My heart breaks for Wales – and my Mum who’s stranded there

‘I’m a criminal!” Helen is a law-abiding mother of three, but on Saturday, after a lifetime of obeying the rules, she finally snapped. “To hell with it!” she said in a text which contained language I’d never heard my friend use before. Saturday was Helen’s mum’s 80th birthday. As Helen now lives in a Tier 2 area, she was not supposed to visit her mother who lives alone in Tier 1. A quick look at the infection rates for both areas, which are just nine miles apart, revealed that Helen’s had 78 cases of Covid-19 per 100,000 population. In the town where her mother lives it was 116. But it’s considered lower risk there because, er…

Well, no one knows, frankly, but the Government must be seen to be doing something. Even if that something means children are separated from elderly parents. Helen was fuming. “Although we live in rural Essex, which has a handful of infections, somehow we are in the same tier as Nottingham and Manchester. How can they possibly justify that? I support more localised measures, but it has to be fair and logical otherwise it’s hopeless.”

I know exactly how Helen feels. I haven’t seen my own mum, who lives in Wales, since Christmas. There have been many times when I have just wanted to jump in the car and drive for four-and-a-half hours (not even stopping for a wee at a potentially virus-ridden service station), but I respect the wishes of my mother who is fearful and punctilious about the rules.

Like lots of families, we approach Covid-19 very differently. For instance, there’s the thorny question of whether I can join her “bubble” when her sister has already been in the house? I say, “Don’t be silly, of course I can!” Mum worries that it’s not allowed.

She gets all her information about Covid from the shroud-waving TV news and from Mark Drakeford, the First Minister of Wales. Should he ever apply for the job of undertaker, Mr Drakeford would be rejected on the grounds of excessive gloom. What use is a tunnel if there’s a light at the end of it? That is the First Minister’s settled view and it chimes with a pessimism which runs deep in the Land of My Fathers.

Fair play to him (as the Welsh say), an air of funereal foreboding allied to a precautionary principle, which could be considered proportionate – for bubonic plague – has convinced a majority of the population that the First Minister is “keeping Wales safe”. My mother admires his cautious approach. I think he’s a Corbynite former social studies lecturer who is happy to inflict economic devastation on his nation as long as the hated Tories get the blame.

This week, the chances of seeing my mother got even more remote. Twp is generally one of my favourite Welsh words. Pronounced somewhere between tup and toop, the closest English translation would be slow or stupid. Neither quite captures the sublime, yokel-dense dim-wittedness of twp. I’m sorry to say that my beloved homeland has just reached Peak Twp.

The First Minister announced that from Friday all of Wales would have a 16-day “firebreak”. Call it Llockdown. This, he insisted, was “the best chance of regaining control of the virus” despite the fact there is no evidence that lockdown works. Infections are merely postponed while the poorest people get poorer. Nevertheless, social “bubbles” must now be popped, gatherings with anyone from another household are banned. Nonessential retail, including hospitality and hairdressers, only lately back on their feet, will close, in some cases for good. According to the First Minister, this was “a short, sharp shock” to “turn the tide”.

Pause for one moment to consider this towering Snowdonia of twp. Just over three million people live in Wales, 400 of those people were in hospital as confirmed Covid-19 patients and only 32 poor souls bad enough to be on ventilators. At the height of the pandemic it was more than 150. Daily deaths fell to zero for a while and only recently “surged” to five. This is not an out-of-control blaze that demands a firebreak; a few well-targeted sandbags would do.

Last Friday, Public Health Wales reported that in Carmarthenshire, Pembrokeshire and Ceredigion – combined population of around 386,000 – there were 25 new cases of the coronavirus. Pembrokeshire had four and Ceredigion three while my peerlessly lovely birthplace, Carmarthenshire, came in with a deafening 18. Not deaths, cases.

I’d argue there is currently more chance of perishing in a sheeprelated incident than of succumbing to Covid in west Wales.

Imagine asking a tea-shop owner in Tenby to close for the half-term holiday next week, when she had a chance of making up some of her lost takings, because a handful of people in her sparsely populated county have a virus that has almost no chance of harming them. That is what Drakeford and Welsh Labour have just done. Such a relaxed attitude to the annihilation of your society – to its emotional wellbeing, to the health of its private sector – can only be afforded if someone else is paying. All businesses required to close, Drakeford said, “will be able to access support from the UK Government because it’s only the UK Government who has the financial power to guarantee income support that workers need”. The First Minister signs the cheque and London honours it. Well, there’s marvellous for you!

After the first lockdown, Wales saw 30,000 job losses. That figure doesn’t include the self-employed. Even before Covid the country was facing a youth unemployment crisis. I shudder to think of the carnage that will be caused by this second reckless, morally irresponsible suspension of nearer-to-normal life.

In case the Welsh people awake from their trusting coma and start asking awkward questions about collateral damage to jobs and health, Drakeford played the “don’t overwhelm the NHS” card. The First Minister claimed that critical care beds were “full”. That’s strange when according to the Welsh government’s own figures, High Dependency Care occupancy has never been lower than 73.9 per cent in the past 10 years.

Lies, damned lies and scary statistics. At least in the North West and the North East we have witnessed some resistance to the tyranny of twp. The leader of Hartlepool Borough Council said yesterday that if ministers tried to put his region into Tier 3 “they’ll be told to sod off ”. That’s the spirit! Twp- face Hancock must be stopped. Meanwhile, Andy Burnham, the Mayor of Manchester, accused the Government of selective use of NHS numbers to frighten local people into lockdown. Spot on. And at a time when evidence is emerging that the second ripples of the epidemic are already abating.

Poor Wales. The “firebreak” is not a safety measure, it’s a pyre on which the futures of her people will be incinerated.

I grieve for my country, I really do. Most of all, though, I’d like seeing my mum not to be a crime.

Such a relaxed attitude to the annihilation of your society can only be afforded if someone else is paying