It’s apphazard
THE Covid app is no longer fit for purpose. When will the Government accept that?
The requirement to self-isolate if pinged should have ended on Monday, not in another four farcical weeks.
Some Ministers plainly agree. The Business Minister dismisses being pinged as “advisory”.
A Trade Minister tells Nissan their staff can ignore it.
Boris Johnson, though, insists the app is “crucial” with restrictions now lifted.
That’s impossible to argue when just 22 per cent use it as intended, others ignore it or turn it off, millions have deleted it and 40 per cent never even installed it.
Yet even on those derisory numbers the economic and educational damage is huge: Millions pointlessly off work. A million kids off school. It is scandalous.
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The app takes no account of our plummeting risk since its launch last year.
With most of us now double-jabbed and testing negative, there is no excuse for needless house arrest.
Press in peril
THE Home Office bid to criminalise journalists’ public interest scoops is shameful.
Such a chilling clamp would be wildly out of step with other democracies too.
Investigative reporters would be treated like spies under the suggested reform of the Official Secrets Act and jailed for years for revealing confidential Government information . . . even if doing so was provably to society’s benefit.
That is a licence for cover-up — of disastrous failures, criminal negligence or career-ending hypocrisies like Trending In The News’s Matt Hancock revelations.
It is sinister enough that the Information Commissioner’s Office carried out raids trying to uncover our source for that exclusive. This law change could outlaw such reporting entirely.
Some sensitive data must of course remain secret.
But if journalists and whistleblowers are jailed over leaks unassailably in the public interest, we are in the grip of oppression.
Border farce
ANOTHER glorious summer’s day sees a new armada from France deposit hundreds more illegal migrants on our beaches.
To legal arrivals we are arguably the most welcoming nation on Earth. But the Government’s impotence over the enormous numbers each day cheating the system is enraging the public.
Home Secretary Priti Patel desperately talks up her new deal with France to increase policing and hold the small boats back. Sadly, we’ve heard it before.
The French take our millions, wave the migrants off and even escort them into our waters.
With no real deterrent here, these mainly young men will abandon the safety of France and risk their lives. More will inevitably drown.
But while Britain remains a soft touch this evil trade will prosper.
