Lockdown

Last week The Spectator highlighted new data from the OECD that offers a weekly update comparing a country’s current GDP levels to the previous year. It continues to show the UK experiencing some of the highest levels of economic damage. If you factor in lockdown stringency, you can also make out a rough correlation between countries under the strictest lockdowns and countries taking the biggest hits to GDP. Just how reliable are these calculations? A cross-check between the OECD data and the Office for National Statistics' monthly GDP update would suggest it’s pretty spot-on, if not slightly more positive. Today’s update from the ONS shows the economy to be 9.2 per cent below where it was in January 2020.

Schools in England have gone back today, with pupils taking lateral flow tests and being asked to wear masks in order to keep the risk of infections as low as possible.  Today Boris Johnson held a special press conference to mark what he described as an 'emotional' moment in the exit from lockdown. He said that the 'overwhelming feeling is one of relief' and that the 'greater risk now is keeping them out of school for a day longer'.  There are rumblings about whether the current plan for lifting restrictions is sustainable He praised teachers for getting schools ready and for teaching throughout the lockdown period, and parents for homeschooling while trying to hold down their own jobs.

Rishi Sunak’s planned corporation tax hike is a reminder of the importance he sets by trying to put the public finances on a sounder footing. He think that his room for manoeuvre in this crisis has been, in part, because the public finances were in reasonable shape before it.  The vaccination programme remains this government’s most important economic policy As I say in the magazine this week, his concern about debt has long been about the cost of servicing it (which remains low) rather than its precise level. But the debt pile is now so large that small movements in interest rates have big consequences. But straightening out the public finances will need growth.

Even in the quick-as-a-wink world of democratic politics, where calculations change at slot-machine speed, you can feel major moments growling and growing. You don’t know precisely where things and events are going. You just know they are going. We're in one of those moments now, with Texas and its 29 million people poised to move out of the heavy shadow of government control over their lives and movements as we head towards what we must hope is the late stages of this so-called 'war' against COVID-19. On Tuesday March 2 — otherwise known as Texas Independence Day, when Lone Star flags decorate staves everywhere, honoring Texas’ successful struggle in 1836 for freedom from Mexico — Gov. Greg Abbott announced he was letting life return to normal.

Tory MP’s reaction to the lockdown easing plan is a mixed bag. In general, they would have preferred a quicker timetable. But, as I say in the magazine this week, there is also relief that Johnson has explicitly ruled out going for a zero-Covid strategy and that there is an end date for all restrictions. A big fear on the Tory benches was that unless a date was set, restrictions could drag on for years in the way that rationing did after the second world war.  If the data on vaccine take-up and efficacy continues to beat the government’s models, there will be some very impatient Tory MPs One senior Conservative backbencher from the more libertarian wing of the party observes that the plan ‘could have been worse’.