PRICE OF LIVING IN FEAR – WRECKED ECONOMY, MILLIONS JOBLESS, YOUNG WITHOUT HOPE AND OLD IN PENURY

THERE ARE some books that are well worth re-reading, even many years later. I have just finished such a one. It is called The Last Enemy, written by Richard Hillary. He was a young Australian who came here as a boy, went to school here and to Oxford in the late Thirties. At the outset of war he joined the RAF and quickly qualified as a pilot, assigned to Spitfires.

He flew as one of The Few in the Battle of Britain but was shot down and horribly burned as his fighter flamed out of the sky.

He spent many months, horribly disfigured (he had been drop-dead handsome), in surgery and on emerging insisted on going back into the air, though he qualified for permanent grounding. He crashed again and died, but he left his manuscript.

In it he said the last enemy was fear itself, and if you could conquer that bastard, you could beat all the others.

He was right, so right.

Which is why it makes me so sad to see our people, once the bravest in the world, consumed by a knicker-wetting panic, deliberately preached over many months by people who are supposed to be leading us.

Revelation after revelation shows the Covid-19 pandemic actually has a far lower death toll than we have been told. The books have been cooked, the figures doctored (which is more than we have been) and the lethality grossly exaggerated.

In the process our booming economy has been damaged almost beyond repair, hundreds of thousands of small and medium businesses destroyed, giants reduced to shells consumed by debt, millions made redundant and the hopes of the young smashed. The pending taxes alone will reduce millions expecting a comfortable old age to penury.

I suspect that one day the final, and accurate, picture will reveal the extra death toll to be 10 or 15 per cent more than the annual norm.

I doubt the spirit of Richard Hillary would even recognise us.