Lockdown must end soon so business can open up – Yorkshire Post Letters

THE highly successful roll-out of vaccines in the UK is masking the underlying perilous economic stagnation that this present and previous lockdowns is causing (The Yorkshire Post, February 8).

By February 15, the Government hopes to have vaccinated the top four tiers of the most vulnerable of our society in this pandemic. We surely have to start a fast road to economic recovery two weeks after this date when the vaccine protection kicks in.

Now is not the time to attack the Government; there will be an inquiry when we’re out of this nightmare to learn essential lessons for preparedness and action – hopefully that won’t be required for at least 100 years.

I don’t know anyone in our group of relatives and friends who are not completely at wits’ end with this latest lockdown and are on the edge. My wife and I have been confined to home-prison since a year last December when we were convinced that we had coronavirus as we were so ill (at the time it hadn’t been invented) and we imposed our own lock-in.

It took us a couple of months to recover then the first lockdown was implemented. We escaped briefly for four weeks in July when we tentatively went shopping off-peak followed in August when I had a heart attack. Was this caused be the unhealthy home-prison? I’ll never know.

This must be the final lockdown; the Government has tried all options and have now protected us the vulnerable.

Britain and hundreds of thousands of businesses must open again. The Government’s economic strategy must not be decided by the fear and blame of the death toll and continuing to imprison us all. We want our lives back.

From: Brian H Sheridan, Lodge Moor, Sheffield.

THE news that pubs may be allowed to reopen provided they do not serve alcoholic drinks evokes words from the saddest song in the English language: “There’s nothing so lonesome, morbid or drear, as to stand in the bar of a pub with no beer.”

I will readily endorse that sentiment: one winter evening I went into a cheerfully lit pub near me only to find the place empty but for the manager cutting a forlorn figure behind the bar. I gave him the benefit of the doubt when he said his supplier had let him down. I hadn’t the heart to walk straight out so I asked for a cup of tea before going elsewhere.

Repercussions of Brexit deal

From: Roger Backhouse, Upper Poppleton, York.

THE quality of business pages has always been a good reason 
to buy The Yorkshire Post. 
They are far better than some London-based papers 
manage.

Your feature about Brexit effects on Yorkshire companies was particularly good (The Yorkshire Post, February 6).

After reading it, there can
be no doubt that the deal 
cooked up by Boris Johnson before Christmas is damaging exports.

Despite his promise to the DUP of no customs border 
down the Irish Sea, that is just what we have. Yet Northern Ireland is supposed to be a constituent part of the UK.

It is shocking to read that the Yorkshire nursery firm of Johnsons is losing so much business as a result.

How many jobs will go, particularly from smaller 
firms, as a result of this bad 
deal?

Even worse, the deal says little about financial services now providing seven per cet of Britain’s GDP.

Hungry financial centres in Frankfurt, Paris and Amsterdam are eyeing the UK share of the European market.

American financial firms now get a better deal in the EU than Britain.

What a shambles.

Dangers of an online world

From: David Craggs, Goldthorpe. Rotherham.

I SUPPOSE that there’s no room for sentimentality when it comes to the closure of our high street shops, many that have been with us for as far back as we can remember.

But I personally find it very sad at what is taking place at the moment, and will continue to take place until all shops, as we at present know them, will have disappeared. I suspect that only then will we appreciate what we had.

It was sad to see Woolworths and BHS go, but since the empty sites were surrounded by prosperous stores (long before Covid-19), we tended not to miss them. Do we honestly want to live in a world where every single item that comes into our households has been delivered to our doorstep, having been ordered online? Our very existence would be governed by a ‘box of tricks’, linked to outlets by an unbelievably complex system of electromagnetic waves.

It is inevitable that at times the system will go ‘down’. Already we have seen, although at present it is a very rare event, the till systems go down in our supermarkets, paralysing the whole store.

In fact it is predicted that future wars will be fought, not by soldiers fighting, however sophisticated their equipment might be, but by bringing down a country’s whole electronic network.

No doubt potentially hostile countries are already working on this. And when it does happen it won’t be just a case of the scanners not working at the mini-market down the road. Every form of electronic communication will be down.

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