My friends often say that I write paragraphs. This may seem self-evident: newspaper articles are generally composed of several linked paragraphs, and this is no exception. But what they really mean by this statement, often imbued with a palpable undercurrent of frustration, is that I never truly sacrificed my verboseness or literary tendencies for the brevity which modern communication methods favour.

Until recently, Twitter was typified by an irritatingly constrictive 140-character limit. Multiple texts may be more likely to engender annoyance than appreciation in the receiver. Any Facebook message longer than about four lines leads recipients to expect an unwanted emotional diatribe. This desire for conciseness has even invaded political discussions: lengthy and well-reasoned comments regarding push-button topics on social media appear to be met more commonly with ridicule than the sarcastic and often meaningless replies which inevitably follow.

Often, it seems that anyone hoping to express complex or subtle ideas to friends must either condense them inelegantly or await the rare luxury of coffeehouse get-togethers. Therefore, a few years ago, I resorted to the ancient and arguably declining art of composing letters. This may appear somewhat archaic, but I truly believe that social media and instant messaging have increased the importance of handwritten communication.

Admittedly, busyness prevents me from writing regularly, and the convenience of online messaging is often useful for maintaining contact with close friends. Yet long-form communication remains very personal and satisfying. Letters are blank canvases on which grand ideas and important subtleties, not easily expressible in a simple text message, may be communicated to a specific recipient directly. They are also physical mementos: much as record collectors prize the tangible manifestation of nostalgia, letters enable recipients to hold valuable memories of the author. And letters invite thoughtful replies – not just a few words in answer to a specific and trivial point, but a wholehearted response which is likely to be deeper and more meaningful than a brief Tweet.

But receiving a letter represents more than just a chance for the addressee to understand more fully the mind of the writer: it shows that the author genuinely values the recipient. We live in an age where an unthinking communicator may type and dispatch a minimal reply instantly, and many people regard their overflowing inbox with irritation. However, well-composed letters reflect the planning and effort of the sender, who may hope to be rewarded with a similarly pleasing response. Finding a handwritten envelope among the charity bags and pizza flyers which regularly blight my letterbox is always exciting. I hope to convert others to my allegedly noble cause!

Unfortunately, recruits are few and far between. Social media is anything but a passing fad, and it is difficult to imagine a young person receiving a handwritten letter from one of their peers with anything other than surprise. Nevertheless, I still believe in the importance of communicating with close friends on a deeper level than the sharing of memes or truncated anecdotes: if a face-to-face conversation is not possible, letters are one of the few catalysts of this process.

I just hope that social media doesn’t take over entirely. I’d rather it didn’t infect newspapers like this one, leading contributors to disregard good grammar and omit definitive article in their pieces. One rueful day, we might even begin missing vowels out completely, until there’s nothing left xcpt cmplt nd ttr nnsnse. 😉

Since this article was written, it has emerged that the first British person has tragically died from the disease in Japan.

Fears of the coronavirus threat have intensified after health officials’ warnings of a potential global pandemic.

Italian authorities have begun to fine individuals found entering or leaving its northern outbreak areas, after the country’s death toll rose to 152 – the worst outbreak in Europe. Schools and universities have been closed, and the last days of the Venice Carnival cancelled.

Similar closures have been enforced in Iran. Public buses are being disinfected, and posters put up telling people to wash their hands. Its neighbouring countries Turkey, Iraq and Pakistan have shut down borders or imposed stricter health checks. Meanwhile, a sudden spike in cases was reported in South Korea this weekend, with the southern cities of Daegu and Cheongdo declared as quarantined exclusion zones. People are encouraged to wear face masks, and hand sanitizers have been placed in public spaces.

According to the official website of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, the UK’s risk of ‘clusters, similar to the ones in Italy’ is considered as ‘moderate to high’. But the UK’s comparative placidness appears in striking contrast to the urgency voiced by affected countries. And while Trump has expressed fury over coronavirus patients being flown back to the US, Boris Johnson has stated that the UK should remain ‘confident and calm’.

Evacuated Britons are quietly flown back, quarantined, and treated. Headteachers have been told that there is ‘no need’ to close schools. Face masks are suggested to be ineffective, though washing hands is still important. Sadiq Khan has emphasised that public transport is safe. However, while the government seems calm, others may disagree.

Earlier this month, a family from Southeast Asia complained about their treatment at a local surgery in London after possible coronavirus symptoms were found in the mother. Although measures were promptly taken by the GP to quarantine the family, the ambulance took nearly four hours to arrive (between about 11am and 3pm). Only water was provided during this time. The family, who were visiting the UK to celebrate their daughter’s graduation, eventually phoned their embassy. A director at the embassy then intervened, negotiating with the GP to allow them to order a takeaway.

