Chancellor Rishi Sunak is right to defend the Eat Out To Help Out scheme
Rishi’s right
LET’S not let the Left convince Britain that Rishi Sunak’s “Eat Out” scheme was a deadly mistake. It wasn’t.
A tiny fraction of new Covid outbreaks came from pubs and restaurants being packed out in August. Which is another reason why both The Sun and the Chancellor are so sceptical about the new 10pm curfew imposed on them.
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What “Eat Out To Help Out” did was save thousands of businesses and a vast number of jobs, as it intended. And it encouraged a public locked down for months to venture back out while observing new norms on social distancing, hand-washing and masks.
This was only a mistake to those short-sighted fools who want to shut the entire economy until Covid has “gone”.
So Mr Sunak is right to defend the scheme so staunchly in his admirably frank Sun interview. We are glad to see at least one figure so senior railing against more closures and restrictions, even as the Government’s top scientists and medics panic at every new infection.
Unlike them, the Chancellor and Boris Johnson have to save lives from Covid without wrecking millions of livelihoods and causing deaths from hardship and mental ill-health. It is an extraordinarily tough balance.
Where we strongly disagree with Mr Sunak is over how to pay the gargantuan Covid bill.
Next year, as our economy rebuilds, the last thing it will need is new taxes on fuel or the self-employed. The Covid borrowing should be parked, like a wartime debt, and repaid over a generation.
Cut taxes . . . that’s the boost we need.
Not a Government picking our pockets and suffocating the recovery.
Skyfalls in
THE new Bond film’s postponement is a catastrophe for our stricken cinemas.
Five thousand staff face the dole today if Cineworld closes for the foreseeable future.
Other operators relying on the 007 blockbuster face huge losses with little else to draw in the punters.
Have Bond’s producers thought this through? They want the Daniel Craig movie seen next April by a “worldwide theatrical audience”. They’ll be lucky.
What if Covid is still rampant? What if no viable cinemas remain?
It’s meant to be No Time To Die. Not live and let die.
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Parking mad
IT is plainly unjust that a war veteran who lost both legs to the Taliban is fined for parking in a disabled bay.
It’s not the warden’s fault. He couldn’t see a blue badge. But once Tyler Christopher explained the circumstances, why didn’t someone — anyone — show some common sense?
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Perhaps the parking firm’s millionaire owner can. The omens are not great.
How about it . . . er, “Mr Clampit”?
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