Coronavirus

Unemployment is creeping up. For months it remained stagnant, as the combination of the furlough scheme and people keeping out of the jobs market kept the rate deceptively low. But over the past few months, it has started to increase, with today’s labour market overview from the Office for National Statistics revealing a 4.5 per cent unemployment rate — the highest level in three years. There’s a sliver of hope in today’s data, which shows job vacancies are up Still, at first glance you’d expect the unemployment rate to be much worse. After the largest economic contraction in three hundred years, an increase from 3.9 per cent at the start

Chris Whitty made clear at tonight’s press conference with the Prime Minister and the Chancellor that he doesn’t think that the tier three restrictions are enough to get on top of the virus in the worst hit places. He was explicit that local councils will need to go even further in terms of closures in some places. Later in the press conference he said that the government ‘knew full lockdown works’ but it was also aware of the societal and economic harm it does, and the government rightly wants to keep schools open. Taken together, the answers strongly implied that Whitty thinks that in Covid hotspots everything apart from schools

August should have been a relative boom for the British economy: restrictions were the most relaxed since the Covid crisis began. Businesses in the hospitality and leisure industries were largely allowed to reopen by this point, and public transport guidance changed to allow non-essential workers to return to the office. On top of these liberalisations, schemes like Eat Out to Help Out were brought in to encourage – even subsidise – more economic activity. Yet growth figures fell flat, increasing by 2.1 per cent – roughly half of what was expected by economists. It appears economic recovery started to stagnate (down from June’s 9.1 per cent and July’s 6.4 per

The centrepiece of Boris Johnson’s speech to Tory party conference this year was his Damascene conversion to the merits of wind farms. Some people used to sneer and say wind power wouldn’t pull the skin off a rice pudding, he said — referring, of course, to himself, writing in 2013. Now, his post-Covid plan for Britain is wind farms powering every home by the end of the decade. But the Prime Minister was right first time. When he was dismissing wind power, it was eye-wateringly expensive and was forecast to stay that way for the foreseeable future. No one envisaged, then, how global competition and technology would force prices down.

How popular are circuit breakers? The latest Covid-19 news from Ireland would suggest support varies dramatically between the scientists and politicians. Speaking on RTE, Leo Varadkar revealed the National Public Health Emergency Team had recommended moving to ‘level 5’, which would have amounted to a ‘circuit break’ and another shutdown of the Irish economy. Pushing back, Varadkar told the national broadcaster that outstanding questions about the effectiveness of a temporary shutdown could not be answered to his satisfaction: ‘We didn’t feel it had been thought through properly. For example, we asked for some comfort that four weeks might be enough… They weren’t able to give us that comfort.’ This is

When Rishi Sunak was appointed Chancellor in February, he must never have imagined that his first address to the Conservative party conference would be made to an empty room. Nor would he have expected to have his entire speech dominated by a pandemic. Yet in his short, direct address, Sunak barely strayed from Covid-19. He reminded the public of the government’s vast interventions to curb the impact of the virus — and hinted at what steps might be taken in future as the Treasury deals with the aftermath of our six month spending spree. In a run-down of the many schemes — and billions of pounds — directed towards the crisis so

Cineworld is to close its 128 cinemas – saying that the Covid restrictions have made its business “unviable”. It’s terrible to see that word applied to the cinema industry – and even worse to think of the 5,500 jobs this will impact. But the truth is that many businesses can’t survive what will be a year’s worth of restrictions – based on PM’s timeline where he’s talking about some kind of scientific breakthrough by Easter. The final straw for Cineworld was the delay of the new 007 film No Time to Die, now due out next April on the logic that this would maximise takings.  But how many cinemas will still be around then to show this

Home More than a quarter of the population of the United Kingdom (three-fifths of the Welsh, a third of the Scots and two-thirds of those in northern England) were put under harsher coronavirus restrictions. Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, amid a flurry of local lockdowns, found himself unable to state the coronavirus restrictions suddenly imposed on the north-east. He said ‘six in a home, six in hospitality’ could meet, though the law said that members of different households could not meet at all indoors. Universal laws, brought in by statutory instruments, prohibited eating or drinking in bars, restaurants or clubs after 10 p.m. In cities such as York and Liverpool,