Boris Johnson vowed that austerity, and the misery it inflicted, would not return after Covid. Labour must hold him to it
It’s not recessions that should scare us the most: it’s the political choices that follow. Due to a failure to suppress its public health crisis and the subsequent lockdowns, Britain suffered its worst annual decline in 300 years, with a 9.9% drop in GDP in 2020. Behind this abstract statistic is an all too real human crisis: lost jobs, cut wages, rising debts, rent arrears, hunger. Whether this crisis is exacerbated or resolved will not depend on market forces, but on political responses.
More than a decade ago, it was David Cameron of all people who declared: “It’s time we admitted that there’s more to life than money and it’s time we focused not just on GDP but on GWB – general wellbeing.” It is normally those who have too much of it who claim there’s more to life than money – those who spend sleepless nights staring at ceilings panicking about energy bills rarely utter those words – but the point about wellbeing trumping economic statistics is an important one.
