Self-employed workers richly deserve a coronavirus bail-out

It will be impossible to calculate. There will be widespread fraud. And there is no mechanism for sending out the money. As the Chancellor Rishi Sunak scratches around for ways to bail out the UK’s five million self-employed in the same way he has done for employees he faces plenty of obstacles. No doubt his Treasury officials have come up with a list of reasons why any scheme he comes up with won’t work in practise, will prove too expensive, will break the IT system, or can’t be implemented until 2029 at the earliest.

But hold on. That’s crazy. In fact, the self-employed deserve their bail-out more than anyone. Sure, it is difficult. The self-employed don’t have regular salaries in the way employees do. And lots of them already earn plenty and may see hardly any impact on their income from the crisis; typically they already worked from home, and many have been self-isolating for years because they prefer it (if they liked other people, they’d probably be in an office somewhere).