So Rishi Sunak seems a bit bemused by the fact that, in his words, since the pandemic something has gone wrong. A whopping 850,000 more people are now ‘economically inactive’ in the UK as a whole than before Covid came a-calling.
Bloody hell, Prime Minister, it really is a mystery, isn’t it? You close the country down, send everyone back to their homes to cower in fear of the virus, and then you make sure that everyone gets paid anyway, whether they’re intending to do something once it’s all over or not. In fact, you employ a brand new way of running a country based on money tree economics.
Then you wonder why some of those people might have come to the conclusion that there’s not a lot of point in getting up out of their beds in the morning to do something called work. It’s not all that well paid, as it turns out, and the government pays just as well. And, what’s more, they can stay around the house, catch up on repeats on Dave and avoid anyone with a bit of a cough.
Some of these people, of course, are economically inactive for very good reasons. But some of them, as Rishi knows and we all know, aren’t. As the old saying goes, they’re swinging the lead.
So he’s trying to do something about it, and it’s not going down too well amongst the assorted bleeding hearts of Westminster politics. Still, as a policy, it might just wrestle a few votes back from Starmer and his crew.
Mind you, judging by the opinion polls, he’ll need to do something a bit more dramatic than that. The Rwanda nonsense and the question of where the flame-haired Labour heroine Angela Rayner actually lives won’t cut much mustard either.
Meanwhile, the Northern Ireland phase of the UK Public Inquiry into the handling of the Covid 19 pandemic is set to begin in Belfast next week. That’ll give Robin Swann something else to do. But sure he was a hero….wasn’t he?