The case for Chinese reparations

It is time we started to talk about reparations. I am not of course referring to the demands made by certain communities to be given vast cash payouts for things that happened before they were born, to people they never knew, by people they never met. I am talking about the need of the citizens of the world to be given reparations by China for what it did to us all this year.

Before proceeding further, perhaps it is worth putting a few things in perspective. Delivering his spending review before the House of Commons last week, the Chancellor Rishi Sunak cited figures from the Office for Budget Responsibility explaining that the UK economy is due to contract by more than 11 per cent this year. To put this in some context, that is the largest fall in output that this country has seen in over 300 years. In the best-case scenario, Britain will not go back to pre-Covid economic output until the fourth quarter of next year. Government borrowing is the highest it has ever been in peacetime, and the expectation is that by 2025-26 debt will constitute 97.5 per cent of GDP.

Anyone tempted to say that this is only because of the actions of the British government should look almost anywhere else. In America, the country’s GDP has suffered its worst ever fall-off while government debt has soared to over $27 trillion. In Australia, the state of Queensland alone is expected to rack up debt of more than $130 billion in the next couple of years. Everywhere the world’s economies are experiencing an unprecedented slump in GDP and a rocketing of government borrowing.