One of the myths that is being peddled during the present Covid-19 crisis is that we are all in it together. It is true that every section of UK society has been inconvenienced or worse. The virus makes no distinction between rich and poor or even, it seems, between young and old. And yet there is a sense in which the adage ‘we are all in it together’ is a falsehood. Behind this slogan is a reality too uncomfortable for most of us to face. What seems to be happening is that some are surviving far better than others. Large numbers of people without secure housing or income are losing their safety nets of survival and are being threatened with their families by something close to destitution.
In my piece about the post Covid-19 Church, I made the point that it will be the new economic realities that will cause the greatest earthquakes on the life of the church in this country. While I am no economist, I do read the financial pages of the newspaper with a reasonable amount of attention. The anticipated falls in industrial output in this and every country make for sombre reading. The effect on employment may be catastrophic. It does not take a mathematical genius to see that if you take out, even for a short space of time, a quarter of a nation’s industrial output you destroy massive amounts of personal wealth as well as the tax revenues available to a government. Much of this revenue in Britain is at present spent on the welfare state (including pensions). Even if the country gets back to normal in six months, the effect of all that lost output will take a long time to repair. At present the energy of the country is focused on the need to defeat the virus. Everything else is on hold, including the planning of how we start to recover economically. How does a country recover its economy and make it possible for ordinary citizens to continue to feed themselves and pay their bills and mortgages? Meeting that expense in peace time will put a huge dent in the nation’s future prosperity. Even if Universal Credit is quickly available for all who need it, will this cover all the necessary outgoings that most families have to meet each month? Even if landlords are generous to tenants during the crisis period we are in at the moment, who is going to be responsible for those sums in the longer term? The same question has to be asked about utility bills. Will the companies be required to write off all debts of customers who cannot pay?
There are many economic questions to be answered over the next months and years. But, however those questions are answered, it is clear that many of Teresa May’s JAMs (just about managing) will tip over into real poverty. I don’t remember the percentage of people who have absolutely no savings, but it is uncomfortably high. Living from hand to mouth has always been the way of living which has been the only available method for large numbers of people. They simply cannot afford the catastrophe of widespread unemployment that our country faces as the result of the virus.
If I can indulge in a bit of long distant memory on the topic of poverty, I could claim that when a child my family was poor by the standards of today. We were poor in the sense that we never bought ‘stuff’ and most things we had were hand-me-downs or second-hand. In society as a whole there was then in the 50s little in the way of credit to buy luxury items. Although the expression ‘overdraft’ did enter my consciousness from quite an early age, there was none of the culture of leasing a brand-new car and all the other schemes calculated to keep many families today in the stranglehold of debt.
I have sometimes wondered what would happen if even a small percentage of the leased cars on the road were to be repossessed and returned to the lenders? Even a ten per cent default will create a massive earthquake in the price of second-hand cars. The availability of these leasing schemes would decline as the companies offering these schemes find they are losing money. This would in turn seriously affect the new car market. The same thing could happen to housing. Mortgage companies can only afford to give a small holiday before they have to start to repossess homes. Once again, homes will begin to flood the market and prices will start to drop. Massive financial dislocation will again follow as some of the wealth accumulated over decades for secure retirements begins to evaporate, even for the wealthier in society. The economic activity of this country is in some areas built on the precarious and risky roundabout of debt and leverage. If the roundabout stops then everyone will realise that much of their wealth is based on fantasy.
This blog piece is a thinking out-loud exercise. We are facing a severe economic dislocation in society which may plunge many in our society in a terrible place of economic distress. Some, a few, will have taken measures to protect themselves. Some may even stand to make huge profits as they bet on the downward march of markets and currencies. The majority, the vast majority, will be poorer. Those already poor may know levels of need that will require huge levels of government intervention to enable even bare survival.
