The UK is cowering in fear of coronavirus but it’s time to look for a new approach for the difficult months ahead

WELL done to Doctor Doom Whitty and scheming Sturgeon – the population is suitably terrified again. You’ve got us where you want us: Cowering indoors.

Exactly half a year since being plunged into lockdown on that dark Monday night in March, draconian and authoritarian new limitations on our lives for the next six months based on a dodgy graph without any real opposition or debate are wildly popular.

Reuters

Doctor Doom Chris Whitty has got us where he wants us: cowering indoors.[/caption]

According to YouGov, just 17 per cent oppose the new measures, including a 10pm nationwide curfew and a new work from home order, while 77 per cent offer full throttled support.

But perhaps more disturbingly, 45 per cent think the changes – which, let’s remember, include sending the army onto the streets – do not go far enough. Thirty-two per cent of us think the new rules are about right and only 13 per cent join me in thinking the changes have gone too far.

PA:Press Association

Scheming Sturgeon has used fear to boost her own popularity throughout the pandemic.[/caption]

But let’s remember that group includes eminent scientists like Sunetra Gupta and Carl Heneghan who believe we are dooming the nation to economic catastrophe, when we should be focussing on protecting the most vulnerable who have been shielding or are in care homes. Just like the successful Swedish model.

PA:Press Association

Boris’ government is using fear to achieve compliance. But that will have lasting effects.[/caption]

These daily tracking polls, which the government is so reliant on, represent the danger of short-termism.

I find it hard to believe the population will still feel the same in a year’s time if there remains no effective vaccine, unemployment is at record highs, there are tens of thousands of excess deaths from untreated cancer and heart disease, and mental health problems lead to a suicide epidemic.

PA:Press Association

Six months since lockdown and the public are still suitably scared.[/caption]

The risk of the government continuing to use fear to guarantee complicity when it comes to the new rules is that the consequences of that approach could last for a generation.

No wonder the public believes that seven per cent of the UK population has died from Covid, which is more than 100 times higher than the actual death toll.

As my talkRADIO colleague Julia Hartley Brewer pointed out to a speechless Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab this morning on her show, the total number of people who died with or of Covid in English hospitals under the age of 60 without underlying health conditions was just 307 folk.

While the opposition of Labour in England and the SNP in Scotland might claim publicly that they’re putting politics aside to do what’s right, anyone with half a brain knows that’s a joke.

At PMQs today the SNP’s Westminster leader Ian Blackford warned with barely hidden glee that Boris is facing a new “winter of discontent”. That’s the dream for the SNP, desperate to use this crisis to drive forward independence.

And Labour front bencher Kate Green, the Shadow Education Secretary, has revealed the secret strategy of her party, shamefully telling supporters: “I think we should use the opportunity, don’t let a good crisis go to waste.”

Boris and our Cabinet must listen to the Resolution Foundation’s Torsten Bell who said today: “Phasing in restrictions to control the virus, while simultaneously phasing out support for firms and workers, isn’t a sustainable approach to the difficult months ahead. A new approach, based on learning the lessons from the last six months rather than simply repeating the same policy, is needed.”