Conrad Black

If Boris wants a New Deal he needs to end the lockdown

It’s time for him to lead the country back to normal lives

[Getty Images]

The invocation of Franklin D. Roosevelt by Boris Johnson is welcome, but the conditions that greeted Roosevelt when he was inaugurated US president in 1933 and those in the UK today are very distinguishable. Roosevelt inherited a collapsed financial system; the stock and commodity exchanges and almost all of the banks in the country had been closed for up to two weeks. Almost a third of the country was unemployed (the states compiled the figures and they were not entirely reliable), and there was no direct relief for the jobless.

For the first time since the Civil War there were machine-guns at the corners of the great federal buildings in Washington on Inauguration Day. The incoming president had a practically unlimited mandate to take drastic measures to deal with the crisis. He famously began his address with the assertion that ‘The only thing we have to fear is fear itself’, and concluded that ‘the people have made me the present instrument’ of their requirement for decisive executive action and ‘in the spirit of the gift, I take it’.

After the most memorable inaugural address in the history of the office (except for the two by Abraham Lincoln) he convened Congress in emergency session, re-financed the banking system in three days and continued with a vast three-month legislative programme of public works (infrastructure today) and conservation workfare schemes, agricultural price supports, labour and securities reforms, and the recovery began. He was America’s greatest reformer but also considered himself ‘the greatest friend American capitalism has ever had’.

‘I’m sure you’ll be very excited by my massive borrowing and spending plan.’

Economics is essentially half psychology and half elementary school arithmetic. As economics, FDR’s New Deal receives a solid pass. As catastrophe avoidance, a nearly perfect score. (The US appeared to lag behind western Europe and Japan in reducing unemployment because the conscripts and defence workers of the other countries were considered to be employed and America’s millions of workfare participants, who worked as hard and more productively, were not.

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