Economical truths

THE further we plummet into recession, the more meaningless the gloomy statistics become. The numbers are too big to grasp.

Take just one day. As I write, the US corporate giant General Motors is poised to slash 47,000 jobs worldwide, including staff in the UK. The aircraft and car parts firm GKN is going to cut 564 people from its workforce. Thames Water wants to shed 300 people from its strength. ITV is looking at a ‘savage’ rationalisation of its network production in the north of England, and could put up to 500 people out of work. I could go on.

Statistics like this have become so commonplace over recent months that, unless we’re directly affected by job cuts, we’ve become almost inured to the scale of the tragedy that is unfolding. As Ronald Reagan rightly pointed out: “Recession is when a neighbour loses a job. Depression is when you lose yours”.

Certainly, one of the fundamental ways of understanding any crisis is to seek out the stories of the individuals who have been most affected. And that’s why I’ve been irritated beyond measure by many media reports on how the recession has touched our lives.

Take some gems culled from recent newspaper headlines. Evening Standard: “Fee-paying schools will close, warns Eton head”. Daily Mail: “Nannies first to go as City job losses and pay cuts hit home”. Guardian: “Needs Must” (an article on the dreadful necessity of drinking ‘cosily inexpensive’ wine, such as the bargain £6.98 Pilgrimage Mazuelo 2007).

And then there’s my favourite, from Alice Thomson in The Times: “Why the recession is a blessing in disguise”. Ostensibly a piece about why we’ll all drink less, smoke less, drive less (and presumably enjoy life less), it contains the memorable line: I got a message from a friend this week. “We’ve decided to downscale and go to Venice for a bit. We’re in a flat on the Grand Canal, the children are learning Italian, the weather is wonderful and it feels like we can finally relax after ten years of madness.”

“Ten years of madness” is certainly right; but now their credit-funded lifestyles are gone, many people’s capacity for delusion remains intact. For them, recession is characterised by personal inconvenience and – just like in the good times – rarely about the consequences their actions have on others.

Let’s go back to those stories and put them into a Hackney perspective. Aside from the fact that weaker private schools have always gone bust during economic downturns (charitable subsidy or not), the increased demand for places in Hackney’s schools is already causing problems — there are already 800 extra applications compared to last year, meaning that many more of the borough’s poorest will not have the potentially life-changing opportunity of attending one of the better schools.

Similarly, sacking nannies is likely to have the knock-on effect of creating more competition for nursery and childminder places, not to mention putting many — often Eastern European — people out of work. And most irritatingly of all, many of the parents who wrestled with their consciences (no matter how fleetingly) before educating their kids privately will now claim their sponsorship of the state system is a virtue.

The stories about food and shopping also underline that, for the writers at least, reality is still a long way off. Yes, moderately well-off people are abandoning expensive lifestyle grocers like Fresh & Wild (the Bristol branch closed down as far back as September), and sales of organic produce did fall by a fifth last year — the first drop in a decade.

But to read the grumbles of people who have to buy a cheaper bottle of wine, cut back on luxuries and — biggest shock of all — feel compelled to switch the weekly grocery shop from Waitrose to Tesco, is to ignore that fact that the recession is making it much more difficult for the low-paid and the jobless to put any sort of food on the table.

If there’s one ray of hope, though, it’s the thought that recession will break down additional barriers between the different communities in Hackney and elsewhere. As fewer of us opt out of the amenities offered by our local communities, the more we’ll learn about each other.

And maybe — just maybe — we’ll be able to open our newspapers and connect the gloomy statistics with the personal stories of those whose lives really have been blighted by the downturn.

I wouldn’t bank on it, though.