THE cancellation of Christmas, unnecessary deaths and individual blame were debated by columnists in the newspapers.

The Daily Mail

Jan Moir said not since the 17th century - when Oliver Cromwell stopped Christmas altogether - have our festive plans been thrown into such disarray.

“In England, gatherings of more than six people from two households are banned,” she said. “In Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon has opted for the same rule, but added that the number does not include children under 12, and any number of them can join the party. Shriek!”

She said the thought of unlimited numbers of children at Christmas dinner was most people’s idea of purgatory.

“Suddenly, everyone’s festive celebrations have been pulled into sharp focus,” she added. “Big family gatherings look like they are off the table this year, while there is no escape outside the home, either.

“London’s Winter Wonderland has been cancelled, Berlin’s Christmas Market has been cancelled, office parties have been cancelled, hotels are closing their dining rooms, there’s not a panto to be seen and, up at the North Pole, Father Christmas must be considering his options.”

She pointed out that Christmas was the high point of the year for many families.

“The very thought of it is one of the few things that has got us through this interminable lockdown,” she said.

“First they came for our hairdressers. Then they came for our holidays. Now the Government seem hell bent on a collision course with Christmas, which looks like having a snowball’s chance of surviving in any traditional sense this year.

“Is that good news or bad news? Neither. It’s simply up to us all to make the most of it.”

The Daily Express

Frederick Forsyth said he predicted weeks ago that the Government’s ‘bungled response’ to Covid would cause more deaths than the disease itself.

“It now appears that has been precisely the outcome,” he said. “The Government wailed that it was “following the science” as if that was excuse enough for destroying the economy and wrecking untold numbers of lives.”

He said the Institute for Government had confirmed that was what had happened.

“A bad but never nation-destroying situation was made a hundred times worse than it need have been,” he said. “Its policy of slavish obedience to thoroughly flawed pseudo-science “seems likely to have cost a significant number of additional lives and contributed to the UK suffering the highest excess death rate in Europe”.”

He said the Government was stupid to have listened to the advice of so many quangos - but there may be light at the end of the tunnel.

“At the heart of officialdom is the Civil Service, headed by the Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Home Civil Service,” he said. “He is being replaced by a completely new man who so far looks good.

“Simon Case is youthful at 41, the youngest ever, and has never been a bureaucrat at all. There are hopes that he will inaugurate and preside over the root-and-branch clear-out of the mandarin dead wood for which some of us have lusted so long.”

Perhaps more importantly he has the ‘wily Dominic Cummings behind him’ and the reformed Boris Johnson, he said. “To get the root-out job done he is going to need their unalloyed support,” he said.

The Independent

Ian Hamilton said the government knows factors like education and where you are born determine your long term health and life expectancy.

“[They] regularly refer to their ambition to “level up”, a term describing their aim of reducing inequalities,” he said. “So, it is odd that they continue to blame individuals for making poor lifestyle choices,” he said. “Multiple groups have been shamed recently: the overweight, smokers, drinkers and those that don’t exercise. Of course, all these factors do play a part in health, but they don’t have anywhere near the impact that social determinants do.”

He pointed out that weight doesn’t matter just during the Covid 19 pandemic but that it was a symptom not a cause.

“Even if poorer people had more access to healthy food, their income is unlikely to allow these foods to feature regularly on their table,” he said. “There is no political appetite to address these root causes of inequality, instead the emphasis and blame is on the individual for making the “wrong choices”, even though these choices are severely limited.

“Blaming individuals neatly absolves the government from their own choices, past and present, which so far have nurtured inequality and sabotaged nearly a century of rising life expectancy.”