Life after the Wuhan virus

The effects of the Wuhan virus on our freedoms and liberties has only just started. Even with a partial lifting of isolating restrictions in a 'stop - start' control regime, it now seems inevitable that we face food rationing. Ironically, the UK is self-sufficient in toilet roll manufacture but not in food. Professor Ashton introduces the unmentionable topic in the Telegraph. However, posts about rationing and the interesting effect this will have on the extent of the nation's food fads and imagined allergies are to come. This is a post about the future.

We will get the Wuhan virus under control, maybe this year, maybe next. And I have one prediction - that after an unprecedented intrusion into our freedoms and liberties, any hopes that the Central State has of permanently maintaining these controls will be dashed. On the contrary, the universal backlash against central State power will catalyse a hugely overdue Big Bang devolution of powers. We must just ensure that our most fundamental freedoms remain intact; universal suffrage, the secret ballot and the freedom to form and participate in political parties.

In addition to movement controls, we are likely to see food rationing, possibly even energy rationing and internet and phone restrictions, controls on internet shopping and deliveries, import controls, currency controls and unprecedented State use of mobile phone location and activity data to police and monitor public behaviour. These may all be used to ensure the greatest benefit for the greatest number whilst the crisis subsists. But paradoxically it will not be libertarians praying for the early development of a vaccine (which may also be compulsory - and sod the anti-vaxers. They will disappear along with the food faddists) but the central Statists; the longer and deeper the restrictions on our freedoms, the stronger and wider the public backlash, and the bigger the Big Bang demolition of the Central State to come.

There will be an interesting re-discovery of moral exactitude and an intolerance of moral relativity. We will get used to the idea of collectivist libertarianism. As a libertarian, I have long accepted that the freedoms I demand only extend so far as they cause no harm to any other. Libertarianism isn't the sort of me-generation selfishness that drives many of the objections to the lockdown measures, but the freedom to make your own decisions about your own life within an utterly essential collective, within a society and nation. And without ceding some freedoms to the collective, we cannot enjoy individual liberty.

But these are points for debate and discussion, not a didactic prescription. And that will be new for us. Perhaps not since the age of Huxley and Orwell will there have been such a national debate, will we engage in such dialogue over existential definitions, identity and morality. The paradox is that the Wuhan virus, from the heart of the most repressive nation on earth, may catalyse for us a freedom unknown for a century.  

Bounceback & backlogs

We must not forget when throwing money at workers and businesses where we want to end up when the virus crisis is past. Before we spend every pound we must turn it over twice, as my mother used to say. This is not a demand shock - the nation did not want to stop spending. But we must realise that Covid-19 will change everything, and when it is over our spending patterns will undoubtedly have changed. We must not waste money on businesses and activities that have no future. The virus is a system shock that will accelerate changes that are happening anyway - but how do we decide what to fund, how to fund it and on what terms?

Airlines
The case for LHR's extra runway has become much weaker. I can't see demand for global travel ever recovering to the point it was at in November 2019, and that means airlines, which are anyway on the cusp of profitability, going bust and allowing it to happen. What do we save? Well, we're back to national carriers all over the world, so we must fund BA. And easyjet is our national budget carrier, so deserving of support. Let the others fall, including Branson's Virgin.

The High Street
The slow decline of the high street has seen chain stores struggle to survive in the face of crippling rent and rates. The government's last budget offered some relief, but after a period of enforced close down will the High Street post-Covid ever return to what it was? The streetscape of our towns and cities is relatively recent, dating largely from the mid 19th century, so it's not an immutable part of our heritage.

Bounceback
When it is possible to lift restrictions - and suggestions are that this might be stop-start - demand will return and we must do everything we can to ensure the effects of bounceback leave us where we want to be. For some businesses, there will be a permanent loss of income. If you normally go to the barbers every month, after four month's absence you won't have four haircuts - all that income is lost. Offering loans to such businesses is pointless - imposing a burden they are unlikely to recoup in increased trade. Backlogs in contrast will see a huge burst of spending as at the end of rationing when buyers create four months of sales in a month; loans to such businesses to keep them ticking over make eminent sense. Computers, DIY goods, home improvements may be such.

AI
We saw the end of the trade of Tube driver last week. The pics that hit the press and social media of dangerously crowded tubes because drivers were self-isolating in large numbers, when not a single DLR formation was cancelled, means the end of public opposition to driverless tube trains - meaning more of them, travelling more closely to eachother, more safely and less crowded, is only now a matter of time. Similarly across the economy.

The environment
I think across the entire world the effect of the standstill is striking billions of people as to the effects on both our world and ourselves of human activity. Choking clouds of SO2 and smog lifted from cities, bird song audible in London. We won't quite see dolphins in the Regent's canal, but the effect will be salutary - and not going back will become a politically saleable option.

