast enough for the shops to open for the crowds to come back? As I write, shops are opening in central London but no-one is going into work to buy anything. Scenario planning assumes the environment is operating broadly sensibly in pursuit of broadly sensible goals. The Government is the only environment that matters now, and its goals are unknown, except get-out-of-this-mess-so-we-have-a-chance-at-the-next-election.
I do know that whatever happens, the Great British Public will go along with it. For whatever reasons they have, from virtue-signalling, to simple-minded faith, to a cynical go-along-to-get-along, to the despairing what-freaking-choice-do-I-have? That last is my position. My job lets me see where their money is going, and it's going where it would always go, except when the quarantine stops it. As if that makes it business-as-usual. There will be no legal challenges from companies or trade associations, no photogenic women with deep-pocketed backers to mount legal challenges, and no public disobedience. Because all it is at the moment is a bunch of inconveniences. After October, if the redundancies do not hit, we will go on dealing with the nonsense; if the redundancies do hit, everyone will have much bigger problems.
My guess is that the economy in 2021 will be about the size it was in 2005, but it will look and feel like the much smaller economy of 2000. About three to four million jobs will go, especially in tourism, retail, hospitality and catering. So it's a good thing those sectors employ a disproportionate number of non-UK workers. The EU economic migrants will go home, as the Aussies and Kiwis did in the Oughties when the music stopped. The efforts of many businesses to startup in late 2020 will be a dead cat bounce. Half of them will close within six months, suffocated by Covid loans, unchanged high rents and business rates, and reduced turnover from people who, now that they are back at work, have not got the time to queue. More bankrupt stock for the bottom-feeders to sell on Amazon.
All sorts of things might change. But I have no sense of what. I have never looked into the future and not even been able to see the background.
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