My local high street has refitted itself for today’s reopening of non-essential shops, enabling customers to stay 2 metres apart. Businesses have spent thousands in a frantic attempt to stave off imminent bankruptcy. Yet within a week that money may have to be spent again, as Boris Johnson teases that he may change the distancing rule from 2 metres to 1 metre.
This is toy-town government. Nowhere else in Europe seems to be behaving in this way. The image is of toffs in secure jobs playing maths with other people’s lives.
Shopkeepers are victims not of any disease but of a panicked political response to disease, to deprive them of trade. Plenty of other countries, among them Japan, Sweden and South Korea, did not close their retail sectors. With scientists refusing to take sides on the 2-metre rule, the block seems to lie with ministers who so inflated people’s fear they now dare not return to normality. » | Simon Jenkins | Monday, June 15, 2020
