What’s allowed?
The PM’s confused message
“Boris Johnson and his top aide, Dominic Cummings, are masters of the snappy slogan,” said The Economist. But even the “greatest advertising gurus sometimes pitch a flop”. And that was the Prime Minister’s sad fate on Sunday, when he unveiled the Government’s latest Covid-19 guidelines and its new, updated slogan, “Stay Alert, Control the Virus, Save Lives”. Far from rallying the nation, the statement created confusion. “I don’t know what ‘stay alert’ means,” declared Nicola Sturgeon, the First Minister of Scotland, dismissing it as “vague and imprecise”. She is going to stick with the “Stay Home” slogan, as are the governments of Wales and Northern Ireland. Johnson urged people to return to work if they couldn’t work from home, said Tom Peck in The Independent. But how can they do that if their children are still out of school, or if they can’t, as he advises, avoid public transport? Why can people now have a cleaner come into their house, but not a relative? Why can they meet only one person in the park?
What a muddle, said The Guardian. As the Labour leader Keir Starmer told the PM this week, the public requires two things from their leaders in worrying times like these: “clarity and reassurance”. Johnson has offered neither. It’s not enough for the PM just to invoke “good solid British common sense”, as he did in the Commons, and to hope that employers do the right thing by their workers. Police forces have rightly complained that the “sheer fuzziness” of the “stay alert” message will make the job of enforcing the guidelines all but impossible. The fact that England is now taking a different path to the other nations of the UK further complicates matters, said the FT. “After earlier missteps, the Government had a chance to prove it was getting on top of coronavirus policymaking, but it has flunked it.”
This was, without doubt, a botched presentation, said Alastair Benn on Reaction.life. Johnson should have published the detailed guidance and debated it in Parliament before addressing the nation, rather than the other way round. It’s hard to object, though, to his general approach, which is in line with that of other European countries. President Macron has adopted “Restez prudents” as his slogan for the next phase of France’s lockdown, which translates almost exactly as “stay alert”. The latter phrase is, of course, a more nuanced message than simply “Stay Home”, said Patrick O’Flynn in The Spectator, but it’s not exactly “indecipherable”. The PM’s critics are all bleating about how confusing the new campaign is, as if the Government should be setting out official rules for every conceivable social scenario. It’s ridiculous: ultimately, we’re all going to have to use our judgement. “Before the onset of ‘lockdown’, we used to make many decisions on our own.”
The Government can’t prescribe, in minute detail, every step out of lockdown, agreed The Times. The easing of restrictions, which are contingent on the rate of new infections continuing to decline, will inevitably shift more of the burden of responsibility onto individuals and companies. This might prove less complicated than some of the Government’s critics have suggested. Much professional work can be done from home, and the retail and hospitality sectors are, for now, still closed. The people being encouraged this week to return to work “comprise less than a fifth of the workforce, and some are at work already”. Nor will most of them find it hard to get there: 67% of British workers drive to work and a further 10% walk. Besides, said The Sun, while we have no wish to downplay Covid-19 – “the UK’s 30,000 overall deaths tell their own story” – it’s worth remembering that the risk to most workers is “relatively tiny”.
The public is “way ahead” of the Government on this, said Janice Turner in The Times. People have already started taking socially distanced walks with friends and engaging in other everyday activities, having made their own risk assessments. Just as the Government imposed the lockdown after the public had already retreated indoors, so it is now “following behind us, approving the rule changes we’ve already made”. Opinion polls show continuing strong support for the lockdown, said Mark Smith in The Herald (Glasgow), but the behaviour of the public tells a very different story: discipline is clearly fraying. “Data from various organisations, including Google, shows the number of people leaving their local neighbourhood is increasing, and that the trend is most prevalent in Scotland.” Johnson isn’t the only politician who needs to worry about falling behind public opinion. Sturgeon does too.
“No. 10 had a chance to prove it was getting
on top of the crisis, but it has flunked it”
It might have looked like a “shambles”, said
The Sun – but this week’s unveiling of new Government guidance on what we can and can’t do at least marked the first “tentative” steps out of the lockdown “nightmare”. We can now exercise outdoors as much as we like, for instance, with some sports, like tennis, golf and angling, allowed. But meeting in groups for team sports is still a no-no: we can only meet one other person from outside our household – and even then we must maintain a two-metre distance and stay outside. We can drive to a beauty spot for a day out (as long as we return home to sleep and those in England avoid crossing into Wales or Scotland). And yes, we can go to the garden centre (but are advised to wear face masks in enclosed public spaces). Meanwhile, haircuts and summer holidays remain on hold, and public transport should still be avoided where possible.
But life is complicated, said The Times, and the Government’s “one-size-fits-all approach” throws up plenty of anomalies. Homebuyers can visit and view properties – but adults can’t go to their parents’ houses or see them both at the same time. Nannies can work in people’s homes – but rules on dropping children with childminders aren’t clear. Single parents still seem to be banned from seeing anyone outside their household if they have their children in tow. And over-70s can only enjoy the new freedoms if they don’t have underlying conditions. There’s also a two-tier system for workers, said Owen Jones in The Guardian: “If you are a middle-class professional, then you can keep safely working from home.” But for blue-collar employees who can’t do their jobs remotely, it’s “time to get back to work, and best of luck!” – with construction and manufacturing first in line. Clearly, “coronavirus is a class issue”.
Schools are due to start reopening too, said Camilla Turner in The Daily Telegraph. First, children in Reception, Year 1 and Year 6 will be allowed back into classrooms from 1 June – and the “ambition” is for all primary school pupils to return for a month of lessons before the summer holidays. Year 10 and Year 12 students, who are midway through GCSE and A-level syllabuses, should also be given “some” classroom time before summer. But pupils in other years are in limbo, and nervous parents can still choose to keep their children at home. In practice, it means the “vast majority” of England’s 8.8 million pupils won’t return to school until September, said The Guardian. That’s six months since schools shut: a “disastrous” prospect which will hit the most disadvantaged children first – while private schools offer practically a full curriculum online.
To make matters worse, the teaching unions are “playing politics” with children’s lives, said Ross Clark in The Daily Telegraph. The National Education Union has ordered its members not to engage with plans to reopen schools, and others have warned they may not support a return until September. Unions in other sectors are “flexing their muscles”. The GMB, TSSA and TUC have all threatened that “their members will simply veto any relaxation” of the rules that they don’t like. There’s now a real risk that the lockdown “morphs into a general strike”, with unions using coronavirus as a pretext to press for “all kinds of demands”, while the Government tries to get the country back to work. “Stand by, then, for the pandemic of discontent.”