Coronavirus pandemic will add to UK’s pressing social problems

ALMOST every day, except of course Sunday, I open my copy of The Yorkshire Post, which so often with its editorial offerings and perceptive letters from readers, well and truly deserves the title of “Britain’s most trusted newspaper”.

As has been seen with first, Brexit, then the coronavirus outbreak, here and across the world, British Prime Ministers and the supporting Government, get all too easily knocked off course by what one former premier, Harold Macmillan, identified as being the reason why the job is so difficult – “events dear boy events”.

The inescapable fact is that many of Britain’s pressing social problems that have been with us, certainly since the end of World War Two, confront us now as never before, particularly care of the elderly, the crisis in mental health for people of all ages, not to mention a drastic housing shortage and the disparities in health provision based on a postcode lottery.

Then a constant theme in The Yorkshire Post is a lack of affordable houses (March 7 and 9), jobs for our young people to remain in large rural areas and then schools that their children require if they are to achieve a high standard of education without being moved out of the area where they were born and brought up.

Then the devastation caused by the most recent storms that resulted in thousands of homes and businesses being flooded due to the level of the oceans, and the temperature of the seas, both rising. Also dangerously high levels of pollution discharged in to the air by industry and motor vehicles constitute our biggest headache if we wish to hold back and eventually deal with the full effects of global warming and climate change. All of the major issues have confronted us for far too long ,along with our inability to run a national railway network without having to believe that all our problems would be solved with the construction of HS2.

I have a feeling that, should I be here in 10 years time, I will still be reading in The Yorkshire Post about our seemingly insolveable problems which, as a nation, we seem either unwilling or unable to deal with other than for politicians to promise high amounts of cash on the back of much talk, without any real action, to get us out of the morass. We now seem, by our own ineptitude, to have sunk without any meaningful and constructive way of moving forward as a united nation.