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When this is all over let’s learn the lessons

Wembley Arch is illuminated in blue to show its appreciation to the NHS amid the coronavirus outbreak in London. Photograph: Kirsty O' Connor/PA Wire. - Credit: PA

Readers have their say on the response to the coronavirus.

When everything is over let’s remember who risked their lives to save ours and contain the infection; and let’s remember that if there is money to be found to fix public budgets, health is the last place to look for them. When everything is over, let’s remember how much we needed one another.

When everything is over, let’s remember how the politicians who represent us behaved. Only by learning to select the most deserving politicians do we improve our democracy and manage to better cope with emergencies.

When everything is over, let’s remember how much we have discovered ourselves interdependent with the whole world. We are a global community willingly or not.

When it is all over, let’s remember how futile the financial casino looked in the face of the pandemic. Mountains of money that have turned into a wastepaper before death.

When everything is over let’s remember how vulnerable and helpless we felt in the face of this global tragedy. We cannot control and plan everything in our life. And we are not eternal at all.

Let us remember. Because only if we remember all this, one day we will be better.

Tommaso Merlo, Milan, Italy


Have your say

Send your letters for publication to The New European by emailing letters@theneweuropean.co.uk and pick up an edition each Thursday for more comment and analysis. Find your nearest stockist here or subscribe to a print or digital edition for just £13. You can also join our readers' Facebook group to keep the discussion and debate going with thousands of fellow pro-Europeans.

To combat coronavirus, implement massive infrastructure projects, build more houses, recruit umpteen thousand police officers and mitigate the effects of flooding, you need capacity.

Capacity does not come from having more testing kits, making land available and announcing squillions of spending from a diminishing money tree. Those things make a contribution, but most of the increased capacity comes from having people to do the work – and those people need training which in many cases takes years. Presumably they will need to have more than one A-Level and will earn more than £25,600, so, friends and partners in the EU, prepare to send us some of your brighter and better even though they will not really be welcome – we will need hundreds of thousands of them, and clearly you won’t.

Phil Green

The Treasury has confirmed that it will not be getting an extra £350m a week after Britain stops paying into the EU budget, despite false claims by Brexiteers during the referendum. Well, what a surprise!

How many undecided voters in 2016 were persuaded by this lie to vote Leave? My wife works in a local hospital where they don’t even have access to hand sanitiser. She is trying to find a supplier who has not sold all stock to buy it herself to give her at least a low level of protection.

That £350 million would have bought a lot of pots of hand sanitizer. Oh, I nearly forgot, the NHS won’t be getting it!

David John, Bridgend

• Have your say by sending your letters for publication to letters@theneweuropean.co.uk

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