I will avoid my local high street following face mask rule – Yorkshire Post Letters

FROM now on, I will no longer be shopping in the local high street. I will not be supporting local businesses. My shopping will all be done online. All this as a result of our government, yet again, taking two steps forward, and four to the left (GP Taylor, The Yorkshire Post, July 15).

Why? Because the Government sees fit to make the wearing of face masks in shops mandatory. Where is the science to show that wearing masks actually works, in the field?

Whenever I see a member of the general public wearing a face mask, they are always touching it and fiddling with it – and then touching items that are for sale; items which will, most likely, be touched by others.

When people talk in face masks, invariably the masks slip down and sit underneath their nostrils. Then they have to be fingered and pulled up again. All this is gross. One might as well wave a snotty handkerchief around.

Much more effective would be the outlawing of blown-air hand dryers in public lavatories – they are extremely effective at blasting out germs from inadequately washed hands. Most insanitary, especially in confined spaces.

And how about banning blown air-conditioning in shops? That would be a great step forward. But no – let’s con people into feeling they are ‘doing something’.

All this virtue signalling is a desperate effort by the Government to encourage people in London and other large cities to feel ‘safe’, so that they will pour into the shops and ‘spend, spend, spend’. A desperate attempt to kickstart the economy.

It is a despicable undermining of democracy and personal freedom; nothing more than bullying by a government which has, for the past several months, waged a war of terror upon its people, and brought our economy to its knees. ‘Shop for Britain’? No way.

From: Edward Gifford, Wetherby Road, Scarcroft.

WE voted Conservative at the last general election: there was no other choice to ensure Brexit and stop Jeremy Corbyn.

Boris Johnson was a freedom loving, libertarian who, we hoped, would supercharge Britain, both socially and economically, but the response to the Coronavirus has been, putting it mildly, a shambolic disaster.

We never imagined a Conservative government would become the Government of authoritarian control, nor the Government of the ‘magic money-tree’, nor the Government which uses science and scientists, when their views coincide with what the cabinet needs to hear, as a political tool.

We have put up with three months of devastating house arrest. This folly will have, no doubt, killed more than the virus itself in the long run. Cancer treatments postponed indefinitely, vital operations cancelled, dentists closed, schools shuttered: none of these were needed, just look at Sweden.

Making mask wearing compulsory is the final nail in the coffin. Evidently the Government does not trust, despite frequent protestations to the contrary, the people of this country.

Editor’s note: first and foremost - and rarely have I written down these words with more sincerity - I hope this finds you well.

Almost certainly you are here because you value the quality and the integrity of the journalism produced by The Yorkshire Post’s journalists - almost all of which live alongside you in Yorkshire, spending the wages they earn with Yorkshire businesses - who last year took this title to the industry watchdog’s Most Trusted Newspaper in Britain accolade.

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Sincerely. Thank you.

James Mitchinson

Editor