 The next thing we are going to talk about is the coronavirus elements of this budget. It was pitched as the government's response to coronavirus, both to, I suppose, bring about the conditions whereby people can stay in their homes and take time off work so that they don't pass on coronavirus to other people. But also to keep the economy rolling, we're going to talk about the extent to which coronavirus looks like it will cause a massive economic crash in this country and all over the world. First of all, here are the announcements that were in that budget relating to coronavirus. So you have £5 billion emergency response fund to support the NHS and other public services in England. All those advised to self-isolate will be entitled to statutory sick pay, often not enough, even if they have not presented with symptoms. So before they were saying, you have to be ill before you get sick pay now. If you've been told to self-isolate, you can get sick pay as well. Self-employed workers who are not eligible will be able to claim contributory employment support allowance and employment support allowance benefit will be available from day one, not after a week as now. It will seem to be odd to me why you have to wait a week anyway, whether or not there's coronavirus around. People have to feed themselves in that first week. £500 million hardship fund for councils in England to help the most vulnerable in their areas. Firms with fewer than 250 staff will be refunded for sick pay payments for two weeks. A good one because it means that your small business owner shouldn't be pressuring you to not call in sick. Small firms will be able to access business interruptions and loans of up to £1.2 million. If businesses have to shut down for a couple of weeks, they might not be able to pay their bills. Business rates in England will be abolished in retail, leisure and hospitality sectors with a rateable value below £51 grand, so that's a little bit of support to small businesses so they can survive whatever shutdown they have to do during the coronavirus spike. Some of these measures, obviously good, important. There's been a lot of conversation around sick pay and when it will start to kick in for people. These are good things. It doesn't change the fact that the amount of sick pay that we get in this country protected by law is shit when you compare it to the rest of Europe. And when you have such terrible sick pay provision, you are actively disincentivising people from staying at home when they're sick because plenty of people are looking at a straight choice between paying bills, food on the table for my kids or staying home and looking after the collective health of population for most people needing to feed their families will win out. And I think that when it comes to how we imagine public health measures in this country, I think 40 years of neoliberalism has done a lot to corrode the idea of a collective subject. So the idea that sick pay isn't an entitlement, it's a public health measure or indeed things like elderly social care, not an entitlement. It's a public health measure. We've got six million carers in this country who are caring for one of their relatives. A third of those carers are themselves over 65. Now, my grandma lives with my stepdad and my mom because she needs more care now that she's older, cooking meals, company, help with various tasks. Let's say my mom on the true back gets coronavirus, gets the fever, blah, blah, blah. And so she takes the advice to self isolate. She self isolates in a house which has got someone who's over 80 years old in it. Let's say she's able to effectively self isolate within that house. And so the holder of who uses the bathroom and blah, blah, blah. All of that goes fine. When you have an elderly relative in the house who needs care and needs to be cooked for and needs to be helped around to move. It's not as simple as that. And we created these conditions by not having a proper social care system in this country. And so it just, it seems to me that, yes, the Conservative Party have to some extent turned on the taps when it comes to borrowing. But it's all entirely reactive and short termist. The idea that you need to build these institutions, which are universal and that will make for a more resilient and healthy population is absolutely nowhere to be seen. So I suppose we should also know actually that this morning the Bank of England reduced the interest rate from 0.75 to 0.25. So that was 0.25 percent. And that was most coordinated with the government to try and give a big signal that the government is going to be there to keep the economy. It barely matters. There's sort of signaling effects in the base rate reduction. They've also offered, they've extended the term funding scheme and some support for businesses over the next few years, basically making it cheaper to borrow to get through periods where they can't necessarily meet the demands made in them in terms of cash because nobody's buying anything because they're all locked in the houses or supposed to be locked in the houses. This isn't going to be adequate, is the first thing to say in it. The provision that's been made for statutory sick pay, I think, is farcical because Britain has around about the lowest, the second lowest level of statutory sick pay relative to average wages out of any European country. So that's already bad. The fact it's been extended the first day, it should never, ever not have been the first day. And by the way, one of the things we have to say when this has presumably died down somewhat in three, four months time, is that these things ought to remain in place permanently. The provision for if you're self-employed, which is not statutory sick pay, it's getting forced onto some of the other forms of benefit that are out there, are not adequate. The provision overall is not enough to deal with the scale of the crisis we're running into. And it's important to get the fundamental of this one. The COVID-19 disease is caused by a virus which is exceptionally, really exceptionally transmissible between people. It is very, very infectious. Significantly above, it would seem the SARS epidemic of 2002, 2003. Significantly above, as far as you can tell, things like Spanish flu epidemic in 1918. Certainly above what normally we get as the sort of