Ben Lowry: If lockdown is returning then the pain needs to be much more widely shared

Much has happened.

Annual celebrations for Ireland’s patron saint were cancelled on both sides of the border, and in America, but days before life was carrying on as normal.

The last premiership football games were played the week before.

A friend of mine who had gone, as he always does, to what became the controversial Cheltenham festival left before a race was run on its final Friday (March 13), such was his alarm at seeing people file into the course, often after drink, untroubled by the fledgling pandemic.

There is a theory that the UK had a worse Covid outbreak because it let big sporting events happen so late (and that Louisiana was worse hit than US states nearby due to the Mardi Gras celebration in New Orleans at the end of February).

By St Patrick’s Day, schools were about to close early for Easter, holidays booked for early summer already looked in doubt and we were on verge of lockdown (March 23).

It was mid March before Covid was embedded in people’s consciousness. At an event in Dublin on March 2 I was troubled to see people still shaking hands, then the same at a dinner in Co Down on March 6. On March 2 even Angela Merkel of Germany was trying to shake hands and the next day Boris Johnson even boasted of doing so.

On March 5 I sat on a Glider in Belfast beside a woman who coughed the whole journey and I decided not to use public transport again, but it did not occur to me to refuse to give a talk that night on early News Letters.

Even at the time, but particularly with hindsight, we can see how Covid was spreading easily.

The world has learned a lot about the virus since then, and yet in key areas knowledge is patchy.

We should beware politicians who say that they are ‘following the science,’ for two reasons.

First because politicians should weigh scientific advice against factors such as economic impact.

Second, because some of the greatest medical and biological minds in the world disagree.

Thousands of scientists have signed the Great Barrington Declaration, which says the cure is worse than the virus (mental health and untreated disease, etc). Other scientists reject this view, and dismiss as a “myth” that Covid 19 can be solved by herd immunity (enough people getting it and becoming immune).

It is hard for political leaders when expert advice is conflicted. Typically they tend towards the safest response to the most obvious problem, which is Covid (as opposed to the fallout of lockdown, much of which is hidden).

People in the UK or Republic of Ireland are still not being advised that society faces early death and tragedy whatever we do.

Anyone who highlights the median age of Covid deaths (82, similar to the average age that people die in normal times) might be labelled callous about old folk. Yet lockdown kills young people from causes such as despair and untreated cancer.

We just don’t know how many.

Other lockdown side effects include a wrecked economy and lasting harm to children’s education (it is interesting that the Republic, which has had stringent Covid rules, is not following NI in extending the Halloween school break).

If we have learned anything about Covid, it is the wildly uneven suffering caused by restrictions.

It has worsened the class divide when there is already gross inequality of assets (ie what people own).

During the housing crash I wrote about the problem of the older property owning class wanting high prices, which shuts the younger generation out of owning. But Covid made homes even more important.

Until 2019 I lived in Belfast flat with no outside space. Many families spent lockdown in that block.

Lockdown has been far easier on the middle classes who can work from home than the working classes who have to travel to work.

Above all it has been easy on the public sector, who enjoy job security (often regardless of performance), superb pensions (despite modest reforms) and the ability to work from the pleasant home that their higher wages buy (NI public pay is far above private equivalents).

Public sector wages make up a massive share of government spending. Yet because public sector workforces are large and powerful, politicians pander to them. Even this Conservative government has pushed through above inflation pay rises at a time of financial disaster.

There would be widespread support for rises for frontline staff, but most public staff are not frontline.

Even freezing non frontline public pay for a year would free up money to spend instead on schemes such as furlough, and would be little loss to the said staff (because, unlike private sector workers who have had pay cuts, they had never had the money and got used to it).

Yet weak politicians on both sides of the Irish Sea will not dare introduce such modest measures.

Instead they will have to increase tax so much that it impacts even on low paid private sector workers.

I think people should now be allowed to decide their own risk of exposure to Covid, and this freedom should be accompanied by intensive ad campaigns to warn people of the risks to the vulnerable. But this argument is being lost in Europe and much of America, in favour of enforced restrictions.

We face rules lasting months, or perhaps years, on and off.

Swathes of industry will be badly damaged. Some sectors ruined.

Countless businesses will close, often small enterprises that someone spent a working life creating.

Politicians have a duty to spread this burden but seem afraid even to discuss the matter, and so a gulf between those who are untouched and those who are badly hit widens.

Leaders could alleviate the sense of injustice by taking a small temporary pay cut if rules tighten further.

• Ben Lowry (@BenLowry2) is News Letter deputy editor

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