Are you surprised by Boris Johnson’s lockdown comment? This government always puts profit before human life

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Last year it was reported that the government adviser Dominic Cummings allegedly argued against strict measures to contain coronavirus, saying the government’s strategy at the time was, “herd immunity, protect the economy and if that means some pensioners die, too bad.”

It is now reported that following the second Covid-19 lockdown last October Boris Johnson told a meeting in Downing Street: “No more f**king lockdowns – let the bodies pile high in their thousands.”

More than 150,000 have died from coronavirus in the UK.

The government has always put profit before people and the economy before human life.

They may have fallen out recently but Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings remain two cheeks on the same fetid rump.

Sasha Simic

London

Lessons not learnt

Robert Murray’s letter yesterday is right on the button. There really is nowhere to hide from the climate crisis and now Covid.

Whatever course humanity takes in the future, no one will be able to claim that we were not warned about the potential for disaster. Groups and individuals have been shouting from the rooftops for years. Since the so-called industrial revolution, humans have been doing irreversible damage to planet earth. Agreed there have been some efforts to limit the damage, but rates of destruction have steadily increased. No area is now safe from exploitation, and the last few wilderness areas are now targets for the same human interference.

Yet, still, a majority of people carry on as usual. Witness the clear desire to get back to flying off to far away places to lie on a hot beach, or get drunk in a foreign bar. And the queues outside cheap clothing shops the moment they reopened. Most governments are weak and self interested on this. The lesson has clearly not got through.

In addition to the environmental and climate issues, we now face having to cope with a virulent virus in our midst. Given the continuing mass desires for material wealth and self gratification, it is almost inevitable that more similar pandemics will befall us, to add to the huge challenges which the climate crisis will impose.

Steve Edmondson

Haslingfield, Cambridge

Step out not back

What a brave and timely column from Charlotte Colombo about how the prospect of normality returning leaves her terrified and many like her, who suffer from social phobia. It is timely because the now unstoppable rush to get back to the “good old days” when life was one long hurly burly of social engagements and interactions, is looming on the horizon and, for many like her, is more menacing than pleasurable.

It is disconcerting and as she rightly states it is made even more so from suffering with ASD as well. This dire pandemic and all its necessary restrictions has indeed changed us all and hopefully now our enforced isolation can give us all an intuitive understanding of what it is like to actually suffer from this debilitating condition, when to engage in social situations is a veritable minefield.

There is indeed a real sense of stepping out into the unknown and we need to approach it in a tentative and compassionate way, that not everyone is longing to be up, close and personal on our streets and cafes again.

Making valuable reconnections is very important for our mental wellbeing but people should do it in their own time and pace and not at the behest of a once consumer ridden society, which placed so much emphasis on a sometimes superficial togetherness and not meaningful engagement.

It is time to step out, but not step back into thoughtless practices that do many men and women more harm than good.

Judith A Daniels

Great Yarmouth, Norfolk

Healthy scepticism

We are told that the prime minister is struggling to make ends meet on his six-figure annual salary. We are then told that he has spent a huge sum refurbishing the flat above 10 Downing St, which he does not own and where he has no security of tenure. Is it any wonder that we are sceptical? It simply does not make sense.

John Wilkin

Bury St Edmunds

Missing Fisk

When I first heard the announcement that President Joe Biden had declared the massacre of the Armenians to be genocide, my first thought was that I wished Robert Fisk were still alive. He wrote so often on this subject. I know his articles and books were widely read. I wonder if the president had read them too.

Penelope Smith

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