Kate Andrews

The calls for tax hikes is ramping up. Last December the Wealth Tax Commission recommended a ‘one-off’ 5 per cent levy on the assets of Britain’s wealthy to pay for the growing costs of Covid-19. In January Oxfam followed suit, using its yearly inequality report to call for big taxes on wealth and high incomes. Now, it’s the International Monetary Fund’s turn, recommending not only a temporary income tax hike for high earners, but also a windfall tax — that is, a tax on ‘excess profits’ — on businesses that faired well and profited during the pandemic. The concept of wealth taxes on individuals is bad enough.

How strange to have spent a year in a world where to hug someone outside of your household is not allowed. For the past five days, six people in England have been able to meet up outdoors again, but only in a socially distanced way. Previously, the argument for crackdown on such instinctive human behaviour centred around hospitals being overrun. Today, the Covid data tells a very positive story, with infections, hospitalisations and deaths all down by 90 per cent or more since the most recent peak. Meanwhile, the right data is going up, with over half of the UK adult population having received at least their first dose of a Covid vaccine, and the top nine priority groups still on track to have been offered a first jab in less than two weeks' time.

Britain’s Covid data is moving in the right direction. Today’s update from the Office for National Statistics confirms this on one of the most critical measures: excess deaths. For the second consecutive week, deaths in England and Wales are below the five-year average. In the latest week ending 19 March, there were 10,311 registered deaths — 676 fewer deaths than the week before and down 8 per cent on the average. The good news doesn’t stop there. Not only are deaths down (more than 90 per cent below the peak of the latest wave) but the vaccine factor is also showing its effect.

To what extent do workers want to return to the office? It’s a question on everyone’s mind – none more so than Rishi Sunak. If Covid working habits stick post-lockdown, with a majority of people continuing to work from their living room, it’s not just the working day that will be fundamentally altered, but the wider economy too. The economic implications for the shops and services designed to cater to the office worker will be drastic: large parts of city centres and high streets may find themselves without customers, or enough business to turn a profit. But these were not the main points the Chancellor made in his interview with the Daily Telegraph and the Sun, as part of a Conservative fringe event hosted by iNHouse Communications.

Do vaccines lead to freedom – or to more lockdown rules? That very question would have seemed bizarre a few weeks ago, when Matt Hancock told this magazine that he’d ‘cry freedom’ when the most vulnerable had been protected. But now, things are swinging the other way. The end of the second wave in Britain (infections and intensive care admissions are down 95 per cent from the peak) has not been followed by reopening. Instead, it’s being used as rationale to continue lockdown for months to come. The latest is international travel: the freedom to leave the country.