The jobs dam is bursting as the government threatens no-deal Brexit

Television news bulletins mostly pass you by when you’re a kid. But there was one thing that I remember vividly from the ones I sat through during the 1980s: the regular updates on redundancies they used to run.

These were displayed via colourful graphics that included easily digestible numbers, which gave the feature the feel of a sporting event, or maybe a game show, just one that was a lot more serious than Blankety Blank with Terry Wogan.

First up was always the jobs lost. They were, I recall, displayed via yellow flashes on a map of Britain with the numbers in red. Then came the jobs created. They were given a more friendly colour. Was it cyan?

My brother and I always hoped that the team cyan would win. But it never did. There always seemed to be more yellow flashes and the red numbers in them always seemed to be bigger.

Looking back, I can see why. Unemployment was surging towards 3 million and the wildly successful Saatchi & Saatchi slogan that helped propel the Tories into power (“Labour isn’t Working”) seemed like a sick joke.

We may be in for a rerun. Would someone like to alert the graphics department?

The government is preparing to wind down its job retention scheme and I fear that a lot of those put on furlough won’t long have jobs after they officially return to work.

British Gas owner Centrica has just unveiled a bright yellow flash of its own with the number “5,000” in red.

Many of those who will find themselves pitched into an ice-cold jobs market are managers, although that’s not true of all of them.

Some 3,800 furloughed engineers, who weren’t able to enter customers’ homes for understandable reasons, will mostly be OK. But the decision will still come as a bitter blow to their colleagues who’ve been keeping the show on the road in the meantime.

Centrica has been bleeding customers, but that isn’t on those facing the chop. It’s the responsibility of those at the top. Quite how the plans are going to help British Gas solve its problems is an open question.

The announcement may ultimately serve as one of those small but significant breaches that herald the bursting of a dam.

Britain boasts Europe’s worst Covid-19 death toll and the OECD now thinks it’s going to endure the worst economic hit from the pandemic as well. Its service based economy is struggling to cope with the fact that people don’t have much call for services when they’re stuck at home.

Early on there were hopes that the emergence from lockdown would lead to a relatively rapid bounce back. Recently economists have been expressing doubts about that. The going report ahead of the UK PLC Coronavirus Recovery Stakes may be a lot heavier than people feared.

Worst still is the fact that the government wants to turn it into a certified bog that only a carthorse could handle with what it calls an “Australian”-style Brexit that everyone else refers to as “no deal” because that’s what it is.

Poor Carolyn Fairbairn. The CBI’s director general, who has been cast in the role of the nation’s unheard voice of reason for years now, has warned that British business simply can’t cope with that on top of the battering they’ve suffered as a result of Covid-19.

She’s quite correct, but a government made up of mediocre middle managers, spineless sycophants and cheap chancers finds it more convenient to twist her words than it does to listen to them (I see you Michael Gove) .

Britain hasn’t had to cope with mass unemployment for years now. Coronavirus is gong to change that, and it could get sticky. The government’s ideological obsession with no deal will be like squirting superglue over the cogs and wheels of an economy in need of lubricant.

There is still just about time to prevent this, to stop red numbers and yellow flashes from winning if the BBC had the cajones to repeat the exercise. Just not much.

If the government does, in its wisdom, opt to crash the nation into the wall of no deal, I suppose the one consolation is that it should finally torch the Tory party’s undeserved reputation for economic competence that chancellor Rishi Sunak had been doing his best to shore up.