Please note that the post below was published more than ten year ago on 21st November 2009 Nick Herbert MP, shadow cabinet member for the Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs, was in Cumbria this morning to see the areas affected by the flooding. He writes on Conservative Home about his visit. Here is an extract. I’ve been in Cumbria today to see the areas affected by the floods. I arrived early in Keswick where I met officials from the Environment Agency. Although the river levels had fallen considerably and homes were no longer flooded, the damage to homes had been done. And the water which had got into houses wasn’t just from the river – it was foul water which had risen from the drains. I talked to fire crews who were pumping flood water back into the river, and discovered that they were from Tyne & Wear and Lancashire. They had been called in at an hours’ notice and had been working on the scene ever since, staying at a local hotel. You cannot fail to be impressed by the
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The virus has damaged the economy in every country. The priority for now has to be to save lives, but the government has put an unprecedented package of measures in place - which in normal times would make Corbyn and McDonnell look positively Thatcherite but these are not normal times - to ensure people don't starve, go bankrupt or get evicted in the meantime.
Not because that's going to stop the economy tanking - nothing could stop COVID-19 tanking the economy - but so that there is some sort of economy to worry about when the Coronavirus crisis is over and we can go back to trying to sort it out.
I'm sorry but that is nonsense. Of course it had to be this way.
to repeat in slightly more precise language what I stated in my previous comment, I very much doubt if there will be a single country anywhere in the world which both has escaped and will continue to escape significant damage to their economy this year from the Coronavirus pandemic.
There is certainly a direct correlation between, on the one hand, the degree to which a government was and remained complacent and, on the other hand, the number of people COVID-19 kills in that country, but the damn thing will cause massive damage to the economy of every country regardless of what the government does.
If the government of a country is complacent, and somehow manages to stay complacent as the body count starts to go through the ceiling, that damage will be caused by the deaths which the coronavirus brings about and the reaction of the population to those deaths.
If the government of a country is NOT complacent the measures it takes to limit the spread of the disease will themselves cause massive dislocation to the economy.
The economy tanks either way. QED.
(For the benefit of those who were not fortunate enough to have the opportunity to study either Latin or how to prove things, "QED" stands for "Quod Erat Demonstrandum" which means "That which was to be proved" and it is written at the end of a proof.)
So far as damage to the economy is concerned, yes it did have to be this way.
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