Public and private jobs gap shows we are not in it together

THERE is a widening gap between the public sector’s demands for tighter coronavirus restrictions and private sector workers desperately hoping to keep their jobs and businesses open. It’s no surprise the public sector is OK with lockdowns as their wages arrive regardless of the pain suffered by the rest of us.

- Tim Newark

But it’s private sector taxes that pay their wages and generous pensions, and they should be keener to see a balance struck between health and economic concerns.

Health experts, civil servants, academics, trade union bosses and many politicians are all arguing for stricter controls to flatten a second spike of infections but every new regional lockdown puts a nail in the coffin of independent businesses just struggling to get back to normal after the spring national lockdown.

Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s Eat Out to Help Out was a wonderfully targeted campaign to rebuild our confidence in getting back to the high street, giving some businesses their best August for years, but now all that good work is being undone by the familiar voices of doom.

Professor Neil Ferguson, briefly disgraced for violating lockdown rules by seeing his girlfriend, is back on the radio telling us all that the NHS is on the verge of being “overwhelmed again” and that cases “are probably doubling every two weeks or so”.