As Commonwealth heads of government wrap up their Samoan pow-wow, Rachel Reeves’ economic woes may be about to get about a thousand times worse. Our foreign friends are angling for reparations for slavery, and the figures they’re floating will make her “£22 billion black hole” look like a pinprick on a banana.
Happily, I have a cunning plan. How about we ask the Chinese for compensation for Covid?
These days, pretty much nobody still pretends the pandemic started in a wet market. Even if it did, it would still be their fault for eating pangolins. In reality, we all know they crashed the entire global economy by playing “let’s make perfume with pathogens” in a lab. Now, it is only fair that they pay the price.
Quite how much we should hit them for is a conundrum, and may depend on whether we try our luck alone or embark on some kind of class action. We could, for example, join forces with the United States, especially if Trump is re-elected. He always liked labelling Covid the “Chinese virus” and would relish squaring up to Xi Jinping.
According to various estimates, the pandemic cost America around $16 trillion: 90 per cent of the country’s entire GDP. Conveniently, that’s just a few trillion shy of what China makes (around US$19 trillion) – meaning that if they are ready to do the right thing, they could afford to repay the lot.
As for how much Beijing owes Britain for the blundering of Wuhan’s men and women in white coats, the very least we could accept would be £400 billion, this being the amount spent on Covid-specific measures like furlough.
Of course, the real cost to the nation was a multiple of this. The question is how to come up with a figure to kick-start negotiations. How to put a price tag on lives and livelihoods lost; the derailing of education for a generation of children; tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of missed cancers; an epidemic of lockdown-related loneliness and addiction? The truth, of course, is you cannot. It is as incalculable as the cost of slavery to the affected nations and peoples, especially when all that ended centuries ago.
But since Commonwealth leaders are trying their luck, we might as well have a go too. On top of the £400 billion sunk into initiatives like bounce-back loans; “saving the NHS” and all those jabs and booster jabs, our compensation claim must incorporate the seismic political consequences of the pandemic.
After all, without Covid, there would have been no lockdown-busting Downing St parties to bring an abrupt end to Boris Johnson’s premiership, which means Liz Truss might still be foreign secretary. That means Kwasi Kwarteng would never have been chancellor, and there would have been no infamous “mini-Budget”. The bond markets would never have taken fright; Truss would not have had to resign; and there would not have been a prime minister called Rishi Sunak.
Johnson himself – who could explore submitting an individual claim – would not have nearly died from the virus, and might very well still be in Downing Street today, preparing for a general election that might just deliver yet another thumping Tory majority.
Working from home, with all its dismal implications for productivity, would never have taken off and nobody would still be going around wearing those stupid pale blue face masks. Landfill sites would not be clogged with mountains of PPE, and pharmaceutical companies could have directed their resources at developing treatments and cures for other stuff. The NHS would not be in such a mess, and we wouldn’t all be bracing for the budget of doom.
How on earth to put a figure on all that?
I have no idea, but if Sir Keir Starmer is going to countenance these claims from Caribbean countries, he better get his calculator out.