In 2020, the first year of the pandemic, almost every country in the world had a major recession. As this map from the IMF shows, most countries in Europe saw GDP decline by more than 3%, the only exception being Ireland (which in any case has an unusual way of counting GDP).
Despite this, unemployment in the EU only increased by a modest 1.2 percentage points, rising from 6.6% to 7.8% by the third quarter of 2020. One reason why unemployment didn’t rise more during months of lockdown is that governments spent unprecedented sums of money on furlough and other wage-support schemes.
In other words, they paid people to sit at home all day. For example, The U.K.’s Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme paid furloughed workers 80% of their previous salary, up to a cap of £2,500 a week.
While such wage-support schemes had the benefit of preventing large rises in unemployment, they had the cost of being extremely expensive. Data published by the ONS in January of this year show just how expensive.
The chart below shows change in general government gross debt (as a percentage of GDP) in percentage points from the fourth quarter of 2019 to the third quarter of 2021:
Many countries saw absolutely huge increases in debt. Over just seven quarters, Spain’s debt grew by 26 percentage points, Italy’s by 21 percentage points, and Greece’s by 20 percentage points. The UK wasn’t far behind, logging an increase of 18.7 percentage points.
At the other end of the spectrum, Ireland’s debt grew by less than one percentage point, while Sweden’s grew by only 1.2 percentage points. Of course, Sweden’s strong performance comes as no surprise, given it was the only major European country that didn’t lock down in the spring.
As I noted previously, The Economist ranked Sweden third in a league table of 23 rich countries for overall economic performance during the pandemic. And we know this didn’t come at the cost of Swedish lives – the country actually saw negative excess mortality between January of 2020 and June of 2021.
To compare European countries in a comprehensive way, I plotted change in general government gross debt against age-adjusted excess mortality. (Data were not available for Germany, Ireland, Norway and Switzerland.)
Taking into account both metrics, Sweden was one of the best overall performers in Europe, along with Luxembourg, Denmark and Finland. And it was by far the best performer among countries with a population over 10 million.
By contrast, Eastern European countries and large Western European countries – almost all of which had strict lockdowns – did poorly on both metrics. So lockdown was harmful to the public finances, with little corresponding benefit in terms of reduced mortality.
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No religion should be above criticism. It seems the pathetically wet cowards who run our Civil Service, Quangos, local authorities and public services would rather appease intolerant authoritarians who threaten violence and division than run the risk of having their snouts pulled from the trough of public expenditure.
That is not the explanation. It is not cowardice or oversight or mistakes thgat lead to this sort of thing but intent.
Which is why I mentioned snouts in troughs.
And I certainly don’t believe it’s an oversight or mistake. You only have to look at ideological oppression in the present and past to see that there are those who benefit economically from maintaining such ideologies and there are those who are scared of being ostracised.
Yes but Islam is not just a religion. It is a Political System as well. You must be free to criticise all Politics.
Nothing should be above criticism. Religious, political or otherwise.
And a legal system, as it defines Sharia
As one loudmouth school teacher union rep and Pakistani-British anti racist campaigner shouted at me “Islam is not a religion it is a way of life’.
“Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Faith, Communities and Resettlement”
1) Interesting title. It probably means PUSS for All faiths except Christianity, discriminating against Christians, Communities = non-white people, Resettlement = lots of immigration.
2) What the hell do we need this person for? Why is the government/state concerned with “Faith, Communities and Resettlement”? Why do we have to have state involvement in every aspect of our lives?
What the hell do we need this person for? Why is the government/state concerned with “Faith, Communities and Resettlement”? Why do we have to have state involvement in every aspect of our lives?
They enable the anti-whitists to carry out The Great Replacement.
Strange logic: coin a term – “islamophobia” – and only then seek to define it in order to legislate against it. It’s rather like deciding that plingeocide is a great evil and then struggling how on earth to eradicate what doesn’t actually mean anything.
Strange yet not strange. Keeping it vague allows you to use it as you see fit to attack your enemies
Some words come to mind—Surrender, Capitulation, Admit Defeat, Yield, Acquiesce. ———But why is there no Buddhaphobia, Hinduphobia, Shikphobia? How strange. Ony Islamophobia.
There is also antisemitism
But Jews don’t mind you criticising their religion, Muslims absolutely do. Jews don’t issue fatwas, preach about killing, conquering or enslaving all the non-believers, kill or imprison gays, kill apostates, kill you if you draw Jesus, there’s no Jewish version of waging jihad, and on and on it goes. We all know the drill by now. It’s only Islam that gets special treatment and allows no criticism of its ideology.
The “antisemitism” issue is complicated. It exists but it is also used to shut down debate.
I’d rather not have any of these special words
You can be a Jewish atheist. You can’t be a Muslim atheist.
And a large percentage of those sent to the gas chambers for being Jews weren’t practicing Jews. The fact they had Jewish heritage doomed them to their fate.
