It’s a panic from crisis to crisis

WHILE I don’t pretend to be religious, the comparison with the Book of Revelations’ four horsemen of the apocalypse and the country’s present situation is both revealing and slightly alarming.

Rename them as coronavirus, climate change, social unrest and economic collapse and we have four modern equivalents to the original conquest, war, famine and death.

Being faced with such very real challenges you would think would be enough for most governments – but not so for PM Boris Johnson.

His arrogance knows no bounds in that he now wants to add a fifth harbinger of disaster by refusing to even consider an extension to the EU transition period, with the inevitable result of a hard Brexit, which has always, I suspect, been the Far Right’s plan.

Given that we are already facing a 20% reduction in economic activity – with the resultant catastrophic increase in unemployment this will cause – would a more intelligent and pragmatic strategy not be to extend the transition period to allow the country and economy to recover from the coronavirus pandemic before embarking on such a huge change? As a net exporter, this could be

disastrous for the North East, despite all the Tory promises we are now seeing exposed as fabrications.

The situation could be turned around with an albeit slow but planned recovery based on environmental and sustainable planning rather than the frenzied panic from one disaster to the next, which epitomises the Government’s record so far.

No-one is realistically blaming the present government for either the Covid-19 pandemic or climate change. However, people are rightly highly critical of their response to these challenges so far, while the social unrest and economic collapse could be controlled by channelling the energy of the former to reduce the impact of the latter. This can only happen with realistic cross-party planning based on the premise that we wish to create a more equitable, greener society where wealth and power is not concentrated in the hands of a tiny minority.

With a seemingly unassailable majority in Parliament, of course, Johnson is under no obligation or pressure to change course apart from considering how history will judge his performance and, for a delusional narcissist like himself, that may be just the key to change. We can but hope or maybe even pray… JOHN DIAS, Newcastle