Overreaction is certainly better than underreaction, and the swiftness of the GP’s response is commendable. But this example echoes the pressure on GPs described in Channel 4’s recent documentary ‘Coronavirus: Is Britain Ready?’, as well as a lack of clarity over procedures for the patients’ information. At one point in the documentary, a member of Brighton’s health board berates the council, noting that ‘Public Health England have really got to step up and be more open in their communications’.

‘We’re being drowned in demand’, another GP adds. The problem of delayed ambulances reflects more long-term concerns over the strain on the underfunded NHS. Coronavirus, if it spikes in the UK, could test this strain to breaking point.

The case may moreover anticipate the ease with which coronavirus patients can be seen primarily as threats rather than humans. In the struggle to contain the disease, the patient’s welfare could be forgotten – the incident at the surgery, unfortunately, recalls the difficulties getting food in quarantined Wuhan . A failure to recognise coronavirus as an international issue can reinforce the simplistic and unhelpful notion of the disease as a ‘Chinese virus’.

There is every reason to have faith in UK’s response to coronavirus: the 2010 independent review by Dame Deirdre Hine in relation to the 2009 influenza pandemic, observed that ‘the NHS and public health services… responded splendidly and the public response was calm and collaborative.’ Meanwhile ‘the vast majority of the reporting of the outbreak’ was ‘highly responsible’.

Nevertheless, coronavirus presents a slightly different threat in its implications for identity politics, when UK post-Brexit is arguably more volatile, more isolated. We cannot be too complacent in expecting to remain ‘confident and calm’.

Proposition – George Beglan

The Government recently announced plans to change how the UK’s VISA system works. The chief impact of this will be to block low-skilled migrants from coming to the UK. 20,700 ‘Tier 2’ General VISAs will be made available annually, divided into monthly installments. It seems that ‘Tier 1’ Exceptional Talent VISAs will be issued solely on a case-by-case basis. This is despite basic flaws in centrally-calculated economic sums.

Knowledge about immigration is, perhaps paradoxically, local in nature. It therefore exists mainly outside the knowledge of any central government or authority. Net immigration exists, as a statistic and to a lesser degree as a general debate, as an abstraction from individual context by sum addition. Whilst this can be a useful intellectual work-around when discussing general principles or debating it on television, it is illiterate to deploy it within practical economic policy. Every immigrant is surrounded by their own set of circumstances, as well as their own unique talents and knowledge. As a consequence of this, the Johnson government could never attain enough worthwhile knowledge of each and every individual. As such, they could never hope to forge a completely fool-proof economic plan. Setting a hard limitation, on a first-come-first-served basis, is a rapid and dangerous way to end up with a multitude of individual economic misallocations. Johnson’s plan could never either predict or effectively combat these issues.

In order to successfully calculate what the economy requires, there needs to be deeply detailed co-ordination between those planning it. The basic info needed for such co-ordination is usually local, temporarily valuable and difficult to compare between different cases. It’s not made easier to compare of people who can’t agree on what is valuable. What a prospective immigrant is valuable about their potential contribution to Britain, and what Johnson’s government thinks is valuable, maybe radically different.

This is the essence of the problem with the government’s proposals. People coming to this country may well have a very different understanding of what they can bring to Britain than the government’s tick-boxes. The VISA system prevents effective communication between these two parties and thus any sort of coordination between Home Office policy and prospective migrants. The government’s policy, pax Pink Floyd, makes each immigrant just another brick in the wall either facing in or out of Britain. It neglects the unique personality and potential contribution of every individual.

Subjectivity comes to the heart of the government’s problem. Who decides what the country needs? Central government? UK businesses? Voters at the ballot box every five year? Immigrants themselves? A quango? The day-to-day whims of Priti Patel? All these perspectives pulling in radically different directions mean that any simple conclusion of what’s best for Britain’s economy is impossible to arrive at. It’s amazing that a government that claims it represents a “People’s Government” has no idea just what sort of people it’s referring to in one of its central policies.

Opposition – Jasper Evans

Before I begin, I would like to make clear that I disagree with this policy. For one, I find it emblematic of Boris ‘watermelon smiles’ Johnson’s attitude towards migration, and the larger ‘hostile environment’ attitude of the recent Conservative party. Perhaps more importantly, as the son of an immigrant, I would like to be allowed to come back home in the next vacation.

