Scaling back furlough is a dangerous move that will reduce effective demand, create insecurity and precariousness and presumably endanger lives by forcing workers who can’t work from home back to their workplaces. Sunak’s devotion liberal market economics will cost ‘viable’ jobs.

Labour are making exactly the same mistake that they made with austerity in 2010 by not opposing this in full. Sunak is effectively enacting Dodds’ demand for targeted relief when Labour should be demanding the maintenance of a comprehensive safeguard.

Sunak is following previous Tory chancellors by enforcing an outmoded liberal orthodoxy at a point of crisis: Churchill restored the gold standard at pre WWI parity; Thatcher’s first government implemented a disastrous monetarist experiment; Osborne’s implemented austerity.

There was little electoral cost for these measures. The Tories briefly lost office from 1929-31 but returned to government and swiftly rejected their old approach. Monetarism was effectively abandoned later after 20% of industrial employment was lost in 2 years. Austerity ...