It is the story of a large bourgeois house divided today into four apartments, as there are thousands of in London. A brick facade, bow windows, a small garden at the back for the accommodation on the ground floor… A slice of banal middle-class life in a southern suburb of the British capital, at Streatham Hill.
Inside, eight residents – three couples and two roommates. Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, with a first confinement imposed exactly one year ago, on March 23, 2020, their life tells of a fragile British labor market, but which has held up surprisingly well, despite the cataclysm that suggests economic statistics. Among them are a singer who can no longer work because of the confinement and a fitness instructor who is impatiently awaiting the reopening of the gyms, but also two employees hired in the midst of the pandemic, and who have never set foot in office, social distancing requires.
While the food bank, half a kilometer away, is crumbling under requests for help, proof of a real social breakdown at the bottom of the scale, the resilience of these middle classes, thanks to the safety net put in place. in place by the state, gives economists hope that the recovery will be vigorous.
Britain’s unemployment rate reached 5% of the working population in January, according to statistics released on Tuesday March 23. This is only 1.1 points higher than before the pandemic, very far from the 9% forecast by the Bank of England in May 2020. To make any French government green with envy.
The impact of the pandemic is real, with 700,000 jobs lost in one year, nearly two-thirds of which are those under 25. But given the UK’s 9.9% recession in 2020, the worst in three centuries, the shock is limited.
Partial unemployment and social assistance
As elsewhere in Europe, the amortization comes mainly from short-time working, from which 4.7 million Britons currently benefit, earning 80% of their salary to stay at home. These statistics remind us that this crisis is in no way comparable to the previous ones. The economy did not collapse so much as it was frozen, with partial unemployment and social assistance.
The whole question is to know what will happen at the time of the thaw, believes David Owen, an economist at the Jefferies bank. “Are these people going to find jobs quickly when the economy reopens?” Are travel agencies really going to resume as before? Are we going to crowd into theaters or cinemas as in the past? The truth is, we don’t know. “
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