London Daily

Focus on the big picture.
Tuesday, Oct 14, 2025

Christmas will be a public health disaster if the UK nations don't come together

Christmas will be a public health disaster if the UK nations don't come together

Unless there’s a joint approach now to the challenges of the festive season the consequences will be grim
In any other year, it would be trite and lazy to be already writing about Christmas when we are still only in October. Yet in 2020 the subject cannot be avoided.

If you think Boris Johnson has stranded himself on the wrong side of the argument over Marcus Rashford’s holiday school meals campaign, wait until you think about the Christmas car crash towards which he and his government are now foolishly speeding.

Christmas is less than two months away. This year, it beckons more than usually as a moment of balm, hope and connection amid grim and disorientated times. Yet Britain’s surging rate of second-wave Covid cases is getting out of control. The test-and-trace system is failing.

Coronavirus restrictions across Britain are a confusing tangle. Unless he is extremely lucky, Johnson is hurtling towards an unwanted choice between imposing a Christmas lockdown and permitting a Christmas viral explosion in the population. The wrong decision here would make his mishandling of the Rashford campaign look like a pre-season warm-up.

To be fair to Johnson, he is not the only politician facing an unenviable choice about the second wave. Leaders across Europe and beyond are also grappling with comparable dilemmas. Emmanuel Macron spent Wednesday preparing an expected new French lockdown announcement of at least a month.

Angela Merkel spent the day in a conference call with regional leaders on a common approach to Germany’s lucrative but potentially lethal Christmas celebrations. Meanwhile in the polarised United States, the festive season hardly bears thinking about, whatever the result of next week’s election.

Yet Johnson cannot expect to receive a free pass simply because Covid is a global threat. Here in Britain we face particular problems of our own, to which Johnson has conspicuously failed to rise during the pandemic. Even so, he is not alone here either.

All governments at local and national level face a familiar balancing act between public health precautions and the encouragement of economic activity. But, under Britain’s broken constitutional arrangements, the public is being very badly served in an increasingly dangerous pandemic situation. Johnson is not the only one to blame for that.

The most striking fact about Britain and the pandemic is that the Covid problems are broadly the same in every part of the country. That is hardly surprising. We all live in much the same place. The range of people’s lifestyles are broadly comparable. Covid levels have risen, subsided and now risen again together.

The successes and failures have much in common too. The idea that Scotland or Wales has handled the pandemic better than England – as opposed to handling the politics and the messaging of the pandemic better – is hard to square with the general upsurge of cases.

This is emphatically not an argument against devolution. But it is an argument for better cooperation. As the Irish taoiseach Micheál Martin said last week, a day after taking the republic back into a national lockdown, we live in shared islands.

On Covid, we face shared problems in England, Scotland, Wales and in both parts of Ireland. So it makes overwhelming sense for the governments to try to align their approaches as much as possible, not to insist on doing things in different ways when it can be avoided.

It passed almost without comment at the time, but it was ridiculous that England should have adopted a three-tier response to the current phase of the crisis, while Scotland is about to have a five-tier approach (as the Irish Republic also does) and Wales currently operates a nationwide lockdown.

What is the point, in public health terms, of the narcissism of such differences? Surely the UK nations still have sufficient in common that, perhaps in consultation with the Irish Republic, they could agree on a common set of restriction tiers, with the differences between the tiers clearly spelled out, which the individual nations and their systems of local government would then manage as they see fit?

A common set of tiers would not necessarily mean a common approach – though there would not be much wrong with that. People certainly say they want politicians to come together.

It might also encourage the sharing of ideas and best practice. But standardised tiers would definitely be more understandable to the public, who are increasingly saying they are confused about the rules, and people would be able to move from one part of the islands to another with a clearer appreciation of what was involved.

Nowhere is this issue bigger or more urgent than in relation to Christmas, when more people normally move about the country than usual, when students travel home, and when people shop, party and get together with greater intensity than at any other time of year. No British politician, least of all Johnson, is going to do an Oliver Cromwell and cancel Christmas, and nor should they. Civil disobedience would inevitably follow on a daunting scale.

All the same, Christmas 2020 is a public health disaster waiting to happen unless the authorities raise their game, and do it together. This issue cannot be put off.

The Liberal Democrats in Britain and the Alliance party in Northern Ireland are spot-on with their call on Wednesday for a four-nation summit to consider a joint approach towards the many challenges of a Covid Christmas. Other parties, north and south, east and west, should back the call. This is an ideal opportunity for an intensive citizens’ assembly too, to help build trust.

