Tuesday 24 November 2020 5:00 pm  |  Updated:  Tuesday 24 November 2020 5:05 pm

Editorial: London, like Josef K, awaits its sentence

By: City PM Editorial

On Thursday, we will find out whether the death warrant for thousands of London’s businesses, mainly in hospitality, will be signed.

But, like Josef K in Kafka’s Trial, those businesses are left clueless of what their future depends upon.

London will enter Tier 1, Tier 2 or Tier 3 of the new restrictions next week.

As of yet, the Government – which has so delighted in ducking difficult political decisions throughout this year by claiming to be following the science – has given no indication of how those Tiers will be assigned.

Does it matter if cases are high, but falling? Does it matter if they’re low, but rising? Does it matter if they hit a certain threshold? We know not.

And for our hospitality businesses in particular, to lose out on Christmas – as they would totally in tier 3, and plenty in tier 2 – would be the end of many of them.

Pub owners will tell you that December’s takings pay for January (the insufferable march of the temperance puritans has consequences) and the grim winter nights of February. Only in March do they start seeing a bit of cash roll in.

It’s a similar story for restaurants. Even under Tier 2, it’s difficult to see many of them surviving once the deferred bills come due in 2021.

And, to this untrained eye, the numbers simply don’t support a Tier 3 lockdown of the capital as a whole. Central London – highly populated areas like Lambeth and Southwark and Islington – are registering daily positive cases that barely register on the dial.

Accounting for population across the board, there is simply no justification either.

It is deeply disheartening to hear whispers, then, that London could be headed to Tier 3. On what grounds? For whose benefit?

To his immense credit, the Mayor Sadiq Khan is amongst those rightly calling for London to be in Tier 2 – with cases lower than other parts of the country expected to retain this vestige of their freedom.

There is a balance to be struck between health, the economy and liberty, and like us at City A.M when we look at the data, we don’t see the rationale for crippling the second and curtailing the third.

Josef K never knew what he was found guilty of, nor did he understand the motives of those attempting to put him away.

The Government should be very careful in what it does to the capital in the days to come.

If London is plunged into the economically ruinous top tier, it will be hard to shake the suspicion it is driven by politics – not the data, nor the science.

And if some form of explanation is not forthcoming? Forgiveness will be a long time in coming, as the Tories’ candidate in next year’s Mayoral elections Shaun Bailey may well find.