If Boris wants a New Deal he needs to end the lockdown

The invocation of Franklin D. Roosevelt by Boris Johnson is welcome, but the conditions that greeted Roosevelt when he was inaugurated US president in 1933 and those in the UK today are very distinguishable. Roosevelt inherited a collapsed financial system; the stock and commodity exchanges and almost all of the banks in the country had been closed for up to two weeks. Almost a third of the country was unemployed (the states compiled the figures and they were not entirely reliable), and there was no direct relief for the jobless.

For the first time since the Civil War there were machine-guns at the corners of the great federal buildings in Washington on Inauguration Day. The incoming president had a practically unlimited mandate to take drastic measures to deal with the crisis. He famously began his address with the assertion that ‘The only thing we have to fear is fear itself’, and concluded that ‘the people have made me the present instrument’ of their requirement for decisive executive action and ‘in the spirit of the gift, I take it’.