Is PM listening to the right experts?

AFTER a brief period when it seemed as if the regulations, controls and restrictions on our lives were loosening, we are now confronted with measures which look and feel very like a second lockdown. Worse, there is no suggestion of any finish to this.

Somehow, by a process never fully explained, we are asked to help by making sacrifices unprecedented in peacetime and which feel way out of proportion to the problem.

Effects on family life have been especially hard to bear – separation from loved ones at the ends of their lives, enforced solitude for formerly healthy older people, grandparents parted from their grandchildren, weddings drained of joy or postponed.

Then there are the brutally interrupted educations, not just of school pupils, but of university students, wondering what on earth they have got into debt for as they face remote teaching and a campus life of nannying and isolation. And beneath this lies another layer. The treasured family firms, built up by years of sacrifice and risk, dying at the hands of a supposedly pro-enterprise Government. The giant companies tottering from lack of customers, again imposed by politicians who speak of their support for business.

Well, Britain can take it. Goodness, we have shown that again and again. But do we really need to? Are Ministers too much in thrall to their advisers, who fear risk above all things, while forgetting the deeper duty to the country’s long-term welfare?

Is the Government consulting the right experts? Is its objective, total victory over the Covid virus, even attainable? What about the collateral damage – an NHS still running at half-speed, the legacy of deaths from undiscovered or untreated cancers? More of the same may in fact not be the answer.