Coronavirus: Staggered closures are reviving the north-south divide | UK News

The North has become the epicenter of England’s second wave of coronavirus, with the toughest restrictions imposed in some areas.

Sky News political editor Beth Rigby has spent this week touring northern towns and cities where staggered blockades have shattered the normal lives of millions of people.

Walk into downtown Bradford and the shock of COVID-19 in this city in West Yorkshire it’s easy to see.

In the shadow of the imposing Venetian-style town hall in Centennial Square is a gigantic makeshift coronavirus test center.

It has been there for four months and the 536,000 people who live here in Bradford have been living in lockdown for three months.

This was one of 20 cities and towns in Greater Manchester, East Lancashire and parts of West Yorkshire where people have been banned from meeting indoors since late July.

The summer here was harsh and the winter is about to get worse.

I was in Bradford on Monday, the day the government announced its three-tier COVID alert system.

For this city not much has changed, it is already at Level 2.

How London and other large southern cities were enjoying an almost normal summer, the people of Bradford following stricter rules and making sacrifices with no end in sight.

Medical Director Chris Whitty told me the day the government announced its new tiered system at a televised press conference that Bradford has shown “excellent leadership” in working to keep virus rates low in his community.

But getting through this winter “is going to be tough and everyone knows it,” he said.

It is particularly difficult in the North West, North East and Yorkshire, where COVID levels and hospital admissions are rising rapidly.

All but one of the top 20 virus hotspots in England are in the north.

It is these cities and towns that are being most affected by this second wave and I saw with my own eyes this week the very real impact it is having on people’s lives and livelihoods while traveling to Bradford, Sheffield, Rochdale, Manchester and Liverpool. .

If in the first confinement we were “all together”, the second time we are increasingly separated.

As the initial wave receded, the options on how to deal with the second have become nuanced and controversial, as trade-offs between public health and the economy have become more finely balanced and more fought for.

In his deserted office overlooking the remodeled Park Hill estate outside Sheffield, Subway Mayor Dan Jarvis is clearly concerned.

Sheffield, a student city, now has the eighth highest weekly infection rate in the country and has moved to level 2 “high risk.”

Jarvis tells me that he would support a tighter lockdown in a heartbeat if he could assure the people of Sheffield that they would get the financial support they need.

“Yes [to stricter measures] from a public health point of view, because I am not convinced that the restrictions that are introduced do the job of reducing the rate of reinfection.

“But we also have to look at the state of our economy.

“So yeah, I think more restrictions are likely to be introduced on the public health side.”

“What I’m saying is that they must go hand in hand with additional financial support measures.”

The message from the North over the past week is that the financial support offered by Westminster is not enough and if the central government does not pay the bill, local leaders do not believe that their communities can, or should, bear the cost.

But as local and national politicians fight for the terms of regional closures, people have also joined in this crisis.

In Liverpool, I met Everton supporter Dave Kelly, whose volunteer group ‘Fans Supporting Foodbanks’ has been feeding hundreds of families during the coronavirus crisis, with Liverpool and Everton fans putting aside their sporting rivalries and working together to collect food and other donations to give to local families and schools.

As I help him unload boxes of clothes at the Fazakerley community center in one of the poorest parts of Liverpool, he tells me that football fans and players from the city’s two big clubs have donated £ 200,000 to charity in the last months.

But the new lockdown measures imposed on Liverpool this week are hurting.

Pub closings mean Dave will watch Saturday’s Merseyside derby alone at home.

“I protected myself for months,” he tells me. “And now I’m going to have to do it again.”

And the volunteers at the local community center are worried, angry and skeptical.

Angry that Liverpool is one of the few parts of the country that is being subjected to the strictest lockdown measures and skeptical that they will work.

Maureen Delahunty-Kehoe, who works for the Fazakerley Community Federation, tells me that she almost lost her father to the coronavirus in the first wave.

“It’s scary,” he says.

“The way people are going to come out of this are different extremes. Some people will be greatly affected, others have buried people.

“It’s scary to think that we don’t have it under control, that we don’t have the proper measures.”

Dave wants the government to act at the national level instead of singling out Liverpool.

“We need to go into a total blockade – not Liverpool, not Merseyside, not the Liverpool city region, we need to blockade the whole country,” he tells me.

“Unfortunately, I think the vast majority of Liverpool will probably think that the government is more concerned with protecting the economy than its citizens.”

But as soccer fans put their differences aside, the political divisions in this second phase of COVID become more tense.

And that tension was not felt more intensely anywhere than in Manchester where I ended the week under a cloud of uncertainty and acceptable local anger at Westminster’s attempts to relocate the region from the city of Manchester and Lancashire, which is now entering Level 3 after securing a £ 42 million deal with the government on Friday, at the same “very high” risk level as Liverpool.

And in the city on Thursday, that showdown between Westminster and Manchester unfolded in the city’s St. Peter’s Square when Subway Mayor Andy Burnham, flanked by his deputies Sir Richard Leese and Bev Hughes, organized an impromptu press conference. to tell his people that they were being used as “the canary in the coal mine for an experimental regional lockdown strategy” that might not work.

He said Westminster was “treating the North with contempt.”

Was a remarkable speech That spoke to the anger, anxiety and hardships felt in Greater Manchester, where, as in Bradford, people have been locked in Level 2 restraints for three months with no additional financial support.

A crowd spontaneously gathered behind our television cameras to cheer and applaud their mayor while demanding additional financial support.

When I interviewed him after his statement, Mr. Burnham told me that imposing Level 3 in Manchester “would ruin the lives of thousands of people in this city” and he was not willing to allow that to happen.

“There is not enough support in this agreement, we will not deliver our residents to difficulties in the run-up to Christmas, it is as simple and straightforward as that.”

“If the government wants a regional blockade strategy, it has to finance a regional blockade strategy and protect everyone’s health through this crisis.”

The government took a regional lockdown approach to try to safeguard the broader economy, but my week in the north illuminated how much this approach is reviving the north-south divide and reopening old grievances between the government and communities that feel forgotten and left behind. behind.

It comes with a political cost for a conservative government that promised to level this country and improve the lives of those who voted for Boris Johnson in the former Red Wall seats.

But this also comes at a much higher cost.

As political progress stagnates, the virus advances and that costs lives.