Ever the post-truth traitor our country didn’t deserve, Boris Johnson has agreed to ramp up Britain’s contribution to the World Health Organisation with £571m to provide research for a vaccine that is scientifically impossible to achieve, putting us ahead of America’s contribution and making us the joint largest funders on a par with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for 2020/21.
Does the scale of the coronavirus issue really justify such a chronic explosion in public sector debt?
Christopher J. Wilkinson
ONS statistics released yesterday showed that Britain’s borrowing figure for this calendar year is already over £120 billion and will undoubtedly be much more by the end of the year. Does the scale of the coronavirus issue really justify such a chronic explosion in public sector debt? And make no mistake, the tax rises that the state will levy to help close the funding gap the government caused are coming sooner rather than later, despite the tax burden being at the highest level since Harold Wilson devalued the pound in the late 1960s.
We need to get business going again.
Christopher J. Wilkinson
The Conservative government needs to stop scaring people out of the shops, the pubs, the parks and the cafes. We need to be opening GPs surgeries for physical appointments to prevent illness, not just cure it. We need to be lifting the restrictions for commerce and industry in view of a low death rate, not piling on more restrictions such as the 10pm curfew in view of rising cases. We need to get business going again. Getting the economy sorted is the first step to sorting out the virus.
SOURCES:
https://www.ft.com/content/32d5befc-90e8-43a5-b805-7dc357e30666
https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/governmentpublicsectorandtaxes/publicsectorfinance/timeseries/dzls/pusf
Christopher J. Wilkinson 