One would like to think that the leadership of our country would help people to understand what could be around the corner for everyone. I would like to think that those in government are already working out the huge rises in tax that will become necessary to stop the group we call JAMs from experiencing want and actual hunger. It will require true leadership for a Prime Minister to tell people that, to keep this country going, there will have to be real sacrifice on behalf of all to deal with the future economic shocks that we will be experiencing, as the economic realities of the virus become clearer by the month.
Where do Christians fit into all this? I would suggest that we need to hear from the leaders of churches and faiths to help us all face some of the hard truths about the future which I am trying to explore. The way forward is help all of us to see that we there has to be a new mood of community awareness. We all need to pull in the same direction to bring the whole country through the crisis. During the war, every citizen was required to lend to the government, through the tax system, extra money. This was to be returned in the form of post-war credits. Money was eventually returned, but the recipient received only a fraction of the value of what had been lent. Inflation had destroyed much of its purchasing power in the meantime. It would be difficult for any government to force wealthier citizens to hand over assets for a national crisis as they did in the 1940s. But some huge sacrificial effort is going to be needed if we are to overcome the crisis facing so many people in our society. Things like conspicuous consumption will need to be regarded as anti-social and against the common good. Sharing, recycling our ‘stuff’ and community activity will again be the new norm. Acts that show awareness of all those living around us should be encouraged, just as they have begun to appear during the lock-down. A more caring, more aware society could emerge from the present crisis and be carried into the future. This future will be one full of economic challenges of the highest order. We need dynamic and excellent leadership both from Church as well as State to make the radical shifts of attitude that I believe are going to be necessary. The old Churchillian sentiments about ‘blood, toil, tears and sweat’ may have to be wheeled out once more. Perhaps the whole country, in meeting the cost of sacrifice being asked of all, may become just a little bit more like the Kingdom that Jesus came to tell us about.
It’s good to read some realism. Every clerical message, streamed service, and church YouTube video refers to “exceptional” (or some such word) times with the usually implicit expectation that things will get back to how they were.
They might not. RNA viruses mutate, vaccines don’t always work, new viruses emerge, people don’t behave as politicians demand (neither do politicians). Our church leaders don’t seem to confront this reality. They send out messages of hope and trust, fine in themselves, but inadequate in the bigger picture. This is akin to giving false hope to a patient diagnosed with a life threatening illness – something that in my experience always gave rise to more long term distress than short term comfort.
Just as tectonic plates do the “things that come naturally” leading to quakes and tsunamis, so viruses do the “things that come naturally” leading to morbidity and mortality in vulnerable creatures like humans. It’s the natural order. But never mind. The sky is clear, riverbeds visible, air less polluted. The night sky is spectacular. You might say that whatever its effects on Homo sapiens, this virus is doing the planet a favour.
Thank you very much indeed for this – and many thanks also to Stanley for his analysis (together with what he has written for TA and on his latest post for his own blog).
Although I don’t wish to play the part of an armchair epidemiologist (there are so many of them these days), it is the genetic instability of influenza and other coronaviruses which makes immunity impossible, except perhaps for short periods. Indeed, I’ve seen stories about recent victims in China and Korea becoming reinfected. We have still not got to the bottom of influenza, despite it being studied fairly intensively since the first recorded pandemic in 1510. In view of COVID-19’s potential mutability, herd immunity might prove an elusive concept. There is a high probability of further waves of infection, perhaps of greater lethality, and that each wave will have its own subsidiary waves of mortality: (i) of people not being treated for critical conditions; (ii) of people whose important, but not critical, treatment is postponed; and (iii) of people who suffer ‘deaths of despair’. The initial wave will therefore have an amplifying effect, creating perhaps even greater casualties.
Even if the science is somewhat blurred at present, the other consequences are becoming evident. This is a disease which strikes very effectively at every predicate of late-stage capitalism. It is almost as though it has been programmed to test and overturn almost every major social and economic assumption instituted over the last ten or eleven generations. The resulting uncertainties may guarantee a permanent depression; we may only get out of the woods if we can create a vaccine that not only compromises the efficacy of COVID-19, but also of its permutations: in other words, it might need to be an agent which disrupts the basic molecular organisation of the virus.
