Put snitching Stasi army out to grass

HEAVEN help us, we are now encouraged to be a nation of snitches, sneaks and quasi Stasi. So far has Boris departed from his “land of liberty” that ministers are now actively urging people to report groups of seven in their neighbours’ gardens and proudly proclaiming they would do so themselves.

Presumably Boris thinks the boys in blue have nothing better to do than rush out to investigate the allegations of busybodies and nosey parkers: no thefts, burglaries, assaults, rapes or murders or even raves and really serious breaches of coronavirus laws. Just how much sillier can this whole saga get?

Another lockdown will tip the economy into a black hole from which it is unlikely to recover for years to come and our children and children’s children will be saddled with the debts of the Government’s panic.

Figures over the weekend showed Sweden, which has had no universal lockdown, to have had the lowest number of deaths in the past 14 days and the lowest number of daily cases per million residents.

AS LONG ago as March 18 I wrote in this column that with nine out of 10 Covid deaths occurring in those with underlying health conditions ( and that was before ministers were classifying obesity as such a condition) the logic pointed to locking down the unhealthy and the very frail aged and telling the rest of us that it was our duty to keep the economy and volunteer effort going.

There are signs that ministers are now looking at that with talk of everybody over 50 being awarded a personal risk score. Good, but I raised another issue in a later column which I have never seen answered: of those who have died without any underlying health condition, what is the breakdown in age? What is the proof that healthy septuagenarians are substantially more at risk than healthy quintagenarians?