Andrew Tickell: The teachable moments that we all must learn from

In the lockdown, you might be spending your days fending off your kids or getting used to your own company, hipstering it up by breathing life into that sourdough starter, knocking the dust off your pasta maker – or like my mother, taking up knitting with the focused fury of a tricoteuse on the steps of the guillotine. Others are experiencing profound economic anxiety, and I feel for them.

The idea that coronavirus is potentially educational might seem tasteless, one weekend in. It might feel too soon to contemplate what we’ll take from all this when the present crisis subsides, whenever it subsides. But heaven knows – we’ve got the time to kill, and reading between the reams of our rolling press coverage, this has been an interesting two weeks.

Because the economy shuddered to a halt, because the UK Government has been compelled to intervene in an unprecedented way in the labour market, we’ve been talking more about the basic building blocks of the British economy – and where each of us fit into it – than I can remember in my lifetime. Even the global financial crash of 2008 – whose shadow has loomed over my entire adult life – doesn’t compare to this.

And speaking for myself at least, I feel like I’m learning a lot of things I ought to have known already. I am, as you know, a lawyer, not an economist. Words are my bag, not numbers. But the numbers paint our predicament more vividly than words. They give real context to the silence in our streets, the shuttered shopfronts, with their boarded windows and locked doors.

The questions are basic. How many families in our society are one pay cheque away from disaster? What percentage of people in Britain are self-employed? How many of us have savings put by if the work suddenly dries up, and how long are we likely to be able to eke those out without finding ourselves in irrecoverable financial jeopardy? At the beginning of the week, I didn’t know the answer to any of these questions. Because of the political response to the social distancing demanded by the coronavirus, now I do. Self-isolated, I can’t be alone in re-appraising the economic judgements and priorities we’ve been living with, before we all had at least two meters between us.

One of the basic dynamics of British politics is the rich don’t realise how rich they are, and the poor underestimate their relative poverty. One of the historical responsibilities of the Tory party and Britain’s Tory press has been to ensure this remains the case. The political strategies aren’t subtle. Cry wolf on mild social democracy as full luxury communism. Pathologise taxing the wealthiest properly as “the politics of envy” and a “tax on aspiration”. Splash great wades of cash on pet projects, while swaggering around like a Victorian dominie, wagging your finger at the poor and the disabled, telling them to live within their means. Much of the press does a party turn here too. They buy into the demonology of welfare reform. They collude in their middle class readers’ victim fantasies by reassuring people earning tens of thousands of pounds more than the average worker that that they’re hard-done-by “middle earners”. Bootstraps. Belt tightening. All in it together. The Tory clichés are all tried, tested – and, let’s not forget – remarkably politically successful.

The coronavirus has thrown a stark light on all of this. Last week, Rishi

Sunak announced his measures to keep employees on the books and employers in business, with an 80% furlough from the Treasury. Half a million people applied for Universal Credit in the nine days leading up to March 25. This week, after sustained pressure from the Scottish Government and others, the Chancellor finally addressed the situation of self-employed workers. Under Sunak’s plans, freelancers will have to sustain themselves all the way into June, before the infrastructure will be in place to pay out taxable grants worth 80% of average profits over the last three years, up to a maximum of £2500 a month. New-fledged freelancers look to be entirely buggered by the scheme. But so too are those who will struggle to make it to June.

Cue another fact I didn’t know till this week: the number of self-employed people working in the UK increased from

3.3 million people at the turn of the millennium to 4.8 million in 2017. Comparatively speaking, Scotland has one of the lowest rates of self-employment in the UK, with just over 12% of the labour force north of the Border in self-employment. In London, by contrast, self-employed folk make up just shy of a fifth of the city’s huge working population.

Nevertheless, 12% of Scottish workers are in self-employment across Scotland. Think of it as more than two Dundees and more. By far the largest self-employer is the construction industry whose sites and scaffolds are now – rightly – standing idle, followed by service workers like hairdressers, beauty technicians, journeyman engineers – and freelance scribblers like yours truly.

And the evidence about their how much they’re likely to have put by to keep them is profoundly worrying. According to the Scottish Government figures, around three quarters of us have some savings in the bank. Just over half of households have more than £1000 put by – but a few hundred quid won’t go far for rent, power and food if there’s no income coming in. One in four Scottish households has no savings to speak of. That’s around 590,000 families. The data exposes particular vulnerabilities in parts of our community. Some 59% of single parents have no savings. A third of single adult households live hand to mouth, month to month.

Frantisek Brocek of the Fraser of Allander Institute has been looking into the liquid assets of Scottish families, and how long most of us could cope if our income disappears. He found that only 42% of Scotland’s poorest households would be able to cover one month of their regular income from savings, with a worsening picture across the workforce the longer the economy is frozen.

Brocek also identifies a major age differential in financial resilience, finding that “the youngest age groups are the most vulnerable to unexpected income fluctuations” with only a quarter of 16-24-year olds having enough savings to cover one month of their income, never mind two or three cooped up in a rented flat, accumulating liabilities, without security, earning nothing.

These aren’t arid or wonky figures. They’re the stuff of life for millions of people in this country. They’re the difference between a family’s economic survival, and real jeopardy. They’re windows into the justice – and injustices – of our society and its politics.

The inter-generational implications are one of the quiet stories of this health crisis. In a message for young people last week, World Health Organisation chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus appealed to inter-generational solidarity to encourage younger folk to maintain their social distance. “The choices you make about where you go could be the difference between life and death for someone else,” he said. All the younger people I know are stoically – happily – accepting this social responsibility. Many are hopping up tenement stairs, picking up extra messages, helping older folk with new technologies, responsibly staying home.

On Twitter this week, former Scottish Labour MP Paul Sweeney observed “my entire adult life has been characterised by economic strife”. At 31, Paul is a little younger than me – and the same vintage as my wee sister – but I know exactly what he means.

For years now, a substantial section of the British media has been earning a crust by telling us how much they hate their own kids.

Pick your favourite reason to hate “generation snowflake”. There are many. We’re brittle. We’re supposedly entitled. We’re “woke”. But the economic reality has presented us – as Paul says – with unrelenting challenges and insecurity. I don’t think we’ve borne these challenges without grace or patience. Coronavirus is just the latest of a familiar series of shocks younger people have been obliged sanguinely to accept and adapt to. Most are only too happy to do so. But this should be a teachable moment for poison pen columnists and economic policy-makers too. I hope they remember it when this is all through.