There is a major debate going on at the moment: if central banks act as market-makers for most debt markets and as insurers of first and last resort for banks, insurance companies and significant sectors of their respective domestic economies (or, in the case of the Fed, for the economies of more than 150 countries) will they buckle if they are creating liabilities in the currencies that they themselves control? I don’t pretend to know the answer. However, if they do prove vulnerable, then the cataclysm could prove unstoppable.
The essence of capitalism is constant growth based upon healthy profit margins. World peace has been sustained by growth, however uneven. By creating continuous uncertainty the virus crushes demand indefinitely. A virtuous circle is transmuted into a zero sum game. Even if the burden of taxation is shifted onto accumulated wealth and housing (a big ‘if’) the positive effect will be only temporary; the rules of the zero sum game will reassert themselves. We are now at risk of a cascade of mass insolvencies, unemployment, internal unrest and war in pursuit of momentary advantages.
Thank you, Froghole, for this analysis. It’s a relief to know that you and Stephen can clearly see elephants in the room, even if the Lambeth politburo pretends they’re not there. The church would do well to stop obsessing about streaming kitchen sink communions, and start educating its people about coping with uncertainty and mortality. But the church is now little more than a prop like booze and drugs used by a few people to get through life.
We have set ourselves the task of sorting/reading through our books in order to prune our collection. Which is how I find myself reading Bishop David Jenkins’ autobiography. He was much concerned with very similar issues. He pretty much came to the conclusion that the church didn’t really believe in God. And was/is backward not forward looking.
Athena/Stanley: Thank you for your cogent remarks. Since the spirit is willing, yet the flesh weak, the Church will almost always put the preservation of its income streams before the principles which it purports to propound. This is the natural response of every profession or bureaucracy, and it has been a continuous characteristic of the ‘mainstream’ churches since the Milvian Bridge. It is why, when faced with a massive loss of capital, the clerical profession and its satellites (i.e., Synod) will almost certainly prefer harbouring capital for its own preservation and that of its pensioners in preference to its mission, the extent of its ‘footprint’ or the needs of future generations (i.e., the priority of which can be rationalised away). Does this necessarily amount to a negation of its principles? Perhaps, but it is an eminently human response.
To some extent I feel that it is essential that the Church gets through this protracted saga. The state will be in acute distress, and is likely to remain so for a very long time: we will almost certainly not enjoy the growth we had when the state was last put into such straits (during the French revolutionary wars or the last war): there simply aren’t major Pareto-optimal innovations in the pipe in anything like the scale required to generate that growth and satisfy the liabilities, needs and aspirations (or assuage the fears) of 8 billion people. Once that penny drops it will become ever harder for the state to finance itself at a discount and it will struggle to provide the basic levels of subvention needed to ensure stability.
If the state is unable to provide subsistence to the levels required it will place a greater importance on institutions like the churches to provide forms of social risk-pooling. This need will be especially acute when the current generation in their 30s, 40s and 50s (whose DC pensions will not get them very far) are pushed out of the labour market. If we do have a depression it is likely that the authorities will hold interest rates down indefinitely even if inflation eventually returns in force (Stephen has, very aptly, referred to the ‘financial repression’ of the 1940s and ’50s): therefore, that generation will not have the time to rehabilitate itself financially. This may have momentous political consequences. However, if the Church is cleaned out and implodes completely there will be few alternative providers of risk-pooling and the legions of destitute pensioners of the future may lack even that consolation.
The Church can at least go back to the schoolmen and start asking pointed questions about usury, debt relief (the IMF wrote off a few hundred million today: why not much more?), and the meaning/purpose of property rights. People will be made insolvent only because investors (i.e., pension funds) are desperate for returns to feed their members in a negative interest rate environment. Many of those pensioners will be churchgoers.
