Vaccine success must mean an early exit from lockdown
Steered by SAGE, the Prime Minister’s vague exit strategy spells months more of strangled businesses and an economy that will keep on spiralling downwards.
It’s been a political spectacle. Anglophobia and bitter Brexit sentiments exploded in a confrontation with the EU that has left even the hardest of Remainers wondering whether their trust in the Commission was well-placed.
In a vindication of Britain’s distancing from Europe and embracement of the wider world, our vaccine success has shown what we can do standing on our own two feet instead of grouped in as a slow collective. With roughly four hundred thousand vaccinations taking place each day, it is a very real prospect that all over eighties and clinically vulnerable people will be vaccinated by the middle of February.
I don’t need to go into detail about the terrible consequences of lockdown, the huge attainment gap, the devaluing of degrees, the mental health implications and the millions of people who will soon find themselves out of a job and on the bread line. It would seem logical then that the vaccination effort should mean a lockdown exit that is as speedy as it possibly can be to instigate recovery, but that’s not what the Government has in mind.
Steered by SAGE, the Prime Minister’s vague exit strategy spells months more of strangled businesses and an economy that will keep on spiralling downwards.
By Mid-February, despite the vulnerable that will be vaccinated, there is no sign that the Prime Minister has any intentions of lifting the restrictions currently imposed on a once free society. They are kicking the can down the road on schools to March, to the detriment of our young people and only opening businesses from April. It’s even worse for the hospitality industry, whose doors are likely to remain shut all the way until May!
Rather hypocritically, the Government is touting the effectiveness of the Chancellor’s previous ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ scheme asserting that it led to no rise in infections while forbidding pubs and restaurants to open. There is no sense, rhyme or reason to this self-inflicted economic catastrophe that the Government seems to want to drag out as much as possible.
Probably the only vague opposition will come from Sir Graham Brady, Steve Baker and other backbench MPs who must keep the pressure on the Government to ditch the medical diktats of SAGE when the vaccines begin to really take effect. We have to have an early exit from lockdown, or any chance of a fast recovery is for the birds.
