Picking winners

I thought she would use the time to look around the job market or decide on a new career. Instead the furlough scheme allowed her to focus on other issues and wait for when her company decided to reinstate her or make her redundant.

It seemed to me that being employed in an events company now represented a fragile career. I said that armed with her experience and the trend for virtual conferences, she should look to build a life in the virtual world.

As 2020 progressed from coronavirus into a second wave, job-support was seen to be more and more important.

The UK Chancellor, who sets the government tax and spend plans had clearly said, that not every job would be saved. But that was a close as he got to indicating that employees should become more mobile. The furlough scheme in the UK was the most generous in Europe.

In the USA, job culture has largely involved the need for a bit of personal imagination. There is no stigma in being fired – it is often seen as a right of passage, particularly amongst those in high-tech domains. So when the Federal government was faced with a Covid-19 lock-down in many industries, there was no furlough scheme for employees. Employees were provided with one-off individual payments and increased out-of-work benefits. This meant that in a country dogmatically resistant to a welfare state, albeit temporarily, 70% of unemployed Americans earned more in benefit than when they were still in work.

This appears to have had the effect of increasing the indicators of entrepreneurial activity. Employees did not assume that they were most likely to return to work-as-before and started to prepare to earn an income from independent efforts.

In Europe the attitude and support structures lean towards security, whilst in America, the system is less supportive. Does this increase individual initiative and economic vitality?

It has traditionally been the case that new technology breaks cover in the USA, regardless of where the original ideas and research activity were based. This engendered a venture capital industry ready to share risks and invest in speculative projects. Europe has never seemed to be able to emulate this.

For Britain the consequences of getting this wrong are magnified. Whilst other economies re-establish their trading relationships, supply chains and markets, the UK will be faced with post-Brexit tariffs in its traditional markets and little chance of building new ones. Pre-Covid19 trends are no comfort either. The UK financial infrastructure is still dominated by declining industries whilst those in the US contain the rising stars of high-tech.

Napoleon is supposed to have called the British “a nation of shopkeepers”. This was no great insult in a world where the British exploited the rest of the world. But now, an economy of self-sustained activity won’t work; we need the strength of association which the EU gave us just a little more than they need us. That little will make all the difference to us as we struggle to replace our lost markets, overcome the pandemic and face a world of big power rivalry and climate change.