I’m saddened by so much talk of a prospective Armageddon, but in no way competent to counter it, and have to defer to others more expert.
Reflecting on a number of things which have happened today, out of the blue the first line of this beautiful hymn by G W Briggs came into my head, asking the question where would be the right place to greet our risen Lord in the difficult times facing all of us? I have also posted a similar question on ‘Thinking Anglicans’. Different answers are possible.
I think these words provide some inspiration in present circumstances.
1 Come, risen Lord, and deign to be our guest;
no, let us be your guests and with you dine;
at your own table now be manifest
in your own sacrament of bread and wine.
2 We meet as in the upper room they met;
now at the table, blessing, yet you stand:
‘This is my body’: this you give us yet;
faith still receives the cup as from your hand.
3 One body we, one body who partake,
one church united in communion blessed;
one name we bear, one bread of life we break,
with all your saints on earth and saints at rest.
4 One with each other, Lord, and one in you,
who are one Saviour and one living head;
open our eyes to see with vision true;
be known to us in breaking of the bread.
These are uncharted waters. It is a capital mistake to theorise without the facts. One thing is certain: we actually don’t know what’s going to happen.
But many of us have a responsibility to try and work out what could happen and prepare accordingly. I walked past a new mother yesterday on my daily exercise, with her baby swaddled to her body. We both kept our distance, a national strategy which appears to be working. Nevertheless I felt for her and the burden she carried for the welfare of her little one.
I’ve been surprised by recent estimates of how little the economy will contract. I had thought it would be worse. There must be a great deal of economic activity still going on in the background. And anecdotally a number of my suppliers have regrouped and started delivering again. There have been hiccups in the supply chain, but I have been impressed by the non-fatalistic attempts to “get back to normal”. Of course there are shortages still and these will remain for a while whilst more essential goods are prioritised. I apologise in advance if you find war time analogies irritating, but having to queue to get onto a website reminded me of war time rationing tales, and women staffing up our Spitfire factories was triggered by a pilot on furlough now working as a Tesco delivery driver. We really could do, and we really can do.
Students of economics will know how much reliance is placed on assumptions. That people will behave rationally for example, and that we even know what “rational” means, particularly at the moment. We don’t know either.
The stock markets have fallen about 30% and are recovering a little. Some companies’ values have recovered well because they have a strong underlying business. Others will fold. It has always been this way, but hastened by the current economic shock. Market values are sustained by demand. Fear has reduced demand for equities and the money transferred to safer havens, but where the potential returns are much lower. It will be back, driven by the need for growth underpinning our pensions.
We have more data on the Church and can be more certain therefore of its likely steeper decline. I agree with the call for strong leadership. Hiding behind a strategy of hierarchical self preservation, will, in my opinion, hasten decline.
For the avoidance of doubt, banal platitudes, insipid music and rehashed sermons have had their day.
Every death from Covid19 is a tragedy.
From the early disciples onwards, people have anticipated the end of the world. Is coronavirus it? Personally I don’t think so. Many will suffer greatly as they do in far higher numbers with various types cancer for example. At the moment, lockdown is the most effective way of reducing strain on a rapidly gearing up hospital system. It is working, as judged by the linear rather than exponential deaths curve. Lockdowns are being eased gradually. There won’t be immediate cures, but there will be mitigations.
Hereford Cathedral is posting daily prayers and reflections. This is the last verse of a poem by W.H.Vanstone. I apologise if the layout isn’t clear. There are four lines.
“He’s gone!” cries Joseph at the empty tomb;
But Mary says, “He’s left a word for you;
He cannot rest content to be your past;
So he has risen to be your future, too.”
How remarkable that you mention Hereford. A dear friend died on Maundy Thursday and yesterday I received details of his funeral at Hereford next week. Sadly, in present circumstances I cannot attend. It was one of the things which ‘happened’ yesterday which brought to mind the hymn which I quoted, the other being the death yesterday morning of a priest, a retired bishop greatly-loved by all. I have mentioned him on earlier threads, an Anglican Franciscan whose pectoral cross was in the form of two nails, a symbol of humility in a man who held high office.
