COMMENT
COMMENT
Keep calm and don’t carry on
I
Fiona Russell-Horne Editor-in-Chief - BMJ
“
I never saw a man who looked, With such a wistful eye, Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky, And at every wandering cloud that trailed, Its raveled fleeces by.
Oscar Wilde ” INFO PANEL
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have bemoaned the fact many times before, that whatever I write here will, by the time it gets printed, published and read, be ever-so slightly out-of-date or superseded. That is the nature of print publishing and it was ever thus. More particularly so, of course, now that we live in modern media times, when information is, literally, at your finger-tips, available at the swipe of a forefinger, or beamed directly to one’s PC, tablet or phone. Hell, if you ask her nicely, Alexa will even read the news out to you, saving you the bother of, you know, actually looking at it yourself.
All this is, of course, my rather long-winded way of saying that no matter what I write today, it will be out-of-date by lunchtime.
So, as it stands at the moment, the country is not quite in lockdown, although we keep referring to it as such. In a true lockdown, such as they had in Lombardy in Italy and in Belgium and Spain, we would be under far stricter rules about when, where and even whether we could venture from our front doors. In France, the nation that takes bureaucracy to a whole new level and then ignores it, you have to fill out a form to show the gendarmes where you are going and why. Quite what stage the UK will be at in a week when you are actually reading this, I have no idea.
The death toll from the Covid-19 has now gone beyond 1,000 in the UK (at time of writing) and last Sunday’s Times lead story warned that this lockdown-that-isn’t-really-one needs to last until June, according to the gloomiest of the government’s experts, Professor Neil Ferguson. Eek. Still, now we know that the heir to the throne, the Prime Minister and the Health Minister have all tested positive for the disease, it’s clear that it is no
respecter of rank. If it can get you, it will. Which is why we do all have to do as we are told and stay home where possible, and where not, stay at least 2metres away from others. That’s a minimum distance by the way, not a target. We do seem to have gone quite quickly from ‘oh it’ll be fine, just wash your hands and don’t hug too many people’ to ‘personal-space-police-state’
Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor of the Exchequer must be taking his temperature hourly, having spent all those press conferences playing Christopher Robin to Boris’s Tigger and Chris Whitty’s Eeyore. Still, thanks to Sunak’s financial packages to help employees, employers and the self-employed, there will be money coming in for those whose income streams have dried up, almost overnight. It’s not perfect, it was never going to be, and it does probably mean we will be head back to austerity- territory afterwards, but it will help, A lot. This thing will end. We don’t know when and we don’t know what state we will be in by then but it will end. How many businesses will survive until then is anyone’s guess, plus, of course, there is the problem that businesses who have managed to keep going until then will be so stretched they might find it hard to cope when things do pick up again. It may seem light years ago, but remember when Robert Jenrick, the Secretary of State for Housing announced his planning reforms that could see it made far, far easier to get developments on brownfield sites off the ground? All that will help to rebuild - excuse the pun - the industry once all this is over. In the meantime, those merchants who can stay open to provide much needed materials for emergency repairs are doing so.
Hang in there. We can get through this. Stay well, stay 2metres apart and keep washing your hands.
April 2020
www.buildersmerchantsjournal.net
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