The renewed government Covid powers may be impossible to lift again
SIR – Some time ago, in conversation with friends (via Zoom), I suggested that, once any government acquires additional powers granting it more control over the population, it becomes extremely unwilling to give them up.
I gave as an example the fact that income tax was introduced as a temporary measure at the end of the 18th century in order to pay for the Napoleonic wars.
Our Government has just extended its draconian Covid powers for another six months. That will take us up to September, and I am sure that, soon after, the medical advisers who regularly stand beside the Prime Minister will warn us of an imminent flu epidemic – leading to a further six-month extension of these powers (as a precaution, of course).
After that, I suspect more Covid-19 variants will be discovered, requiring another six months. Soon enough we will have reached the winter of 2022 – and so it will continue.
The Prime Minister is supposed to be a libertarian and a Conservative. You could have fooled me. Andrew Barr
St Albans, Hertfordshire
SIR – A few days ago I received an excited message from my daughter-inlaw in Switzerland, telling me that there was no longer a quarantine requirement for travellers from the UK. When would I be coming?
I replied that, were I to do so much as show my face at Bristol airport, I could be fined £5,000 – even though I would be travelling privately at the end of the short flight, then staying in a quiet mountain village and doing little more than seeing my grandchildren for the first time in over a year.
I have been vaccinated, and had hoped to fly in June. I would be happy to isolate on my return, take a test, wear a tag… Yet this is an increasingly faint hope, and I am starting to fear that our Government may have us trapped on this island forever.
Annie Elles Torquay, Devon
SIR – Grant Feller (“A year on, I still haven’t grieved for my father”, Features, March 26) is not alone in finding that anger has taken precedence.
My husband, a cancer patient, died in November – not of Covid but possibly prematurely because of it, having had a life-extending operation cancelled three times. We too were unable to see him in his final two weeks in hospital; he too asked me in one phone call why I had abandoned him. In the months since his death, I have been haunted by his face when we were finally allowed to see him for a few minutes the day before he died.
Britain quite rightly had a day of remembrance for those who died from the virus – but please don’t forget the other families for whom it made a loved one’s death equally unbearable. I hope Mr Feller can eventually open the box of his father’s possessions and find some peace. Living for the day is probably a good place to start. Elaine Jamieson Stirling