seasonal flu and this sort of thing. And that's bad when you also then have not so much that it kills lots of people, it doesn't. It kills people who are susceptible to it. They have some pre-existing condition. They're elderly, this sort of thing. The fatality rate in Hubei and China is 14% if you're over the age of 80. It is quite seriously bad if you're elderly. It's quite seriously bad if you have some pre-existing condition. And it's pretty bad for everyone else because there's a large number of people end up with some acute condition where you need treatment. That's the point of which, as you see happening in Italy, your health service gets overwhelmed with a load of people who need to have really quite intensive care. Now, Britain does not have a particularly adequate supply of intensive and acute care, I should say, beds. Oh, you look at that every winter. Exactly. And already, if you look in London, acute bed usage is around about 90% throughout the NHS. Now, you take Germany, it's about 23 acute care beds per 100,000 people. In this country, it's about six. European average is something around eight. So Germany is very well provided. We are very under provided. So that overwhelms the existing health system once you get large numbers of people with disease. That means one of the things you have to do and one of the things that should already have happened is the government should, in fact, have told people, this is what's going on. You need to self-isolate immediately. Here is the financial assistance to make sure that you can do this because it's no good saying to people, work from home or something. If you can't work from home because you're supposed to be in a shop or a factory or wherever it might be, it's fine if you have a relatively white collar job and go and sit at home and tootle around the internet. It doesn't seem too bad. We've seen this in China, by the way. The class division and this is striking. The way it reinforces inequality is striking. If you're reasonably well off, you can sit at home or to deliver ooze or wherever it might be and not. In China, when they told people to stay at home, for example, or physically stop them from getting to their jobs, did they provide benefits for those people when they're at home? I haven't read much about this. The Chinese benefit system is, frankly, underdeveloped at best and is a very, very large informal sector. So you end up with a large number of people who are really in quite a dire situation as a result of basically being told, you have to stay there and you can't go to work, right? And that has been very, very strictly enforced, which in a sort of epidemiological and healthcare sense is like one way to solve this. The reason it's so strict is because the virus is so infectious and so you have to be pretty extreme in how you monitor and control for it. Now, you can be less dramatic than that. Part of what's happened in China, you also see it happening in South Korea, is that you try and monitor where people are going. So the second stage of this thing is not just control, you stop people moving around, you try and trace where they've been and then you sort of monitor that. Now that can be a very sort of intrusive process of working out where people have got to. Did anyone see the announcement this morning that, of course, Dominic Cummings and Boris Johnson invited in the tech companies to go and have a nice gathering and work out what everyone's doing with this? And this is, by the way, one of the things that comes out of this, the other side, is that suddenly we have a far more intensive surveillance through our mobile phones, through everything else we do, than we're used to as a result of this. But that is part of potentially how you try and deal with some of the problem of people wandering around. You need to trace where they've talked to because it's infectious. So you have to trace where the virus has got to because you can't control it as effectively as you like on quarantine alone. We've been talking now about how measures in the budget might be inadequate. There also was one measure slipped in there that's gone largely unnoticed, which is not just inadequate but actively harmful to this country's ability to deal with coronavirus. It is related to the surcharge that migrants have to pay to use the NHS, even though they already pay taxes. So it shouldn't exist in the first place, but it has been increased. So for adults, the surcharge was £400 a year to use the NHS. It's gone up to £624 per year. For children, it was £300 and it's gone up to £470 because this is bigger than a 50% increase. It's massive. And EU migrants who didn't have to pay it before will now have to pay it. So that's a lot more people having to pay for their own health care. It will have to be for new EU migrants. As far as I can tell, it's not going to apply to people who already live in this country. Now, it's not the case that you've got to pay £620 when you go to the hospital because you got drunk on a trampoline and broke your leg. It's something that you have to pay as part of the visa application process. But where that does totally fuck our health care system and therefore our resilience when it comes to things like coronavirus or indeed anything else that's going on with public health is that it disincentivises migrants from coming to this country and working in the NHS. We have a huge staffing shortage of nurses and doctors in particular. You've got a huge staffing shortage in the social care sector as well. Now, faced with that staffing shortage and it's not the case that we have this horrendously uneducated population and all you have to do is train up more British doctors and nurses. I mean, one way in which you could do that is by making tuition free. It's because we have an ageing population. You have an infrastructure which needs to be staffed properly. And who is going to want to come to work in this health care system if you have to fork out £620 for the privilege? It's insane. I'm going to bring up an article now. So this was in Bloomberg today, this morning. The headline was keep calm and wash your hands. Britain's strategy to beat the virus. I hate this tweet. I'll read out the first paragraph. It says, While China quarantined 56 million people and the whole of Italy is on lockdown to counter the