Dan Wootton: 'The government must allow us to rip off the masks'

The government must be bold and brave when it comes to our delayed Freedom Day.

They must allow us to rip off the masks and cancel the one metre plus social distancing rule once and for all. It’s now clear that those moves are absolutely necessary if our decimated events industry is to survive.

That’s made obvious in an internal economic impact assessment produced by the government’s Events Research Programme and leaked to Politico’s Playbook today.

They reported: "The good news is the (pilot events) didn’t find a serious spike in Covid-19 transmission — at one point there were just 15 cases across the whole program.

"The bad news is the modelling found in effect, that keeping any measures would cost the economy billions and see many businesses close.

All the rules must go. The focus must now move towards personal responsibility above all else. Give businesses an opportunity to survive this. As I’ve been saying for weeks, the government messaging must change too. As a Cabinet source told The Daily Mail today: “It’s all over, even if not everyone in Government has realised it yet. The link between cases and deaths is broken.”

Continuing with face masks or attendance caps or alcohol bans would see 30% wiped off the events industry compares to its 2019 level.

It would be particularly disastrous for arts venues, cinemas and business events that would see 40% wiped off its value. But hit hardest would be nightclubs and live music, plummeting by 63% off their 2019 value.

Mark Harper – Chair of the Covid Recovery Group – is right to suggest the government may not have published these figures because “it would have demonstrated that we could have safely opened on June 21.”

The government keeps saying it’s about data and not dates. Well the data is now pointing in only one direction.

The same goes for the devastated travel and tourism industry which has hosted a day of action today to demonstrate its plight. The government has made a dire situation even worse with its maddening Amber List, which makes us an outlier compared to other European countries.

Again, the data here is clear. Of the over 23,000 arrivals from amber list countries, not one brought back a new Covid variant. As a result, quarantine-free travel to amber list destinations must be immediately introduced and far more countries should be put on the green list tomorrow.

The wilful destruction of an entire industry - which is worth £16 billion a year to the British economy and responsible for 221,000 jobs - without the public health data to back it up is no longer acceptable or moral.