My condolences, Rowland. There’ll be a lot of similar experiences I’m afraid.
Condolences, Rowland. These times make the passages of birth, death, marriage etc so hard when we cannot come together to mark the event, mourn or celebrate.
I am v ignorant of economics so am struggling even to understand some of the posts. But in my simple head I can’t help hoping that this does lead to a transformation in our economic system. I have always thought that the principle of perpetual growth is unsustainable and planet-unfriendly. That the fundamentals of capitalism – profit and free market – are based on exploitation and favouring the rich and powerful. I hope we do end up with a bias for the poor, and a new economy that is sustainable and cares for people and planet.
That is the hope I would like to hear leaders -political and church – talk about. Hope is vital, a loss of hope is the biggest single factor that tips mental distress into suicide. So we need messages of hope. Thank you to those who have shared hopeful hymn words here.
I think my biggest fear is nothing changes. Some people -those already at the bottom of the pile -will crash out, businesses will fold. But the markets and banks will pick up and go back to what they have always done.
Justin Welby has been a disappointment to a number of survivors. But perhaps here he could be a good person for the job, with his background. He, along with other faith leaders, could be leading a call for a new economic order, one based on principles of shalom, justice, community etc.
Thank you for those kind words, Jane. As it happens, the Dean of Hereford who has posted daily meditations on the Hereford Cathedral website, part of one is quoted above by English Athena, will be taking my friend’s funeral. This can only be at a crematorium, but there will be a celebration of his life, with music, in church when that becomes possible again.
I’m sure it will be fitting. And I’m sure the celebrations later will be helpful.
The story of Captain Tom epitomises hope and goodness. A 99 year old war veteran tries to raise a few pounds to thank the NHS for how they helped him. The public response was (as of this morning) £17 million! That’s heart warming. It’s also £17m not spent on “conspicuous consumption”. Individual people have given what they could have spent on themselves or their own families for the benefit of others.
Individual actions, selfish or selfless accumulate over a large population to produce an effect like this in an economy. In this case it was selfless and lead by the resolve of a strong character with a walking frame in his back garden. And social media.
In testing times you seem to get more of this sort of thing. I’m going to try and support smaller businesses when I can who must be struggling at the moment. But I’m also grateful to bigger ones like Amazon who have delivered medicines to me which I couldn’t get locally. They also just delivered a toaster for a 91 year old relative we ordered for. The local driver was telling me last year, that there were 900 vans leaving our local depot each morning. Their investment in the delivery network was costly and now looks timely.
Of course as a society we must ensure we legislate against potential monopoly abuse. I share Jane’s distaste for some of the banking sector, but we must remember that we all are part of this system, delegating management of our money (such as it is) to those we wouldn’t trust further than we could throw them.
We have a local farmer’s market where I buy small quantities of expensive cheese, and a local Aldi supermarket where I buy larger quantities of much cheaper cheese. Wealth brings choice. Those who profess to “understand” the markets, and those who profess not to, have quite a strong intersection. Again we are all part of this system.
Big enforced changes in our patterns of living have made me think. Was that bus journey strictly necessary in times gone by? Will I go back to longer less local journeys if I don’t have to? I can buy a bag of coffee for the price of a single café cup. Will I go back to the several independent firms I frequented when the lockdown is lifted? Or save the money. I’m surviving after all. But are they?
This strange time is an important opportunity to re-think what we do and how we live. From what I’ve seen, I’m very hopeful that people’s goodness and ingenuity will overcome.
I’m sorry not to be totally sanguine about this. Before they went remote, the local doctor’s surgery had to put a sign beside the hand sanitiser asking people not to steal it! We’re bad as well as good. I suspect nothing much will change. Rich people will still want to keep their money. And that goes double if there’s a recession. The church on the other hand may change. There are already Dioceses trading insolvently. Something will have to be done.
