The state of the UK

[Sean Hayden]

What's up with saying "yeah" after everything?

It's annoying, yeah.

[laklak]

I know, yeah?

[Sean Hayden]

Cracking, yeah?

[laklak]

Canadians say "eh" instead, yeah?

[Sean Hayden]

And 'mericans, "you know", yeah?

[Brian Peacock]

You know what I mean, right?

[JimC]

No worries...

[laklak]

Nomesain? Yeah.

[Scot Dutchy]

Sunak axes budget in scramble for urgent measures to save jobs

Chancellor to revamp support for jobs and economy owing to tightening of restrictions

Rishi Sunak has scrapped his plan for an autumn budget and will announce fresh measures to halt job losses and business failures on Thursday amid government fears that a second wave of Covid-19 threatens Britain with a double-dip recession.

The chancellor has decided that the long-term decisions that would have featured in the annual set-piece event must be shelved in order for the Treasury to be able to focus on avoiding a short-term economic crisis.

With signs that the summer spurt in growth has proved short lived, Sunak will use his statement to MPs to announce an extension of business loan schemes and a package of employment support to replace the government’s furlough scheme, which is due to end next month.

Setting the stage for a Commons update, the chancellor said he would announce the details of a “winter economy plan” that would “continue protecting jobs” as Britain enters a new phase of the pandemic.

The chaos is complete.

[laklak]

At this point just give up like we have. Fuck it, let the chips fall, it's not like we're stopping anything anyway.

[JimC]

It is both easy and tempting to drift into fatalism...

[Brian Peacock]

Only a month ago Sunak was talking about a so-called 'sharp V' recession - one in which growth and output took a massive dip but would quickly bounce back to somewhere near where is was before. That seems like a bit of a forlorn hope now - something that was pulled out of the bag to boost market-confidence, to steady the listing ship even as it continued to take on more water.

I think it's interesting that the government last week announced an increase the basic rate of welfare benefits for those who've lost their jobs during the crisis to the tune of an extra £100 pw for a family of four. Since around 2010 the Conservatives have framed unemployment purely as a moral issue - one of people shirking their responsibilities, of not upholding their social obligation to be an economically productive member of society. To this end they've imposed increasingly stringent, and often punitive conditions on claimants to disincentivise people from claiming. And to a larger extent the general public have gone along with this, agreeing with the Tories 'workers not shirkers', 'strivers not skivers' sloganising - because it was always other people who were unemployed, apparently choosing a 'dependency life-style' of idleness on £56 a week over work. Now a lot of those same people are finding themselves in increasingly precarious positions and are beginning to understand that they're becoming unemployed not because they're feckless wastrels who won't pull their finger out but because a singular event has exposed underlying structural weaknesses in the economy and in so doing has also demonstrated the inherent inability of conservatives to deal with this kind of crisis.

The options open to Sunak are i) the usual further, faster, harder capitalism that's led us to where we are today, and with it another decade or two of The Austerity to top off the highest cases-to-Covid-deaths ratio of any Western nation, or ii) to make some structural changes to the economy in order to transfer value and security back into the wider social arena. So far the Johnson government have made a big noise about doing the latter, of 'levelling up' society, particularly the more deprived, traditionally Labour-voting former industrial regions who voted Tory at the last election in order to 'get Brexit done' - but at the same time all Johnson's gov have done in a practical sense is continue to play tunes from the neo-liberal songbook.

They might be able to pull that off for a while but in the end people will start to notice, and when they do the Tories are going to cop a lot of social discontent - and probably not just at the ballot box. The conceptual problem here is that staunch neo-liberal ideologues can't even imagine an alternative to further, faster, harder capitalism, nor do they have a framework by which to understand that further, faster, harder capitalism eventually works against even their interests in the end.

Perhaps one day we'll look back at the former Goldman-Sach executive and hedge-fund manager Rishi Sunak and champion him as the man who kick-started a economic revolution that washed away toxic capitalism to place the well-being of society at the heart of a much needed economic, political and social revival.

I know, I'm a dreamer... but I'm not the only one...

[laklak]

Well, I guess you could call shutting down huge swaths of the economy for months an "underlying structural weakness".

[Brian Peacock]

Indeed. It gives the lie to the idea that The Market is the most efficient and moral way to organise society.

[Brian Peacock]

Anyway, Sunak commits to paying a third of people's wages until January.

UK chancellor announces new Job Support Scheme

Chancellor Rishi Sunak announces a new Job Support Scheme, starting in November

It replaces the 'furlough scheme' and means the government will pay part of workers' wages who have lost hours

The worker must do at least one-third of normal hours, and the government and employer will pay one-third each of the lost hours

The cut in VAT to 5% for the hospitality and tourism sector will be extended until 31 March
Firms that took government loans during the crisis will have longer to pay them back
And companies that deferred their VAT bill will no longer have to pay a lump sum in March

The Adam Smith Institute (neo-liberal thinktank) sounds a note of caution...

The Adam Smith Institute said the chancellor's statement was "sensible" but not costless.

Matthew Lesh, head of research at the free market think tank, said: "It makes sense to replace the furlough scheme - that paid people to not work - with a wage subsidy scheme that helps struggling but viable businesses to keep employees on the job part time.

"Extending loan schemes and VAT cuts is also a measured response to lessen the shock as the government furlough scheme is rolled back.

“This is not costless. The government must resist becoming addicted to spending. Temporary spending is sensible to keep struggling businesses afloat, but in the longer run we are going to have to get the national accounts in order by reducing ongoing spending."