So I disagree with this policy with my heart, but that doesn’t mean my wallet can not see its potential benefits. I am not going to make the tired argument that migrants take up more tax money then they produce, which despite its aggressive disconnection with the truth still manages to trundle out once in a while on Question Time. Instead, I am going to posit that in the long run, a decrease in low-paid migration may be the solution to the British economy’s greatest weakness, productivity.

The British economy is stunningly unproductive. It lingers at the bottom of the G7 table, more than 30% lower than the United States and 10-15% lower than Germany, France or Sweden. Productivity, a measure of the amount of GDP produced per hour, is vitally important to economic growth. As Nobel prize winner Paul Krugman states : ‘productivity isn’t everything, but in the long run it’s almost everything’.

The government policy will (if implemented fully) vastly limit the number of migrants coming to the U.K. Especially low-paid low-skilled workers, who will be banned altogether. This will lower the number of working people in the U.K. and as any first year PPEist should be able to tell you, less supply with the same demand leads to a higher price. Wages will rise.

This may well, in the short run, be detrimental to the U.K. economy. Higher wages mean higher costs and some firms may not be able to compete. However, in the long run, firms will see higher wages as an incentive to invest in their workers. The ratio of the cost of labour to the cost of capital (machines, computers etc) will increase, and so other methods of increasing the amount produced in a firm will become more attractive. This will lead firms to invest more in machines, in training and in emerging technologies such as AI. This investment will allow each worker to produce more goods or services in the same amount of time. Productivity will rise.

At the same time, higher wages for workers and higher costs for firms will mean the economy will level out. Workers will become more valuable and receive a higher cut of revenues, while lower profits (at least in the short run) will limit the growth in wealth of the super-rich. The policy could lead to a more egalitarian society. In other words, the new Conservative policy may solve the productivity crisis and create a more egalitarian society. If it wasn’t such a morally distasteful thing to do, it would be a brilliant idea.

The words “cash” and “money” are interchangeable, but in an age of invisible systems that do anything (and just about everything) for you, surely using tangible money has become rather passé. Why be weighed down by coins, or struggle to sift through banknotes, when you can simply swipe that innocuous, all-powerful plastic rectangle and escape all the fuss?

On one hand, going cash-free is certainly good for the environment. We save on the paper and energy that goes into churning out notes and coins – the Bank of England estimates there are £71 billion of their banknotes currently in circulation. That’s a lot of paper. The good news is that it’s become more sustainable in recent years, with the UK leaving behind cotton-paper, replacing it with the more durable, more hygienic, more secure polymer notes, with a carbon footprint 16% lower than paper. They are also waterproof, trivia fans. Nevertheless, no carbon footprint is better than some carbon footprint, so cards are still preferable.

Most obviously, bank cards are just so easy to use. Where shops offering contactless payment via credit card or mobile phone used to be a minority, now just you can shop about anywhere without worrying that they’ll say “cash only, please”. Asides from The Lamb and Flag, that is. They even only take card payments for snacks on British Airways flights! If that isn’t a sign that we’re headed for a cashless world, I don’t know what is.

Going cashless is decidedly in at the moment. Tatler magazine has affirmed that it’s something of a power-move. And to some, keeping up with trends is reason enough. But be warned: the credit card as a status symbol has the potential to divide. A bank card is disturbingly defining: right there, unalterably printed, is your name, alongside that of a particular bank (who banks there? What do they offer?), on a certain type of card (who designed it? What colour is it? How heavy is it?), all of which communicate your financial status, and by extension say something (however lamentable) about you. That’s a lot more information than most people are comfortable waving around when popping out for milk. The worst part is that people feel entitled to judge you for it. Raised eyebrow at restaurants, or snide “funny, these cards don’t usually get declined” from hoity-toity checkout staff . So in a world where we strive to eradicate elitism, do we really need another silent class marker?

The most terrifying aspect of it is psychological. Research shows that the subconscious reaction triggered by cash and card payments differs significantly: with bank cards, you don’t feel that you are losing money. Whereas the physical act of handing over cash gives us a feeling of loss, swiping a card elicits no such response. It may even be empowering. And as a bona fide card user, that sends chills down my spine.

Today, in our rampantly consumerist society, bank cards undeniably make sense. The environmental and convenience aspects are certainly steps forward. But with every innovation come new challenges, especially for people who struggle to keep up. Many elderly people still rely on cash, and not all of them can master a self-checkout as effortlessly as a Fresher in a hurry. What’s more, the threat of online scammers and credit card fraud looms large – your card details, like your personal information, are probably much more accessible to everyone else than you think.

Food for thought, I say – and how would you like to pay for that? Cash or card?