Ross Clark

Twenty years ago this month Britain briefly endured a different sort of lockdown, as fuel protesters picketed oil refineries and petrol stations ran dry. Supermarket shelves emptied due to panic-buying and some motorists who had failed to fill their tanks found themselves stranded. For the only time during Tony Blair’s premiership the Conservatives very briefly ran ahead of Labour in the polls. The Labour lead was restored, however, when Gordon Brown cut duty and announced he was abandoning the ‘fuel duty escalator’ which had been introduced by Kenneth Clarke. Memories of those few days in September 2000 explain why governments ever since have been reluctant to raise fuel duties. For the past decade duty on road fuel has been frozen.

It has been clear from the start of the Covid-19 crisis – from Wuhan’s experience, before cases were confirmed in Britain – that it was a disease with relatively little impact on children. A broad study led by Liverpool University and published in the British Medical Journal today confirms that – and sheds a lot more light on how Covid-19 affects children. The study looks at data from 260 hospitals in England, Scotland and Wales, to which 69,516 patients were admitted with Covid symptoms between 17 January and 3 July. Of these, 651 were aged under 19 and 225 were aged under 12 months. Serious underlying medical conditions were present in 42 per cent of the children.

Should we be spraying surfaces, and ourselves, with an off-the-shelf mosquito repellent to tackle the spread of Covid-19? The Ministry of Defence has revealed that it has been issuing soldiers with Mosi-guard natural, a spray derived from eucalyptus oil and manufactured by a small company called Citrefine, in Leeds, from the beginning of the Covid crisis. The spray has been tested by the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory and found to have a rapid effect on reducing levels of the virus when sprayed onto surfaces. It did not, however, succeed in eliminating the virus altogether. In one test, the product was sprayed onto latex synthetic skin an hour before being exposed to SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes Covid-19.

Throughout the Covid crisis, the international response to the disease has rested on a simple assumption: that none of us have any resistance to it, being caused by a novel virus. Therefore, if allowed to let rip through the population, the virus would exponentially spread until around 60 – 70 per cent of us had been infected and herd immunity was reached. This was the assumption behind Neil Ferguson’s paper in March, claiming that Covid-19 would kill 500,000 Britons if nothing was done and 250,000 of us if the government carried on with the limited mitigation polices it was then following. Yet real world data has challenged this assumption.

With GCSEs out of the way, we didn't have to wait long for the next campaign to make out the Tories to be a bunch of heartless monsters – and for the Tories to fold. This one revolved around the temporary ban on evictions for tenants of privately-rented properties, which was due to come to an end on Monday but has now been extended for a month. Shadow house secretary Thangam Debbonaire took to Twitter this morning to denounce it as an ‘extraordinary thing to do’, to lift the ban when so many people are facing problems paying their rent. That there are a great number of tenants in financial difficulty is clear. According to the charity Shelter, 227,000 private tenants have fallen into arrears with their rent.

News that rail fares are to rise by 1.6 per cent in January, and public transport fares in London by 2.6 per cent, would normally be met with outrage – how dare they jack up the fares again when the trains are late and I can’t get a seat. Yet this time around the news has hardly raised a whimper. After all, who uses trains any more? There’s some sort of semblance of normality returning to shops, pubs, restaurants. But larges parts of the public transport network have been all but abandoned – even though the government is no longer officially telling us not to use them.  Department for Transport figures from Monday show use of national rail services to be running at just 23 per cent of the level they were at the beginning of March.

It isn’t hard to imagine what would happen if an academic produced a paper claiming that countries led by men were more entrepreneurial or are better at negotiating international deals. The sky would fall in on them before the ink was dry. Their paper wouldn’t find a mainstream journal to publish it, anyway, but the mere existence of the study would be enough to have them denounced by students and thrown out of their university. But if you were to publish a study claiming that countries led by women have coped better with the Covid-19 pandemic, with fewer cases and fewer deaths than countries led my men?

We’ve heard endless statistics on the likely death toll from Covid-19, and over the past week we have learned just how great was the economic devastation in most countries in the second quarter as they locked down to deal with the disease. But what about the global impact on children’s education? That is something the World Bank has attempted to estimate. School closures, it concludes, effectively reduce the times spent in education by between 0.3 and 0.9 years. Globally, before the pandemic, the average child went through 7.9 years of schooling. For the Covid generation this will be reduced to between 7.0 and 7.6 years.