Sort of, yes. It’s complicated. My point was really about what conclusions we could draw from the existence of special words that are often used to shut down debate and what that tells you about the world we live in
If you are an atheist you re no longer Muslim or Catholic or Jewish.—-But actually “atheist” is a non word. You don’t need a word for someone who doesn’t support Arsenal, so why do we need a word for someone who isn’t religious?
Yes I’m not religious and don’t refer to myself as ”atheist” because I’m not a lover of labels, in fact, the obsession with sticking labels on people just so we can be categorized and neatly placed into boxes by people with ill intent and an obsession with control really, really irritates me.
Here we go again. Just as Islamaphobia is a made up word (not recognised by my spell checker, interestingly), antisemitism has also taken on a whole and incorrect, new meaning. The word correctly means opposition or hatred to all peoples of the area of the middle east including Jewish people, Arab people and all others who originated from that region. I am a full supporter of the State of Israel, but still don’t understand how a religion that includes peoples from the middle east, east Africa, central Europe and other places, who have such blatant differences in physical appearance can be defined as one race, just as Muslims cannot. Surely we do away with all references to hatred of people defined by religion and other fairy tales and focus on crushing hatred of all people, whatever their religion, race, sex, etc.
More concerned about Kafirphobia myself, the fear and loathing of unbelievers at the heart of Islam. See the comments made about them by Allah in his best seller “Quran” and the violently supremacist actions directed toward them by Mohammed (as detailed by his biographer ibn Ishaq).
I would not say muslims fear non-believers. At best they hold us in contempt but vary many believe the teachings and want us to convert or die.
Are we now redefining words (rhetorical question) to mean what we wish them to mean?
A Phobia is a fear of something, not a hatred of something, semantics matter, meaning matters.
They are obviously made up words anyway – homophobia (fear of sameness), transphobia (fear of opposites (?) – maybe Americans, as in transatlantic!), Islamophobia (fear of Islam)
A phobia can be both an irrational fear and an irrational hatred. The Greek root simply means fear (not necessarily irrational), but in Engish the word has had two senses since the 18th century. (Yes, I looked that one up!) Not surprising: the two emotions are deeply intertwined in the human psyche. But the latter sense is clearly meant here: the government is not proposing to make it an offence to be afraid of Islam.
I don’t think anyone has a problem understanding that homophia stands for “homosexualityphobia”, which is far too long to be practical (for English – maybe in German).
The obvious question is “why bother” and the clear answer is that the political elites want to pander to a certain religious secion of the community, in many cases for anticipated electoral benefit but in all cases because they really do not like the rest of us.
Exactly, why does Islam need a separate definition and law? Indeed is it not an act of inequality to have a separate law for Islam? Surely we should have just one law on religious freedom and recognition that applies equally to Christians, Jew, Pagans, Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, Buddhists etc. why does one group need a specific law?
Because Muslim MPs are firstly Muslims and only also MPs. It also foreshadows the future of Britain as another Muslim majority country because Muslims still do families with children instead of women working in office jobs and aimlessly screwing around to kill the time when they’re not, thankfully ‘protected’ from functioning biologically like other female animals do by The Pill.
Abstractly, I regret that. However, these sofa-sedentary sex lives and their male 30s-operators are – besides being a hell of a nuisance – a blind alley of evolution and will rightfully die out because of this.
There are certainly no laws against anti-German hatred or even just anti-foreigner hatred and there shouldn’t be any. Insofar this hatred manifests itself in form actual crimes, these are already – in theory, mind you, British police won’t prosecute British people for crimes against mere foreigners who are simply not particularly credible to begin with due to them being foreigners – supposed to be punished. So, why is a law against anti-Muslim hatred needed?
I think what makes the political left and Islam such bedfellows is simply their mutual desire for absolute power.
Even though on paper they have nothing in common (as communism is atheistic), they both have an insatiable need to control every aspect of people’s lives and establish a totalitarian system. Ultimately when it comes to methods of exercising power, the Great Caliphate wouldn’t look that different from North Korea.
But for me there seems to be an inherent feeling of insecurity both in Islam and leftism: they know that no reasonable human being would choose to live in their utopia and so they need to be permanently on the attack.
I guess my thoughts above would probably constitute to islamophobia if this new legislation was introduced, so there you go.
If an individual Muslim holds a particular view, based on Islamic principles, or otherwise, does that mean they will be seen as protected and criticism not permitted by law under any anti-Muslim definition? Just trying to understand any distinction with any Islamophobia definition. Why is the Equality Act not seen as sufficient?
Awarding state protection to any religion and its followers is an attack on those of us who regard ‘faith’ as an opiate and a licence for thought control. No freedoms to criticise these things mean yet another constraint on democracy. Yet more micromanagement by our serpentine socialists and bureuacrats.