Boris Johnson’s lockdown exit plan is slower, but not pain-free

Boris Johnson’s lockdown exit plan is slower, but not pain-free

No big bang reopening. No promises that might be broken. No immediate prospect of life returning to normal for those businesses most severely affected by restrictions deemed necessary to tackle the Covid-19 pandemic.

That, put simply, is what the government's roadmap for leaving lockdown means for the economy. Having been burned badly last year, Boris Johnson has decided to take things much more slowly this time.

Not only that, in the early stages of the plan the need to get children back into school and to allow families a limited amount of freedom to socialise have taken precedence. Only later will non-essential retail stores and the hospitality industry be allowed to reopen. It remains an open question whether foreign holidays will be permitted this year.

The government's thinking is obvious: better to take it slow and steady rather than risk the economic and political catastrophe of a fourth lockdown. The number of new reported cases of Covid-19 is falling but at a slower pace than it was. In some other European countries - the Netherlands and Austria, for example - they have started to nudge up again. Johnson has learned the hard way the moral of the story of the tortoise and the