I hope there is some comfortable in the Dean taking the service at the crem, Rowland.
I totally agree with you, Steve, about individual actions. I run a small business, as do 2 of our sons, and mine is a CIC and vol.org. We will only survive if individuals support us during and after this crisis.
We have always tried to bank ethically (Triodos & Co-op) shop fair trade etc, and as we voyage we make a point of using small local stores and individual indigenous traders as much as possible, rather than multi nationals. These things all help.
But I also share some of English Athena’s doubts. In my field (children’s rights) it is legislation that has offered the only real protection to the vulnerable. Without the Children Act, we would not have the children’s services we do today. Other countries that don’t have such legislation struggle to protect children at risk, when policy makers are more concerned with budgets.
In the same way as Greta is inspiring a new social contract around protecting the environment, we need prophetic leaders to inspire a new social contract around the economy. We all need to be like you, Steve, and ponder the ethics of how we work our money. And those of us who don’t have much, need to unite and campaign for rich people to be less selfish, and for governments to make it harder for people to accumulate wealth at the cost of others.
Meanwhile, and I hope Stephen will forgive me for a slight hijack of this thread, please would you consider helping support children and young people at risk during lockdown, not already known to services? We have published a rapid research report, which we have submitted to government, and welcome any help to email, tweet, forward to contacts who may be able to help. The link is below, if you can help, it will only cost your time😊
AVAILABLE NOW – supporting children & young people who are unknown to statutory services and experiencing/at risk of abuse. Interim report from survivor-led project (@voiceofsurvivor with @mcpinfoundation & @vamhn): https://www.vamhn.co.uk/uploads/1/2/2/7/122741688/off_radar_c_yp_at_risk_report_part_1_.pdf
No worries if not your thing, hope you don’t mind me asking
Yes indeed. Apparently, murder of partners has increased by 300%.
I’ve met and worked with many wealthy people although few would describe themselves as “rich”. It’s all relative. Yet in any objective way they were. Some were very generous and some tight as the proverbial.
Amongst the generous wealthy were a number of senior Christians bankrolling their churches, as deduced by the level of PCC giving and their listed names for example. In a curious conflation of ideas I noted locally some leaving the C of E and appearing as elders in different churches. The diocesan insolvency is worsening there.
One highly successful labour peer I worked with, whose success was borne out of poorer people paying (gladly) for his work, was as generous as the next person. More so in my opinion. But who are we to decide how selfish he was and somehow make him less so, presumably by taxation or other legislative instrument?
Another wealthy character springs to mind who in a different time I may have had to work with. Thankfully not, I can’t stand the man. But do I buy his goods? Well er yes, sometimes I do because I like a bargain. As do others. By doing so we are part of the problem. Particularly as Christians we have to be careful not to be hypocritical about pointing the finger at others.
Rich is relative. If I’m a bit downbeat at the moment it’s because I’m concerned about the pandemic hitting the third world. We’ll be getting off lightly by comparison.
That is undoubtedly true. We should do what we can, Steve, and leave what we can’t to God. If we can afford to buy fruit and veg from small concerns, that’s good. If it has to be a supermarket, fine. Or a mixture. Free range eggs, I can do, free range chicken, not so much. I wish people would be willing to pay what things actually cost, though. Milk, for example, and decent wages for shop workers.
It’s all part of the sin of the world arising from greed, avarice and approval seeking, that in turn lead to iusury, hypocrisy and exploitation – all roundly condemned in The Scriptures. Our present economic system is dependent on usury and greed, and of course pensions on usury. Wecare all complicit. The consequences of the lockdown include clearer skies, cleaner air and cleaner rivers – the virus is good for the planet – so it would be mildly comforting to think that the economic consequences might include a less toxic economic system. But given human propensity to greed and avarice, I’m not hopeful.