Kelly’s Eye
DURING my fortnight away, we spent some time in Newcastle. It’s a cracking city and an ideal base from which to tour the beautiful north- east. What made it a particular pleasure this time was seeing so many of its young people out enjoying themselves in the city’s bars and restaurants.
Similar scenes seem to be replicated across the country.
Not content with jeopardising their entire futures, the Government leads the chorus that brands those young people “irresponsible”, led by our preposterous health commissar Matt Hancock, who warns them not to “kill your gran”.
That must come as a bleak irony to anyone who has lost elderly relatives to coronavirus, as the overwhelming majority of them died in the defenceless care homes where they were decanted with the endorsement of Hancock and his Cabinet colleagues, on the novel grounds of persuading us that the NHS is so wonderful we shouldn’t use it.
Like a hopefully growing number of others, the young have made their own risk assessment and concluded that we need to live with this virus, not hide from it.
Our politicians should be following their lead. Instead we are ruled by diktat and decree based on the opinions of one small group of scientists – not “the science” as ministers insist to demand our quiescence. Our supine, irrelevant Parliament doesn’t even question or scrutinise the greatest curtailment of our liberties since wartime. What was the point of leaving the EU if only to replace it with another set of unelected rule makers, just this time in white coats?
Meanwhile, even his most devoted media cheerleaders openly speculate about how imminently our detached and defeated- looking Prime Minister will step down. The classical scholar has become his own Greek tragedy – mocked by the gods of unforeseen events at the moment of his greatest triumph, and deserted by his previously acute instincts, not least when they told him to pursue collective immunity at the outbreak’s start.
We should be prioritising the care and protection of the most vulnerable, as we conspicuously did not do at that time.
Then, like our much maligned younger population, we need to get out and get on.