The B Ark
We're finding out today who doesn't want their children at home. The most extraordinary melange of B-Ark passengers are claiming 'key worker' status, from nail painters, personal trainers and hashish purveyors to Uber drivers and artisan avocado-mashers. I reckon about 80% of these folk could easily be re-employed out in the fields. We need to subsidise only those activities that create the greatest total benefit for society and nation

It's going to be very interesting.

Update
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Boris is under tremendous pressure from his entire team to introduce a full lockdown - we must at least credit him with resisting it for so long on libertarian grounds. However, I think the science is against him.

And fieldworkers? Uhm, metaphorical. It's my opinion that everyone on the B-ark is free to carry on what they're doing at their own expense - but if they want public money, they must help feed and dress the cared-for - or similar collectively useful employments - rather than painting nails or spraying tanning fluid.

Planning for the impact of AI

If you searched the manifestos of the parties in the election just gone for their AI policies, you will have been disappointed. Apart from Brexit, the news issues were little different from those in 1997 or even in 1979. But AI was there - as a trap for the unwary.

John McDonnell stepped on a mine when his September conference pledge to reduce the working week to 4 days came back to haunt him; I suspect this started as an option for dealing with the effects of AI in some sectors as an alternative to redundancy for 20% of the workforce, but of course it became a source of ridicule. Combined with a pledge to increase public sector pay by 5% immediately, social media filled with memes from delighted NHS workers, train drivers, prison officers and judges at the largesse of the Messiah. Labour tried to counter by saying the 4-day week would not apply to the NHS, only to immediately create hostility amongst half a million Labour voters. Then they did the sensible thing and disowned it, pointing out that it was not a manifesto pledge.

McDonnell is of course a fool. He assumed that the UK would naturally capture the benefits of the changes brought by AI as well as the costs in lost jobs and GDP. Additional wealth and profitability, in McDonnell's imagination, could afford to pay the same wage bill for 20% fewer hours. This is not a safe assumption. Globalism may ensure that the 1% do well out of such changes, but it's also meant that economic benefits have not been wider, and have actually disadvantaged many of the traditional Labour voting areas that wisely chose not to trust McDonnell's economic illiteracy. The risk now is that the benefits of the AI revolution will go to the same nations that have benefited so greatly from Globalism - China, India, Brazil. Managing AI changes must be at the very forefront of our national strategy, and Brexit will ensure that we, as a nation, are agile enough to develop a policy free of the drogue of a sclerotic EU riddled with the self-interests of 27 players.

If the PM is to keep his pledge to all those ex-labour voters, we must drive AI with a determination.

Hence, for those of you who read the full-fat version of this blog with its sidebar, you will have seen a new blog entry from Dominic Cummings pop up yesterday evening in the blogroll. It's all over the papers this morning in a way that a government job advert from a sad HR department would never be - and hasn't cost taxpayers a single penny for half-page display ads in the Guardian or whatever. It demonstrates beyond doubt that despite the almost universal absence of AI from the election manifestos, it's right at the top of the government's agenda. And that is very reassuring indeed.

Harland and Wolff

The final demise of the shipyard that built the Titanic will be largely un-mourned. Only around 100 workers are left, engaged on maintenance activities, including having kept one of the yard's two great cranes, Samson and Goliath, in working order. For many Catholics, denied work at the yard until the 1960s, the erasure of the place from Ulster's landscape will be welcome.

It all started, in a surprisingly modern way, with a smoking ban. Imposed in 1854 by the nascent yard's didactic new manager, the 23 year old Edward Harland. In addition to the ban on smoking, Harland cut wages as he reckoned the work was sub-standard.

It was never a pleasant or progressive place in which to work. The employment system was tyrannical and nepotistic. Bullying and victimisation by the brutal cadre of foremen was the norm rather than the exception. Unskilled labourers, employed casually, were treated like scum, barely better than Catholics.

And the foregoing three paragraphs tell you all we know about the fourth industrial revolution; until now, shipyards, factories, mines have all been seen as formed by the men and women who built them and spent their lives working in them. We discuss them in terms of their workforce. In fact, the yard need not be redundant - though the workforce is history. A shipyard located where slipways fall into deep, sheltered water, where there is an abundance of power, where there are transport links, rail, ports and above all 5G comms, could well become a resurgent industry later this century. CNC steel cutting and shaping, robotic movers and welders, AI build supervisors and driverless cranes could see shipbuilding return to Belfast - but not employment. New jobs will be in a comfortable, climate conditioned computer control and monitoring suite, or servicing the CNC machines and robotic welders.

If the site is so suited, we must make efforts to secure it from being lost to woke hipster housing, leisure centres or MUGA cages paid for with the billions of the supply and confidence arrangements.We must recognise that locations that can be used for AI replacement industry are key assets - and protect them now.