A year ago today the shutters came down and the plague year officially began. As hand sanitiser, toilet rolls, flour and pasta vanished from the shelves, no one imagined that more than 126,000 people would die. No one thought the economy would plummet by an unthinkable 10%, or that we’d still be locked down a year later. At midday today a minute’s silence marks this “national day of reflection”. Bells will toll for the dead, with landmarks lit up at 8pm. The prime minister will observe the minute’s silence “privately”.
A minute is not long, given how much Boris Johnson might contemplate; but then this prime minister is not one much given to reflection. In that minute, his thoughts may not stray far beyond immediate electoral gratification. He may secretly contemplate how truly remarkable it is that despite tens of thousands needlessly killed when his “nanny state” phobia stopped him acting in time, his popularity rises by the day, thanks to the vaccine. He can reflect on his luck that the EU’s vaccination missteps arrived right on cue to “prove” him right on Brexit.
Against the odds, Covid has done Johnson a political favour – so far. The need to splurge, as every similar country has done to keep their economies afloat, has helped him appear to shake off the Cameron/Osborne austerity shadows. He can pose as a magnanimous king showering gold coins from his carriage, especially on travels to his newly conquered northern realms. Yet plenty can still go awry: as another Covid wave sweeps across Europe, this half-vaccinated country is unlikely to escape another surge.
The hope is that deaths will be many fewer than before; but without proper sick pay, already-indebted families can’t afford to self-isolate. As unemployment rises, expected to reach 7%, the Institute for Fiscal Studies’ Paul Johnson points out that our social security payments are “astonishingly low” – just 13% of average earnings for a single unemployed person, compared to 50% in comparable countries. Britain has paid a penalty in its high Covid casualty rate for that longstanding meanness: it’s one reason for test-and-trace’s miserable record in getting those infected, and their contacts, to stay at home.
Will the prime minister reflect on what comes next? Once the Covid tide rolls back, when the euphoria of freedom soon passes, there will be no disguising the state of the country. The pandemic has multiplied its social dislocations and magnified its extreme inequalities, with no plan for repair. Instead, emerging into the light, the Johnson government will be imposing austerity on stilts.
An IFS report last week uncovered huge hidden cuts “buried in the budget, unmentioned in the chancellor’s speech”. The next few years will be a carbon copy of post-2010 austerity, with a massive extra 8% cut to most public services – worse this time for coming on top of the last lost decade and the damage done by this crisis. Despite claims the NHS and schools are “protected”, that’s not how they will feel; they are only due the same funds as planned pre-pandemic, “despite the huge ongoing challenges those departments will face”. There is no repair money. Forget Johnson’s “build back better” rhetoric, the reality, cemented into his spending plans, will hit most departments with even deeper cuts.
As in the last period of austerity, the big axe is being devolved to local government. “It’s difficult to see how further cuts to local government could be reconciled with a coherent levelling-up agenda,” writes Ben Zaranko, the IFS report’s author. At some point, Johnson the great “leveller” will struggle to explain this assault on councils, northern and southern alike – stripping yet more from social and children’s care, disability services, parks and every local amenity. Nonetheless, in this May’s vaccine-enthused local elections he may well get away with it.
His distraction technique will be a welter of local announcements for Boris-branded capital projects, such as crowd-pleasing re-openings of Beeching-shut railway lines in Okehampton or Stocksbridge. Local councils, distraught at lost funding for basics, are invited to compete for pots of money for eye-catching extras. The LSE’s Tony Travers lists 30 small honeypots, from a cultural investment fund and a green recovery challenge to a better towns and a transforming-cities fund. Even a large council such as Leeds, says its leader, James Lewis, lacks spare back-office staff to make multiple complex applications. “Bids must be in by June, but we need core funding, not extras.” However, Johnson’s “levelling up” is all about the optics.
Before embarking on his cuts, it’s doubtful the prime minister will reflect on the damage already done since 2010. On the eve of the pandemic, the Resolution Foundation’s Torsten Bell laid out the history of post-1979 inequality: the living standards of those on the lowest incomes had fallen further since 2010, as colossal £34bn annual benefit cuts have seen the bottom 20% lose a tenth of their income. Child poverty, Bell warned, would reach nearly 5 million children by 2024. Food banks in schools are a shocking new phenomenon.
As for the threadbare state of public services, last March Britain was utterly unprepared, without resilience for crises. “Unlike other countries, we ran our public services all hot, all the time,” says Paul Johnson. Just before Covid struck, he estimated it would take £60bn just to get back to 2010 levels of public services. Hospital A&E departments were already in permanent winter crisis; and schools had lost 8% of funding, bereft of music, drama, art and school trips, with breakfast and after-school clubs closed. And that was before Covid struck the poorest hardest.
Michael Marmot, the renowned health inequalities epidemiologist, recalls how defenceless we were, with Public Health England’s budget having been cut by 40% since 2012, and £700m in real terms being lost from public health at local authority level between 2014-15 and 2019-20. He records the poorest families suffering most from Covid – in deaths, ill-health, lost jobs, scarred lives and damaged education – though the full extent of this was hidden by misleading national averages.
In his reflections, our prime minister only considers the impacts in marginal constituencies. Covid has hit London hardest: despite the City’s streets being paved with gold, it has the worst poverty and has suffered the most job losses, but it has few winnable seats for him. The young people who have sacrificed most risk being largely ignored for the same reason, Johnson’s votes are with the old. Don’t expect him to level with the public: the IFS warns his plans will make “the first half of the 2020s feel quite a lot like the first half of the 2010s”.
At the moment, a lot of wishful thinkers are re-imagining the nature of this country, hoping that somehow no one will accept a return to the bad old British ways. There is a little too much airy optimism: so far, evidence for a change of heart is thin. Bear in mind deep research by King’s College London into public thinking, which revealed an essential harshness of attitudes: nearly half think those who lost jobs during the pandemic were themselves to blame.
Reflecting on all that was lost in the last year, be afraid of all the losses still to come. How long will it be before voters, who have been promised no return to austerity, rumble Johnson’s ruses? Sooner rather than later they will discover that the glittering coins tossed from his carriage are only base metal, the dazzlers only trinkets.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
