Four years ago today ...

On this day, four years ago, I posted the following on Facebook and still believe what I wrote was prescient.

What a day ... and what a surprise ... and what a disaster. It appears that the "have nots" (who unsurprisingly do not like the status quo) have decided to stick it to the establishment.

In the end everyone will suffer, as the economy and the pound takes a battering for who knows how long. The shockwaves will be felt long after this earthquake, and only then will the disadvantaged find that they have slit their own throats.

It is without doubt that the poor will get poorer, as benefits are slashed and wages do not rise. There will still be as many immigrants in the country next year and in the future, and so few seem to realise that most western European countries need immigrants to come and work, and pay taxes, and spend money because there are not enough young people to pay for the ever-increasing cost of benefits, pensions and the whole of the Welfare State.

It is already too late to say "I told you so" and I would love to be proved wrong but ... the British people will be reaping what they have sown for generations to come. As far as self-inflicted wounds go, this is historical.

Of course, that was written without knowing that Coronavirus would strike the world, and send economies into a recession and slowly but surely a severe depression that no one could imagine. I fear for Britain as the way in which the economic disaster has been handled has been little short of disastrous. The “furlough” scheme was (and at the most enormous expense) a way in which the inevitable landslide of redundancies and massive unemployment was delayed for a few months.

Already the financial press is reporting companies both large and small are gearing up to make staff redundant as the partial cost of “furloughing” is to be paid by them. By October the scheme ends and I dread to think how much it will have cost the country (in borrowed billions) and how many millions will be thrown to the cold embrace of universal credit. The austerity of the past decade will pale into insignificance as the Welfare State is cut, and with the inevitable increase in taxation, there will be unbelievable poverty across the land.

Surely it would have been better to have bitten the bullet, accepted there was going to be a massive downturn and subsequent unemployment, and used the money that has been borrowed and “created” (good old Quantitative Easing) to retrain the workforce and perhaps indulge in a little Keynesian economics. It seems a long time since my ‘A’ level Economics (1969) but borrowing to delay inevitable unemployment is surely as economically illiterate as borrowing to pay back a loan. Utter lunacy.

In fact a combination of coronavirus and Brexit will sink the country. And it is not too late to extend the transition period and even rejoin the EU. But, of course, the present cabinet - surely the least intelligent and most incompetent in British history - will not admit they were wrong and change course. And so H.M.S. Great Britain will steam ahead even though the rocks ahead are visible.