We mustn’t sacrifice Generation Covid
THE Mail agrees unequivocally with Gordon Brown that the Government’s muddled, over-zealous approach to tackling coronavirus risks creating a ‘desolate’ generation of workless young people.
As unemployment soars, the former prime minister prophesies a return to the misery of the early 1980s, when those on the bottom rung of the jobs ladder were left without hope, often languishing on futile youth training schemes.
His concerns are underlined by research suggesting one million 16 to 24-year-olds are facing an imminent jobs crisis.
Where we differ from Mr Brown, however, is in how to avert this looming disaster.
Being a Labour politician, he naturally believes the answer is to throw endless public cash at the problem. But with national income in freefall, where is that money going to come from?
We are already set to borrow some £300billion to pay for furlough and other support schemes. How much more debt does he want to hang round the necks of the younger generation he purports to care about?
The only sure way to save them, and stave off the horrors of mass unemployment more generally, is to get Britain working again.
We report today that 750,000 jobs have either gone or are going in the hospitality sector alone. That’s just the start of a much bigger employment bloodbath.
recovery is still possible. But it won’t happen as long as ministers and their scientific Svengalis remain obsessed with ever more draconian local lockdowns or, that worst of all options, the national ‘circuit-breaker’, which would see us all back under house arrest.
We need an exit strategy, not even more constraints.
Apart from anything else, a fatigued and confused public is increasingly reluctant to comply with the restrictions we already have, despite the threat of oppressive police enforcement. (If you have to use a big stick, it’s usually a sign that you’ve lost the argument.)
And although Manchester’s Labour mayor Andy Burnham is playing politics by opposing his city’s move into the highest tier of restrictions, he’s right to say there’s no proof the extra strictures will cut infection rates.
So if Northern leaders say the curbs are pointless and public figures openly flout them (Tony Blair being just the latest), isn’t it inevitable that ordinary people will wonder why they should observe them?
Yes, we must take sensible precautions – distancing, hygiene, isolating when infected, shielding the vulnerable. We must also protect the NHS (though with all the money spent on Nightingale hospitals, ventilators and PPe, hospitals should be prepared for any winter surge).
But there’s no silver bullet to kill Covid in the near future. We have to learn to live with it, and that means a balance of risks.
In striking that balance, ministers must realise that allowing the economy to atrophy and unemployment to hit record levels would be a far greater risk to the physical, mental and financial health of this nation than the virus itself could ever be. Not just for the young, but for all of us.