Party on!
SO now we know for sure: England will celebrate New Year’s Eve with no new Covid restrictions.
It’s the right call, and not just for our embattled publicans.
Yes, daily recorded cases hit a new high over Christmas but that’s to be expected with households testing themselves to exhaustion ahead of festive gatherings.
Deaths remain stable, and although hospitalisations are up, they are still a fraction of previous Covid peaks.
Scotland has seen a similar rise in cases, despite extra restrictions there, and while Nicola Sturgeon grimly nurses a whisky for Hogmanay, hordes of her countrymen are now set to descend on English nightclubs instead, with a similar influx from Wales.
We’re sure pub landlords across the borders will be looking enviously at Boris Johnson’s approach: trust people to manage their own risk, behave responsibly to others and just as importantly, have fun!
Park & chide
IT is enraging that hospitals fleeced staff, patients and visitors for over £53million in parking fees in the past year.
God knows what this backdoor tax on being ill would have been if relatives had been allowed to visit Covid patients.
The Tories recognised the injustice of hospital parking in their 2019 manifesto and have ordered NHS Trusts to stop charging staff, regular patients and parents of sick kids — but it seems some trusts have yet to get the memo.
The Clap for Carers was meaningless if our nurses and other health service heroes are having their pockets pilfered just for turning up to work in a pandemic.
Tank’s a lot
BRIT drivers’ wallets have for too long been squeezed like lemons when it comes to petrol prices.
Currently, it costs £16 more to fill up a family car in the UK than in Austria — and that’s DESPITE Trending In The News’s Keep It Down campaign having successfully lobbied the
Government to freeze fuel duty for 12 years in a row.
At this rate it can’t be long before teenagers are not so much pestering Mum and Dad to buy them a car, as to fork out instead for the petrol to go in it.
Gotta poll with it
PERMA-grumpy Oasis tunesmith Noel Gallagher says he is so disillusioned with Labour he might launch his own party.
So far potty-mouthed Noel has been tight-lipped on policies but we’d be shocked if his masterplan didn’t include lower duties on cigarettes and alcohol, and exile for anyone called Liam.
Some might say he could turn the former Red Wall into a Wonderwall.
