Why young people could be key to the UK’s economic recovery – if only they could find jobs

The British Retail Consortium’s polling data says younger demographics feel noticeably more confident about going out and spending money in the wake of Covid-19, writes James Moore

The queues are coming: unemployment is expected to surge past 3 million (PA)

The UK government has good reason to fear a second wave of the coronavirus. The economy is in dire straits and it will not be fixed by the prime minister’s theatrics or his falsely comparing himself to America’s Democratic wartime president Franklin D Roosevelt.

Boris Johnson says it’s safe to go to the shops (apart from in Leicester). The public is, as a rule, taking it a lot more carefully than the hordes who ignored social distancing while making a mess of Bournemouth’s beaches during the recent heatwave.

The early returns from the reopening of non-essential outlets, however, suggest that younger people are notably more comfortable with emerging from what Johnson has referred to as the national hibernation than are their older peers.