For this to work, politicians must leave their pride at the door. The chances of that would normally be slim. But the demand for a people’s Christmas is going to grow and the risks of it all going wrong are very great. If not now, when?
Newsletter

Related Articles

0:00
0:00
Close
EU Deploys New Biometric Entry/Exit System: What Non-EU Travelers Must Know
Australian Prime Minister’s Private Number Exposed Through AI Contact Scraper
Ex-Microsoft Engineer Confirms Famous Windows XP Key Was Leaked Corporate License, Not a Hack
China’s lesson for the US: it takes more than chips to win the AI race
Australia Faces Demographic Risk as Fertility Falls to Record Low
California County Reinstates Mask Mandate in Health Facilities as Respiratory Illness Risk Rises
Israel and Hamas Agree to First Phase of Trump-Brokered Gaza Truce, Hostages to Be Freed
French Political Turmoil Elevates Marine Le Pen as Rassemblement National Poised for Power
China Unveils Sweeping Rare Earth Export Controls to Shield ‘National Security’
The Davos Set in Decline: Why the World Economic Forum’s Power Must Be Challenged
France: Less Than a Month After His Appointment, the New French Prime Minister Resigns
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán stated that Hungary will not adopt the euro because the European Union is falling apart.
Sarah Mullally Becomes First Woman Appointed Archbishop of Canterbury
Mayor in western Germany in intensive care after stabbing
Australian government pays Deloitte nearly half a million dollars for a report built on fabricated quotes, fake citations, and AI-generated nonsense.
US Prosecutors Gained Legal Approval to Hack Telegram Servers
Macron Faces Intensifying Pressure to Resign or Trigger New Elections Amid France’s Political Turmoil
Standard Chartered Names Roberto Hoornweg as Sole Head of Corporate & Investment Banking
UK Asylum Housing Firm Faces Backlash Over £187 Million Profits and Poor Living Conditions
UK Police Crack Major Gang in Smuggling of up to 40,000 Stolen Phones to China
BYD’s UK Sales Soar Nearly Nine-Fold, Making Britain Its Biggest Market Outside China
Trump Proposes Farm Bailout from Tariff Revenues Amid Backlash from Other Industries
FIFA Accuses Malaysia of Forging Citizenship Documents, Suspends Seven Footballers
Latvia to Bar Tourist and Occasional Buses to Russia and Belarus Until 2026
A Dollar Coin Featuring Trump’s Portrait Expected to Be Issued Next Year
Australia Orders X to Block Murder Videos, Citing Online Safety and Public Exposure
Three Scientists Awarded Nobel Prize in Medicine for Discovery of Immune Self-Tolerance Mechanism
OpenAI and AMD Forge Landmark AI-Chip Alliance with Equity Option
Munich Airport Reopens After Second Drone Shutdown
France Names New Government Amid Political Crisis
Trump Stands Firm in Shutdown Showdown and Declares War on Drug Cartels — Turning Crisis into Opportunity
Surge of U.S. Billionaires Transforms London’s Peninsula Apartments into Ultra-Luxury Stronghold
Pro Europe and Anti-War Babiš Poised to Return to Power After Czech Parliamentary Vote
Jeff Bezos Calls AI Surge a ‘Good’ Bubble, Urges Focus on Lasting Innovation
Japan’s Ruling Party Chooses Sanae Takaichi, Clearing Path to First Female Prime Minister
Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs Sentenced to Fifty Months in Prison Following Prostitution Conviction
Taylor Swift’s ‘Showgirl’ Launch Extends Billion-Dollar Empire
Trump Administration Launches “TrumpRx” Plan to Enable Direct Drug Sales at Deep Discounts
Trump Announces Intention to Impose 100 Percent Tariff on Foreign-Made Films
Altman Says GPT-5 Already Outpaces Him, Warns AI Could Automate 40% of Work
Singapore and Hong Kong Vie to Dominate Asia’s Rising Gold Trade
Trump Organization Teams with Saudi Developer on $1 Billion Trump Plaza in Jeddah
Manhattan Sees Surge in Office-to-Housing Conversions, Highest Since 2008
Switzerland and U.S. Issue Joint Assurance Against Currency Manipulation
Electronic Arts to Be Taken Private in Historic $55 Billion Buyout
Thomas Jacob Sanford Named as Suspect in Deadly Michigan Church Shooting and Arson
Russian Research Vessel 'Yantar' Tracked Mapping Europe’s Subsea Cables, Raising Security Alarms
New York Man Arrested After On-Air Confession to 2017 Parents’ Murders
U.S. Defense Chief Orders Sudden Summit of Hundreds of Generals and Admirals
Global Cruise Industry Posts Dramatic Comeback with 34.6 Million Passengers in 2024
×