Covid-19

Can the High Street recover from the Covid crisis? Even before lockdown, around 14 shops were shutting every day, and 2019 was the worst year for sales in a quarter of a century. After months of enforced closure, shops have finally reopened. But with mandatory face masks, social distancing and roped-off fitting rooms – and no indoor cafes, or restaurants to punctuate a day of retail therapy – shopping will be vastly inferior to the pre-Covid experience.  Nonetheless, there are good reasons to be bullish on the future of the high street – and too many commentators are being needlessly gloomy on its prospects. For a start, households have accumulated significant savings during lockdown. By December 2020, Britain’s

If you think public health authorities in England are overbearing, spare a thought for the Czechs. Parents who fail to have children vaccinated face being fined or having their offspring excluded from nurseries. Now, in a landmark ruling, the European Court of Human Rights, has backed that policy. But even critics aghast at the thought of compulsory vaccinations should welcome the court’s verdict. Why? Because human rights judges should not be butting in here. The Czech law bends over backwards to accommodate welfare concerns: vaccinations are free; there are exceptions for good medical reasons; and any vaccine-generated injury is automatically compensated. Yet it was still an obvious target for human rights challenge on

No prime minister wants to be dependent on the opposition to get the government’s business through the House of Commons. But this is the position Boris Johnson will likely find himself in when it comes to ‘Covid status certificates’, I argue in the magazine this week. Labour are sounding sceptical of vaccine passports at the moment More than 40 Tory MPs have already signed a pledge to oppose vaccine passports, and the government’s majority is 80. ‘It is just down to Starmer. If he whips against, Boris will lose,’ says one of the leaders of the Tory rebellion. The policy has hit a nerve in the Conservative party. Tory opponents

After a year in which young people have lost their jobs, been denied time in the classroom and at university and not been allowed to see their friends, could they now be penalised again? Boris Johnson said we ‘have to be very careful how you handle this and don’t start a system that is discriminatory’ when vaccine passports, or ‘Covid status certification’, were raised at a briefing this week. Yet it’s hard to imagine a more grossly unfair, discriminatory system than introducing vaccine passports before young people have the opportunity to be vaccinated. Young people have sacrificed so much for a disease that they are relatively invulnerable to. Nearly half of those people furloughed

The biggest question facing Boris Johnson is the future of his so-called vaccine passports. A few months ago, the idea was dismissed by No. 10 as ‘discriminatory’. Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, said: ‘We are not a papers-carrying country.’ But now, without debate or democratic scrutiny, vaccine passports are quickly heading from unthinkable to unstoppable. Today, No. 10 released more details — hence the questions Johnson is facing. But bizarrely, the Prime Minister was unable to admit to any of it, and pretended to be confused by what he was being asked. This matters. If he cannot acknowledge his flagship scheme, leaving such an indefensible gulf between what his government has just published and what he has just said, he may already be

May 5th this year will be the two hundredth anniversary of Napoleon’s death on Saint Helena, the tiny island in the south Atlantic where the British confined the Emperor to Longwood House after defeat at Waterloo in 1815. After much hesitation, Emmanuel Macron has decided that France will commemorate the Emperor’s place in French history. Though the most recognisable historical figure in all surveys of the French, almost no public spaces or institutions bear his name. Monarchy and Republic cancelled him. Bonaparte divides. He is at once the figure who tamed the Revolution, drastically reformed France and yet the dictator who overran Europe and reinstated slavery. President Jacques Chirac abhorred

The 10 Downing Street press conferences on Covid-19 tend not to show graphs about cancer care. We see various charts by statisticians and epidemiologists, but the impact of lockdown on patients with time critical conditions such as cancer has been largely ignored. The disruption of cancer services is a global phenomenon, but the suspension of screening services and failure to protect cancer services in the UK has resulted in 40,000 less cancers being diagnosed last year, compared to 2019. The true scale of the cancer backlog has yet to be acknowledged by the UK government, far less prioritised with specific additional funding. Denial could cost lives. Any future cancer strategy

Has the pandemic really been good for the way the NHS treats mental health? That’s the rather startling claim I report on today in my i paper column. Ministers have started to talk — equally surprisingly, it has to be said — about the possibility that they are close to reaching parity of esteem between the treatment of mental and physical health, and that the chaos of Covid is partly responsible. Covid has certainly made it harder for the government to just offer talk and no cash on mental health Now, it slightly depends on what your definition of ‘parity of esteem’ is. If it’s just that party strategists and purse-string-holders

On New Year’s Eve, Emmanuel Macron promised France an economic revival by the Spring. Cancel that. Instead, as the intensive care units are saturated by a third wave of Covid, we have a new lockdown light and a new message from the president: ‘Don’t panic.’ More than a year after Macron the general took personal command of the war on the new coronavirus, the vaccination program has still to get into high gear, the doctors are threatening to triage patients, abandoning those with little hope, yet there was no hint of contrition from the president. Instead, he announced that we are to be subjected to yet another baffling set of