20th April 2020

COVID-19. What would Ginger Crompton do?

For those who are a bit thrown by the headline please bear with me a bit. 

Ginger worked for BOAC, he had been around the world a lot on military service during WW2 as well as ships in the grand era of the ocean liners and in the air at the beginning of the golden age of jet travel through to the early 80’s. When I met him, he was my in-flight boss, a cabin service director (in the old days a Senior Steward) role on VC10’s, 707’s and the early days of the jumbo. An exceptional character who was never phased by anything or anyone.

Let’s think positive shall we? 

As the weeks of enforced one exercise a day, household restrictions and social distancing have passed by, new opportunities can and will be discovered with a little thought. 

The new opportunities will, like the shoots that appear after a forest fire, begin to pop up everywhere.  

But right now, what is emerging from advisers and businesses on the frontline is that the economic impacts of coronavirus are not a question of output slowing, but of it disappearing altogether.

And we should be more afraid this than we are of COVID-19.  

The cure is in danger of being worse than the virus itself! 

We live in the age of ‘hard working families (that means two working age employed or self-employed adults in one household) run on a philosophy of debt, wanting it now expectation, materialistic aspiration, outsourced childcare and state benefit entitlement. 

Nothing too wrong in that I guess, the tax revenues they produce outweigh the benefit costs. Or at least they did………. until now! 

But what of social and mental costs too when the whole way of working is tipped upside down, assuming you have not been furloughed?  

Working families in the ‘We’ll meet again’, 50’s post war era that we are increasingly being referenced back to, consisted of one earner, mostly male who had been recently de-mobbed having survived (like my Dad) the 6 years of WW2. The single parent females were mostly widowed, again collateral WW2 damage.

Over the last couple of weeks, I have been simply amazed at how many of those working from home just cannot cope when confronted the reality of their spouse or partner doing the same a room away and the children bouncing around in-between home schooling sessions. 

Working from home in the way their bosses may expect, is really not working at all?

Or is it not really working at all?

But cometh the hour, big brands will see the true cost of a workforce told go decamp to where they came from. They will see that for the many, the days of big, swanky offices, workforces engaged in constant meetings about meetings about meetings and the health and safety decision delays this causes no longer justifiable. 

They will see the inertia of having so many staff and management linked to so few new business revenue ‘outcomes’ to make up for the revenues lost to COVID-19.  

In contrast, smaller firms who have created and run their own businesses are open to new ideas and are agile enough to adapt to changing circumstances when given encouragement, but if only the banks would give some life boosting support. 

The banks have economic blood on their hands behaving like the behemoths they are. Slow to respond, removing decision making from on locally on the ground to the cloud, via in many cases a call centre in locked down India. They have managed to give only 1.4% of SMS applicants access to the loans they need! Brilliant. 

Economics professor Simon Wren-Lewis reckons school closures would amplify labour shortages if workers were forced to take time off to look after children. “On the basis of the assumptions we made, if schools close for around four weeks, that can multiply the GDP impacts by as much as a factor of three, and if they close for a whole quarter, by twice that.”

And following this article, this week we hear that data from Italy, Spain and France shows between 42 and 57 per cent of coronavirus deaths have been in care homes. 

London School of Economics researchers found the most robust evidence was from Ireland, where 54 per cent of fatalities occurred in care homes.

These numbers look like trouble for the government and those scientists whose advice on lockdown has led to the country now being afraid to go back to work. If between 42 and 57 per cent of coronavirus deaths have been in care homes why on earth has all commercial activity ground to a halt. These individuals have been locked down for weeks, their families cannot visit!!!

Ministers now fear Britons are so cowed by draconian law and snowflake mentality they will not want to go back to work when the coronavirus lockdown ends despite the risk of lasting damage to the economy, it was revealed today.

This is what happens when you pay people to stay at home based on fear, threat, loathing and dodgy data.

Wake up UKplc, we need to get back to work!  The cure IS worse than the illness.

And what would Ginger Crompton do?

His solution to assuage any long haul inflight passenger anguish was to pull from his pocket a pack of Wrigley’s gum, offer the now in ‘meltdown’ passenger a strip saying “I know exactly how you feel, have a strip of gum. It won’t make things better but it will take your mind off it”

Strangely enough it always did. 

Can I suggest that the Government issue us all with our own pack of chewing gum, forget PPE, vaccines, social distancing, five step plans, essential shopping and get chewing.

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