The government’s blinkered approach to lockdown will cost tens of thousands of lives

THE government will win this evening’s vote to plunge 99 per cent of the country back into an unnecessarily draconian lockdown that will likely kill tens of thousands as the years pass.

But it’s becoming obvious that the Tory rebels of the Covid Recovery Group are starting to win the moral argument.

Yesterday’s publication of the Government’s pitiful so-called cost-benefit analysis of our new tiered system proved work has not been done to consider the true costs of shutting down the country for months on end.

The Cabinet has decided that Covid deaths are its priority, no doubt terrified of the constant drumbeat from the BBC and most of the rest of the mainstream media about daily death tolls and case numbers.

But as you know, the situation is far more complex than that.

Halting much of the economy – including entire industries like the arts, travel and hospitality – and confining folk to their homes for potentially over a year, stopping human relationships in so many forms, is catastrophic.

The wave of redundancies set to be announced due to the collapse of Debenhams and the Arcadia Group are just two examples of the real world consequences of lockdown.

We heard it yesterday too in heartbreaking detail on my talkRADIO show from Irene in Durham, a self-employed woman whose son died as a result of a missed medical check-up during the Covid crisis who is now raising her grandchildren on homemade soup because her business has collapsed due to lockdown.

Having been forced to sell her car and wedding ring to try and keep afloat, she summed up the mood of so many when she told me: “Those MPs have no concept of what it’s like or what they’re doing to ordinary, decent, hardworking lives.”

Irene is one of hundreds of thousands of hardworking Brits wondering what their future will look like in a post-Covid world. She’s one of hundreds of thousands of Brits who can’t afford to live for another six months in this hell.

That’s why Labour’s decision to sit on the fence for today’s key vote is sickening.

Just like with his disappearing Brexit position, the Leader of (No) Opposition Keir Starmer is once again saying his party does not have a formal position on the biggest issue facing this country in decades.

Asking his MPs to abstain for purely political reasons is a shameful dereliction of duty which voters will not forget.