Imagine a country where you’re allowed to buy vodka and cigarettes but not baby clothes, because they are ‘non-essential’. A place where supermarkets can sell you socks but, mysteriously, neither tights nor lightbulbs. All right, you may plunge to your death down a dimly lit staircase in Pontarddulais, but at least you didn’t get that terrible Covid.
Often the butt of ignorant jokes, my homeland Wales is now quite rightly a laughing stock. Supermarkets have been allowed to remain open during the 17-day ‘firebreak’ — or Llockdown as it could more honestly be described. But Welsh Labour, led by First Minister Mark Drakeford, has banned them from selling household goods, clothes and books because a) that might encourage the dangerous activity known as ‘browsing’, and b) he claims it is ‘a straightforward matter of fairness’ to prevent retail giants making money from certain goods when small shops which sell them have been told to close.
‘Iesu Mawr!’ as Mamgu, my late grandmother, used to cry at times of peak consternation. The ban makes about as much sense as saying: ‘No, you can’t have a bath tonight because the shower’s broken.’
It is hard to overstate how insane this all is. Beyond the university towns and the Valleys, much of Wales has remarkably few Covid cases. Deaths from the virus fell to zero for several weeks and only recently ‘soared’ to 18. Meanwhile, tourist-dependent businesses in Pembrokeshire have followed the rules meticulously in order to welcome visitors this half-term week and, with luck, stave off bankruptcy. Hen dro! Drakeford won’t ease the restrictions until the entire nation has been razed to an abject state of ‘fairness’.
At least the farce has finally lifted a curtain on the tragedy which has afflicted this beautiful small nation since devolution in 1997.
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