THE cost of Covid, the future of the high street and anti-vaxxers were the topics raised by columnists in the newspapers yesterday.
The Daily Mail
Richard Littlejohn said he could not begin to get his head around the astronomical sums of money thrown at Covid.
"Doesn’t sound much when you say it quickly, does it? £394 billion. Three hundred and ninety-four billion," he said. "Depending on who you believe, Britain now has the biggest national debt since the financial crisis of 2008, World War II or the Norman Conquest."
He said the Chancellor had, until now, been content to max out the credit cards and let the Bank of England print money 'like a counterfeiting factory on an industrial estate.'
"We may soon discover that the billions created by ‘quantitative easing’ are about as kosher as the moody £20 notes The Syrup used to buy a brand new Roger Moore toupee from Robbie Coltrane’s hairdresser Mr Henry in Minder," he said.
"How long before the bailiffs move in, repossess all the furniture and leave us sitting on the floor in an empty apartment, like Barry the Bookie?"
He said the financial reality hadn't hit home with the political classes and said Nicola Sturgeon was still demanding that English taxpayers go ever deeper into debt to finance her 'blatant bribes designed to persuade the Scots to vote for independence.'
"Where’s the money coming from? Wee Burney doesn’t give a monkey’s," he said. "Labour’s just as bad. The Opposition would cheerfully shut down the economy for ever, provided the Government keeps doling out the dosh.
"The day of reckoning is coming. The good news is there’s now a vaccine for Covid. Sadly, no one has yet come up with a vaccine for chronic debt. We are all going to pay through higher taxes. Prepare for the sound of squeaking pips."
The Guardian
Gaby Hinsliff said she wants to be in a crowd, preferably at a party, when all this is over.
"Lately I’ve even been feeling unexpected pangs of nostalgia for the tube at rush hour," she said. "It’s not the feeling of being rammed into a stranger’s armpit but the people-watching, the eavesdropping on strangers’ conversations, the bustle, the life you miss."
The safest substitute at the moment, she said, was to go shopping. Retail therapy was not her thing, she said, but months of steering clear of big cities has been a reminder of the lost pleasures of shopping in person.
"I want to buy them with someone. Nobody click-and-collects with a friend," she said. "That’s why the long-term death of the high street feels perhaps less inevitable than doomsayers think."
She said the assumption that people had abandoned physical shops felt 'instinctively wrong'.
"The future of shopping may well be either small and hyper-local or glitzy big-destination retail, with little surviving in the once vast Debenhams-land in the middle," she said. "But at least it has a future, or it could. A permanent shift towards home working could create a new breed of daytime customer, hungry for social contact after hours spent staring into a laptop."
The Independent
Ian Hamilton said calling anti-vaxxers stupid or conspiracy theorists would do little to change their minds.
"We must engage rather than ignore those with concerns about vaccines," he said. "If the vaccination programme is to be successful, then approximately three quarters of the population will need to be vaccinated."
That means converting one in four who have concerns about vaccines, he said.
"It is unlikely that those holding fixed views of conspiracy theories, including the idea that Bill Gates plans to include a microchip in a vaccine, will be persuadable," he said. "But others are likely to be more malleable as long as we genuinely listen. No vaccine is 100 per cent effective or safe, but a focus on problems rather than potential could be fuelling some of the hesitancy."
He said Government ministers had to bear some responsibility for the lack of trust and credibility in relation to Covid 19. Both Boris Johnson and Matt Hancock had 'consistently over-promised and under-delivered during the pandemic.', he said.
"The achievement of biological science gives us the potential to inhibit the virus, but this will be thwarted by politicians who have been unwilling to admit to their fast and loose relationship with the facts," he said.
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