Is the UK sleep-walking into an unemployment crisis?

This Larry Elliott article about prospects for jobs in the UK, suggests that, while in the short-term things will be bad, they are likely to be even worse in the longer term.

He suggest that the Job Retention Scheme has played a role in protecting jobs up to now but that the unwinding of it poses significant risks, and if the right policy choices aren't made, then we might be faced with unemployment as high as 15% of the labour force, which would see 4 million people unemployed.

Is this too bleak a picture? I suspect it might be: but what is certain is that the coronavirus pandemic will continue to cast a fairly lengthy shadow over the UK economy in the months to come, and so some, notably young workers, it might do so for even longer than that.

In this article, William Keegan delights that we're all Keynesians now! It seems the Chancellor has no alternative but to turn on the taps!