NICK FERRARI The Covid cure that came back to bite us
After Ofwat and Ofcom, will this new football regulator be known as “Offside?”
THE achingly so-correct council inflicted on the good folk of Greenwich in South East London has decreed a mural by the side of a fish and chip shop depicting a giant fish, chips and Union Flag has to be painted over.
The council mumbles some “pollocks” about unauthorised advertising, proximity to a UNESCO site, etc etc.
Can’t help thinking if it was the Palestinian flag there’d be no opposition. Let’s tell these goons it was painted by Banksy.that should ensure it stays in “plaice.”
THE “election” in Russia returned Putin with an 87 per cent majority. Presumably we must prepare for a 13 per cent drop in Russian population any time.
‘We are left blighted with a workshy workforce’
SO the Government is struggling to understand public hesitation over fitting heat pumps... Fact 1: the cost of a typical heat pump installation = £13,300. Fact 2: the cost of a typical traditional gas installation = up to £3,000 Got it now?
ANYONE care to hazard a guess what event took place four years ago this weekend? An unusually sombre-looking then-prime Minister Boris Johnson appeared on every radio and TV bulletin to impart some grim news.
“From this evening, I must give the British people a very simple instruction: you must stay at home,” he said from his office at Number 10 Downing Street.
As the streets emptied and we retreated behind our front doors, much of the nation swiftly resembled a ghost town – and yet in the relatively short time that has elapsed since, we can clearly see the devastating effects that decision, and subsequent ones related to it, have had, making it time to question the fundamental logic behind many crucial calls that were to follow.
In what is likely to be the most troubling unseen consequence, schools were told they must close and switch to teaching online – with the exception of the children of essential workers such as the NHS, police and other emergency services. Whoever thought that was a good idea? Almost from the very first diagnosis, it quickly emerged that young people appeared remarkably robust and adept at NOT catching Covid.
As with so many other “killer viruses,” it targeted the elderly, the weak and the vulnerable.
Why then were millions of children ordered to be kept cooped up like battery hens?
Hardly a month has gone by since the lockdown ended that hasn’t chronicled the disturbingly high rise in children turning to the NHS with emotional health issues, and in some parts of the country the waiting list to see these children is counted in months... sometimes even more than six months.
And on this particular point, the valid argument of “hindsight being 20/20 vision” is simply not justified: children were NOT at high risk and far more
damage has been wrought by the lockdown than by Covid – particularly for the cohort who never actually sat key exams, were given estimated grades and then started their university careers without any lectures!
As I have said, nothing gets near the mental wellbeing of our children. But if you want to look at the financial aspects, they are equally perturbing, as the fiscal folly of furlough also becomes more evident as each month passes. Remember,
this was the scheme by which 11.7 million workers were paid 80 per cent of their wages for sitting at home, at a time when the nation was basking in a spring heatwave – and it was to cost £70BILLION, of which £4.5billion was lost to fraud.
The Conservatives see this as a vote winner and are to launch a series of adverts proclaiming how “14 million jobs were saved”, neatly ignoring the impact it had on the nation’s economy and growth and on our mortgages and cost of living. While some level of support was required, this was absurdly over generous and has exposed another mistake of lockdown lunacy.
It was meant to run for three months, but was in place on and off for a year and a half!
And now Britain is one of the very few countries with the number of active workers smaller than it was prior to the pandemic.
We are left blighted with a workshy workforce.
More than nine million people are economically inactive, 2.7 million claim they suffer from long-term sickness – and that number has rocketed by 700,000 since the pandemic.
Four years ago, we were in fear of a virus. Now, we are a nation in fear of the consequences of our response.