There’s no such thing as a free 50% off lunch – the money will come from our taxes
LAST month Chancellor Rishi Sunak announced his Eat Out to Help Out scheme.
And last week I helped myself to it by getting dinner at my local Chinese restaurant.
When the bill came, it was about half of what it would have been.
Thanks to Mr Sunak, two of us had eaten out for not much more than £20.
Cheers to him, I thought for a moment, as I raised a glass.
And then the small thrill started to wear off. “When was I going to pay for this?” I thought. After all, we are all going to have to at some point.
They say there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Well there’s certainly no such thing as a free, or half-price, dinner.
The Government only has money because it collects it from us in taxation.
When it bribes or encourages us, with schemes like Eat Out to Help Out, it’s easy to lose sight of that fact.
Of course, anything that can be done to boost our service economy is good.
Across this country our restaurants, shops and hotels are suffering as never before.
MASKED STRAGGLERS
True, coronavirus has helped some local retailers.
In recent months many of us have relied more than ever on shops that used to lose out to the supermarkets in the busy rush of pre-Covid life.
For local butchers and others this has been their busiest time for years. Like months of Christmas. And they deserve it.
But our city centres still resemble a zombie survival movie.
A couple of Saturdays ago I walked down London’s Oxford Street in the morning and the chill that went through me had nothing to do with the weather.
It was the chill of a street that would normally be packed with shoppers now with only a few masked stragglers.
The truth is that since the Government first told us to stay in our houses in March, it has scared much of the population into staying inside for the foreseeable future.
Today, when it is trying to prise us out of our homes, it doesn’t help that the messages are so mixed.
We’re advised to use public transport when it isn’t packed.
But at the same time, drivers are penalised like never before.
The Congestion Charge in London has rocketed again, punishing drivers more than ever. So what are we meant to do?
Such mixed messages stop the reopening of our city centres just when they need to start booming again.
So it’s true that our retail economy needs a lifeline.
The Chancellor’s scheme of giving us money off our meals if we eat out from Monday to Wednesday is one way of doing that.
The problem is that all of this is going to have to be paid for some day.
Unless our economy starts to take off again soon, the bill is going to be far higher and more painful than anyone currently wants to say.
Government borrowing has increased this year faster than at any time on record.
The furlough scheme and much more has seen debt as a percentage of GDP go over 100 per cent.
BE COURAGEOUS
That means absolutely everything we are living on now is borrowed. And like all debts, it will at some point have to be paid back.
I don’t know when I’ll pay down my lemon chicken from last week, or when the thousands of other people who’ve taken advantage of Eat Out to Help Out will pay off their meals. Perhaps we won’t.
Perhaps our children or grandchildren will end up paying off the vast tab we ran up in 2020? Because the Chancellor’s scheme is a drop in the ocean of government borrowing this year.
This country has borrowed at a rate that has never occurred in peacetime.
And as a country, we have got to work out how we get out of this mess.
Any way you look at it, we are going to have to prepare for tough economic times.
As the furlough scheme starts to wind down, the first rounds of redundancy are already starting to hit. If our country is going to move on, we can’t just straggle along — we’ve got to boom.
That requires the British people to be courageous.
It is true that there are lots of people with underlying health conditions who will need to remain cautious.
We will all have to play our part to help protect them.
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But those of us at no serious risk from this virus are going to have to get out there again.
To return to our city centres, our shops, pubs and restaurants. To make money, and to spend it.
In short, to get back to those times when if you ran up a bill, you paid it yourself.
Reopening schools
TEACHING unions this week claimed it would be “impossible” to reopen schools next month.
So in September, at the start of the academic year, teachers can go to the pub but not the classroom.
Where is the sense in this? The downsides of not opening are obvious.
Many teachers have worked hard in lockdown to provide something like a normal education for pupils.
But others have provided only a fraction of the teaching they would have.
Thousands of our children are at risk of effectively losing a year of education.
Just consider the effect that will have on every child.
It is natural that the teaching unions would want to look after their members.
It would be nice if they could also spare a thought for the nation’s children.
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