There have been few novel eye-catching moments this week. There’s been some more muddling over travel, with a dash for Mexican departure lounges, but we’re used to all that now. There’s been a fuss about the amount of flying undertaken by Alok Sharma as he has visited 30 or so countries in short order in advance of November’s climate change conference in Glasgow. The question of why he can’t use Zoom like the rest of us is not an invalid one. He, it seems, has also been able to take advantage of an exemption from self-isolating on his return from his travels which is certainly unknown to and, it seems, unavailable to the general population. Again, we have become used to that. Continuing the environmental theme, I come from Liverpool originally and, as you can perhaps imagine, I have heard Margaret Thatcher called many things over the years. The Prime Minister’s labelling her this week as a proto-ecowarrior for closing down the mining industry in the UK was not one that I had ever seen coming and one which will test the patience of a number of his recently acquired friends in the north of England. Not the first foot in mouth moment for Mr Johnson, and our experience indicates that it will not be the last. Oh, and another U-turn on the App, dressed up as a reflection of scientific advice with the customary insouciance.

So far as the virus and our future of living with it are concerned, the ongoing issue is vaccination rates amongst the under 30’s. We have seen a lot of discussion about it, and it’s interesting to note how the news stories around Covid are swinging towards reporting of the relatively high proportion of younger people in those Covid sufferers who need hospitalization. For a government which has based its Covid policy so squarely on vaccination as the most viable means of controlling the virus and its effects, this has to be concerning. It’s perhaps not entirely surprising. Whilst levels of long Covid are only just starting to be known, many of our younger people have either had Covid or have known many friends who have had Covid and relatively few have suffered serious side effects. It’s easy to think, on that basis, that the nastier stuff won’t happen to you. I smoked in my early 20’s and to do so managed to convince myself that the statistics were against me becoming seriously ill as a result of it because most people who smoked did not appear to be killed by the habit.

Overall, the younger members of our society have had a pretty tough time due to Covid. They’re starting to have the finger pointed at them over vaccination and some crude stick and carrot measures such as no entry to nightclubs without proof of vaccination are being adopted. They have suffered the highest proportion of job losses, many were furloughed, they lost the opportunity to socialise at times in their life where it’s important to do so, school education has been disrupted, university fees have been spent on what have, in effect, been distance learning courses and qualifications have been a mess. As we move on, it seems that many will also be in a position where a combination of rapidly rising house prices and rising rents is likely to make it impossible for them ever to buy a house without considerable parental support. Attempts to alleviate this position have themselves, whilst helping some first time buyers, contributed to house price inflation which has made more acute the problem that they have attempted to solve.

The problem seems to be twofold. The first is that the reduction in the requirement for labour caused by the onset of the Covid measures was bound to affect people in the early stages of employment disproportionately. The second is that there is not enough emphasis in our political system on looking after those who are going to be shouldering the burden of paying for the Covid years long after many of us are pushing up daisies. I’d be interested to know if anyone with real power to do anything about it is engaging with our younger adults to ask them what they think about it and what would encourage them to be vaccinated. The overall trend in our politics to overlook the interests of younger members of our society is simply neither fair nor wise, and it seems to be a product of our politicians’ anxiety to look after the people who they consider will be most likely to vote. We’ve seen it in the triple pension lock, in the failure to intervene effectively in a housing market which is increasingly dysfunctional and in the nonsense last year over A levels and GCSE’s. It can’t then be surprising if the younger members of our voting population develop a feeling that they have no voice and their vote counts for nothing. Their failure to vote then leads to them being further ignored. This then becomes a challenge both achieving fairness and to the health and integrity of our parliamentary democracy.

It’s also been a slightly odd week because we’re at the start of the traditional silly season but few traditional silly season stories are making the grade. We have had the Dorset shark, a Lincolnshire wildlife park which has had to separate 5 parrots who wouldn’t stop swearing at visitors and a beaver born in Norfolk for the first time in 600 years, but no real whoppers. It would appear that Westminster is still creating enough headlines to postpone the close season for at least another week.

Have a good weekend.

Ian Waine leads Prettys’ Corporate Services Team and has advised on a large number of corporate recovery and corporate restructuring cases over the last 30 years. He can be contacted at 07979 498817 or iwaine@prettys.co.uk.