spread of coronavirus, the UK is taking a radically different approach. Instead of keeping people inside their homes, Boris Johnson's government is trying to get inside their heads, shunning headline measures like travel restrictions and quarantines to focus on a more banal task, finding ways to persuade people to wash their hands. This advice that the government is taking about how to deal with coronavirus is from the Nudge Unit, it's something that was created in 2010 by David Cameron, the idea. It was all part of his big society where you make the state a bit smaller and instead of having active government policies, you just have a small unit that tells people to do stuff on social media. So they're the unit who encouraged people to get... I get them quite a lot of those texts that say you still haven't done your tax return, you still haven't done your tax return. Maybe you could try and do it tomorrow. So instead of like staffing HMRC to enable them to investigate and audit and collect taxes from huge corporations, you've just got Michael Walker's phone pinging. To be fair, all of those texts do actually make me do my tax return on time, but maybe you should wash your hands. It's good enough for getting you to do your tax return, but is this an approach good enough for...? But doesn't make Philip Green pay more of his tax? Doesn't make Richard Branson pay more of his tax? Doesn't make Jeff Bezos pay more of his tax? Only Michael Walker. Sorry, babe, but you're broke in Macbrokeson. Well, it's also a big risk when it comes to a public health or a potential public health disaster, right, to hope that you can just nudge people into washing their hands enough. It seems to fatally underestimate the basic biological problem of this particular virus, this new novel coronavirus, which is that it is exceptionally infectious. That is what makes it worrying, and it's that awkward balance with a virus where it's very infectious, where it doesn't necessarily kill too many people, and it's kind of, you know, you can wander around with it for quite some period of time without any symptoms. So it spreads very rapidly. And the problem isn't that most people get it, and therefore they die. It's not Ebola. 60% of people who get Ebola die, right? It is absolutely lethal and horrible and immediate, but that's why it doesn't spread very far. This one, you get it, and you wander around a bit, and you meet your friend, and they go and visit their grand, their grandest, and they maybe die. That's the problem with this one. So the idea that you sort of nudge people a little bit to wash their hands slightly more, the idea that you just sort of make these minimal interventions, and by the way, make those interventions rather too late in the day. And this gets us through this. I think it's absolute nonsense. We're probably, what, two, three, four weeks away from having to do things like Italy is doing at this point in time. And that's kind of the rough sort of path we appear to be heading down. And that does mean, suddenly, you have to tell people to stay in their homes. You don't go out too much. I mean, one of the things which I think is incredibly alarming about the coronavirus outbreak in the UK is that I do sometimes feel that our media culture is uniquely stupid and irresponsible when it comes to covering it. So I cannot tell you the amount of times I've been, you know, texted by a producer who's asked me to come on the news specifically to talk about coronavirus. And I'm like, look, much to the disappointment of everyone, not least my mother, I am not a medical doctor. This is not my job. It's one thing for if it comes up in conversation on some kind of panel show for me to go, oh, okay, this is some of my observations, but hey, don't take my word for it. I'm not a fucking doctor. And another to have your opinion deliberately sought out to talk to the public on something which you are not qualified to talk about. It's so, so irresponsible. And then you add to that, but it does come up in some of those panel-y conversations. I have heard the most batshit things you would not believe. I was doing like a late night paper review on the Stephen Nolan show on BBC Five Live with Lance Foreman, who was a former Brexit party MEP. And quite sincerely, he was like, well, I'm not an expert in these things, but I've heard that Wuhan is a centre for biological weapons testing in China, so I wonder if that's got something to do with that. On radio part, wow. He said it completely unchallenged. You know, seeking out Nigel Farage's opinion, what's news night thinking? This is not the time for any rando with a big gob to just hold forth. Even on some of these morning breakfast-y show things, I've definitely heard people saying like, oh, well, you know, she's stuck up on LuRoll because the Chinese are putting all their resources and making face masks now. I have no idea where they've got that from. All I know is that in Sainsbury's and Superdrug and Tesco's and Little, you've got people alleging a wrestling for the last role of Andrex, and that doesn't seem to me to be a particularly responsible media culture. This is a failure of government communication from the off. Why are people panic buying LuRoll? I mean, there is a horrible logic to panic buying, which is that you have to panic buy because everyone else is panic buying. Otherwise, the thing you want to panic buy runs out. And of course, you doing that means everybody else has to do it. So this is all self-confirming logic. It's like a bank run. You have to go to the bank to get your money out because everybody else is doing it. You have to buy LuRoll because everybody else is buying LuRoll. But there's no real reason to do this. And your list of symptoms of what COVID-19 will give you. I mean, mostly it's like a fever and a dry... We were just talking about this in a dry cough. Somewhere down the line, it's like organ failure and diarrhea and stuff. But basically, your LuRoll isn't going to help you much at this point. So why on earth everyone thinks they have to run off and do this is not quite clear. This looks to me like, by the way, a failure of government communications. It should have been made very clear much earlier on that these are things it will do. These are things it won't do. And this is what you might need to do to deal with it.