IF YOU haven’t yet come across Planet Normal, the Telegraph’s weekly podcast presented by its two most ‘lockdown sceptic’ columnists, Allison Pearson and Liam Halligan, last Thursday’s is a good one to begin with.
It reviews the week Captain Tom died (on which we published James Delingpole’s view here), the EU vaccine fiasco and post-Brexit UK triumph in the vaccine wars, plus a good news stats update of falling cases and falling Covid deaths.
But what stood out for me was the interview Pearson and Halligan did with a headmaster of a combined primary and secondary school about lockdown’s terrible effect on children and their mental health. He details the huge deterioration he witnessed in November and how with a return to lockdown after Christmas he is more concerned than ever.
You can listen to him at about 24 minutes in here (February 4 edition).
Politicians need to wake up and listen to teachers like him, not to the unions. They also need to read ‘Simon’s story’, a day in the life of a nine-year-old’s online home-schooling existence 12 floors up in a council block, seeing no other child now for months, which we published yesterday. ‘It lays out the appalling situation so starkly. V upsetting,’ one reader wrote personally to me. It does and it is.
It is enough to make you weep.
