Save us from this circuit-breaker folly

WITH such a gigantic chip on his shoulder, it’s a wonder that Andy Burnham manages to walk in a straight line. Add to that his frequent, unpredictable changes of direction, and it’s a miracle he can stay on his feet at all.

Like some risible Monty Python parody, Greater Manchester’s mayor has become obsessed with Northern grievance. In the process, reason and logic seem to have deserted him.

Last week, for example, he supported the Government’s three-tier control system. But when his city was about to be pushed into the top tier, it suddenly became divisive and ‘unfair’.

Wicked Southerners were treating the North as an experiment, like a sacrificial lamb, a canary in the Covid coal mine, he said. They wanted to push the region back to the dark days of the 1980s.

Even though Manchester has some of the highest infection rates in the country, he saw proposals for tougher local restrictions as a Westminster conspiracy and declared he wouldn’t ‘cave in’ to it (unless there was extra money on offer, of course, in which case he’d be prepared to reconsider).

More confusingly, while railing against a local lockdown, he declared himself quite happy with a national one – which would affect his constituents in just the same way.

And he has the gall to accuse Boris Johnson of sending out mixed messages!

Mr Burnham is by no means the only Northern official to criticise government measures, merely the most petulant. Other local Labour politicians and even some ‘Red Wall’ Tory MPs are threatening rebellion over tougher strictures.

What they don’t have, however, is any alternative plan – beyond constantly demanding more public cash.

They do nothing themselves to help tackle coronavirus. Worse still, they are tacitly encouraging people to flout all Covid rules. Isn’t that sheer irresponsibility?

But for all the cant and posturing of Mr Burnham and his friends, the Mail agrees that intensifying lockdown is a flawed strategy. We believe the damage done to the economic, mental and general health of this nation by perpetual lockdown will end up being far more pernicious than even the worst effects of Covid.

However, misguided though we may think he is, we do not doubt Mr Johnson’s good intentions. The idea that he is somehow punishing the North in order to ease pressure on the South is simply preposterous.

He owes his landslide majority to millions of new supporters in the North and Midlands. What possible motive could he have to alienate them?

The truth is that Labour is playing base party politics in the midst of this national crisis. It hopes to discredit the Government but has no strategy of its own.

While Mr Burnham calls for lighter restrictions, London mayor Sadiq Khan demands harsher ones, putting all of London up to Tier Two status despite infection rates in many boroughs remaining low.

Meanwhile opportunistic party leader Sir Keir Starmer now favours that most pointless and damaging of all options, a two-week ‘circuit-breaker’.

The only thing such a token shutdown would break is the British economy and we urge the Prime Minister to resist pressure for once from over-zealous scientists and agitators on the Left.

What this paper fears most is national penury and mass unemployment – families falling into a spiral of debt, homes repossessed, unaffordable welfare bills, psychological and social breakdown.

These are the inevitable consequences of an endless cycle of lockdowns.

There is no proof that any lives would be saved by returning the nation to house arrest. But millions would certainly be ruined beyond repair.