Setting a Precedent

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Whether Britain’s COVID-19 lockdown will be worth what it will cost — a bill involving far more than just money — was and is, for now, unknowable. That it would be used as an excuse by empowered authoritarians to go even further than highly intrusive regulations allowed them to go was, by contrast, all too predictable. When the state is given a mile, its rank and file will generally add a few inches all of their own. Between them, police and local bureaucrats have already distinguished themselves with stunts such as pulling over cars to check if their drivers are on “appropriate” journeys, dyeing a beautiful lake black to discourage visitors, and deeming Easter eggs “non-essential” purchases.

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Health versus Wealth Is a False Choice

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Deciding how and, critically, when, to put America back to work again after the COVID-19 shutdowns has, all too often, been framed as a debate between green eyeshade and stethoscope. Or, to put it another way, risking lives to put a few points on the Dow. Today’s appalling unemployment data are a reminder that describing the choice in that way is to play politics with a pandemic, and to avoid confronting the daunting dilemmas that will be involved in finding the right time to sound some sort of All Clear.

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After the Iceberg

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The economic numbers are beginning to come in, and, predictably enough, just about wherever you check, they are appalling. In Pennsylvania alone last week there were more than 350,000 first-time claims for unemployment assistance. That compares with (seasonally adjusted) initial national claims over the last year averaging in the low 200,000s, and the news is only going to get worse in Pennsylvania and, probably, every other state. Brokerage research, usually a reliable source of good cheer until well past the last moment, now makes for bleak reading. On Friday, Goldman Sachs estimated that U.S. GDP would tumble by an annualized 24 percent in the second quarter (against earlier expectations of a 5 percent hit). A pandemic has consequences and so do the measures taken to contain it. This week Morgan Stanley ratcheted up the gloom, forecasting an annualized 30 percent GDP decline in a second quarter when unemployment could hit nearly 14 percent. Tracking the course of these projections shows how rapidly the mood is darkening, and expectations play no small role in driving the economy.

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Covfefe-19: is Donald Trump responsible?

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If Amazon or the pharmacies of Manhattan are any guide, buying a thermometer in America has become tricky, expensive or both — the Braun thermometer for which I paid some $60 shortly after the birth of our one-year-old was available online over the weekend for a modest $359.97. In confronting an epidemic data is, if not necessarily the first line of defence, very close behind it. Yet when it comes to testing for Covid-19, the US has been a laggard. On some estimates, fewer than 20,000 Americans had been tested by March 11. That’s around 23 per million, compared with a rate of 347 people per million in the UK.

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In 2020, Trump has everything to lose

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November 2020 is still a long way away, but it already looks as if the next presidential election will be lost not won.
It is not a given that America’s economy will hold up, but if it does, Donald Trump, as the incumbent, would normally have a good chance of hanging onto his job. However, “normally” is not a word that applies to a president forever a tweet, a fiasco or a past, present or future scandal away from disaster. Then there are the polls. Trump has had the lowest average approval ratings of any president since Gallup started measuring them in the 1930s, and he has yet to hit 50 per cent even once. He prevailed in 2016 with the smallest share of the popular vote (46.1 per cent) since a complicated four-way tussle in 1824.

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Boris Johnson Is Being Prosecuted over a Campaign Slogan

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Britain is a country where tweeting, preaching, or posting the wrong thing can get someone in trouble with the police. Under the circumstances, it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that Boris Johnson, one of the most prominent of those who campaigned for the U.K. to leave the EU — and now a possible leader of the Conservative party — is facing prosecution for the official Leave campaign’s claim that the U.K. sent “the EU £350 million a week.” This was money, Vote Leave asserted, that could be used to help fund the perpetually needy National Health Service, a claim that was plastered along the side of its big red campaign bus.

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Before There Was Thatcher

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If you can remember the 1960s, many are said to have said, you weren’t really there. But if Britain fails to remember the 1970s, it may soon find itself in a place where it really should not want to be. Towards the end of the latter, infinitely less entertaining decade, a good number of those at the top of Jeremy Corbyn’s opposition Labour party made their political debut as members of a hard Left that was far less of a fringe than it deserved to be. They have come a long way since, but their thinking has not, and with the Conservatives being broken apart by a botched Brexit, Corbyn’s own ’70s show could be playing in Downing Street soon.

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The Dementia Tax should have taught the Tories not to turn on their allies. But May’s government is at it again

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One ‘dementia tax’ ought to have been enough. The Conservatives were right to identify the cost of social care as an increasingly serious problem. Using their 2017 election manifesto to suggest a solution that was both unjust and likely to hit some of their most loyal supporters (or their children) the hardest was not, however, the way to go. The Tories made many mistakes in the course of that wretched campaign, but if there was one that set them on the path to a vanished majority, the dementia tax was probably it.

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How Brexit Descended into ‘Braos’

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Loosening the ties that bound the U.K. into the EU was always going to be complicated. Dropping out of Brussels’ relentless trudge towards political integration is not in itself too great a challenge, but doing so in a way that minimizes the damage to Britain’s economic access to its European markets is an entirely different matter. To Brussels, economic and political integration are inextricably intertwined. Preserving as much of the benefit of the former while escaping the latter needs patience, diplomatic savvy, a realistic understanding of the EU’s workings, and the ability to weigh the strength (or otherwise) of the U.K.’s negotiating position. Since the Brexit vote on June 23, 2016, Britain’s Conservative government has displayed no sign of any of these qualities.

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