Peter Rhodes on scoffing, solstices and who are the hard-working people?
It emerged at the Covid inquiry this week that the Government's well-intentioned initiative, Eat Out To Help Out, was launched without consulting the scientists and may have contributed to the death toll by encouraging people to spend hours in crowded restaurants. Hindsight? Not entirely.
Leaving aside the infection risks from mingling with strangers, what about the more obvious danger of people pigging out on subsidised meals? In August 2020 when the Eat Out scheme was going strong, I noted in this column: “Some punters are booking two or three meals a day, some insist on paying after each course to claim maximum refunds and some are abusing the staff when service is slow. There seems to be a golden rule of human behaviour: the bigger the bargain, the worse the rabble.”
At the time, doctors were already warning that being overweight not only increased your risk of death from Covid-19 by a shocking 50 per cent but might also reduce the effectiveness of any vaccine. Yet still the face-stuffing went on.
Here we go again. Rishi Sunak promises that the coming tax cuts will be aimed at rewarding “hard working people.” This is a socio-economic group that has never been properly defined. The hardest-working people in Britain are probably those semi-slaves in the so-called black economy where all payments are in cash and nobody pays any tax, so tax cuts make no difference.
Further up the food chain, you often find that those who claim to be working hardest are either wasting time or unable to do their job properly. Above them are bosses who talk grandly about hard work but find plenty of time for golf. And right at the top are the Royals, who earn the title “hard working” for opening hospitals and planting the occasional sapling.
I wrote a few days ago that November 21 always struck me as a happy date, marking just one short month to the winter solstice and lighter days. A reader writes in great detail to point out that around the solstice, lighter evenings may be outweighed by still-dark mornings. So bang goes my happy date. Thank you very much, sir. What next – the truth about Santa?
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