It's not only grim 'Up North'

One of the myths that has been peddled throughout the pandemic is that the response is not a choice between health on one side and the economy on the other, or as one official put it recently, Pubs versus Public Health. However, as we get to the end game (at least for hospitality businesses), politicians need to be honest that this is indeed the dichotomy they are wrestling with.

It comes to something when a book about the Second World War provides some rest bite from the present day. The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson, which tells how Churchill led Britain through the blitz, is a fantastic read and helps put the pandemic in some sort of perspective. 

Of course, the Covid-19 crisis is nowhere near as severe as World War Two, at some point there will be a vaccine and we will come out of this. However, if the current approach of erratic lockdowns continues, our economy and society will be severely damaged and it will take years, perhaps decades to recover.

Larson does not seek to draw comparisons with the current crisis, but it is impossible to avoid the juxtaposition of the towering leadership of Winston Churchill versus the inadequate and feeble approach of Boris Johnson. Churchills force of character, belief, and determination are infectious, but it is his ability to make difficult decisions which is most telling.

In 1940, Churchill understood that Britain was at the most perilous point in its history and to succeed in the overall objective, he had to make judgments that were a balance of human risk and the greater good.

Sooner or later the present Government will have to realise that we cannot continue on this merry go round of lockdown and ease up. They need to allow some of our innate citizens’ rights to be restored. Lockdowns will only suppress the virus until the next time and hospitality businesses across the UK cannot survive the constant on/off trip switch. 

Boris and Dom are obsessed with Covid statistics and continue to peddle them out of context and at the exclusion of everything else. They seem to have forgotten that humans need to socialize to maintain their sanity and are capable of assessing risk within their own behaviour. We do it in the way we run our businesses, the things that we eat and drink and the sports that we play. Why do they believe that we are suddenly incapable of using that judgment?

Business has to be allowed to operate at a profitable level with reasonable precautions and should not be seen as the problem but part of the solution.

For hotels that means being allowed to host groups of thirty people for meetings and events. We have proved that it can be done safely and have invested heavily to make our premises Covid-19 secure.

There is no logic or science, either medical or behavioural, to a 10pm curfew. It is inane to draw comparisons to the licensing hours of the 1980’s and say if it was not a problem then, why now? The social genie is out of the bottle and it is better to have people in a controlled and supervised environment of a pub, hotel, or restaurant than spilling back to each other’s houses.

Companies must allow employees to work from home if the business can operate effectively but it is not up to the government to instruct them to do so – who do the politicians think they are?

It emerged over the weekend that the track and trace app has sent only one alert for a pub or restaurant outbreak since it was launched, while other figures showed that up to a quarter of patients in hospital with Covid-19 caught the virus after being admitted into medical care.

Covid-19 is not an enemy, it is a disease, and instead of personalising and sensationalising the virus we need to accept it is here, protect the old and vulnerable and allow others to use their own judgement whilst implementing local solutions to test and trace.

We keep hearing about ‘government money’, but this money comes from business and individuals in tax. It is a massive folly to destroy the wealth creators and earners in an ill-conceived response to the pandemic. The latest version of the furlough scheme is the very definition of too little too late and the only way now left for hospitality businesses to survive the next round of lockdown is to take on even more debt. What we really want, is to be allowed to operate responsibly without demand being artificially suppressed by further restrictions.

At the end of this we must have something to come back to. The theatres, restaurants, sports clubs, cinemas and hotels will all be gone and the scientists will no doubt take credit for a made-up figure of fewer deaths but what is left for the rest of us and for society in general? 

As Churchill said, “It is no use saying, ‘we are doing our best.’ You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary.”