Beauty entrepreneur Liz Earle has spoken out against the effects of lockdown on vulnerable communities in a new report from the Centre for Social Justice. Here’s an excerpt from her sit-down with Eleanor Mills in the Telegraph:
She’s the queen of wellbeing and author of 35 books on how to live our best life, who sold her eponymous Liz Earle beauty company to Avon in 2010, who then sold it to the owner of high-street chemist Boots in 2015 for £140 million.
So why has Liz Earle spent much of the past few months researching the impacts of lockdown on Britain’s most deprived communities for a landmark Two Nations report for the Centre for Social Justice, with “big cheeses” (as she describes them) including Lord King (former head of the Bank of England) and political grandees from Iain Duncan Smith to Andy Burnham and Miriam Cates?
“I’m not political with a capital P, but I do feel passionately that we should never be locked down again,” she says, Christmas lights shimmering behind her as an open fire roars. “I have worked with the Centre for Social Justice for years; my charity LiveTwice, which gives people a second chance, has supported their work with small charities and I can see that the consequences of lockdown have been disastrous – particularly for children and women and the poorest in our society.”
But isn’t that all being dealt with at vast expense by the current Covid Inquiry? She shakes her head.
“The current Covid Inquiry has been more about the blame-game between politicians, going through their WhatsApps rather than assessing the impact of lockdown on the most disadvantaged, or questioning whether the social harms it led to were worth it, which in my opinion – having spent months assessing the evidence – they definitely were not.” …
“Despite the known traumas lockdowns caused, the Covid Inquiry is yet to look at the effect on young people, particularly the poorest ones, and with the final report not due until summer 2026 by then it will be too late. We are sitting on a ticking physical and mental health timebomb.”
Many other experts agree. The day after we speak the news is full of reports about a spike in mortality especially among people aged 50-64, with lifestyle factors including cardiovascular disease, liver disease and diabetes, which were all exacerbated by lockdown. When I ask her what she brought to the research she is typically self-deprecating, remarking that “A lot of the report was way above my pay grade, but I did bring some basic humanity and understanding of family life, particularly as a working mum with school-age and university-age kids.”
That is way too modest. Earle is not only an Instagram influencer with more than 200,000 followers, but a mother of five and a self-made millionaire entrepreneur. “The think tank was interested in the impact on midlife women, which is very much my constituency, and I am also passionate about how tough the lockdown was for small businesses. I had to pivot my business fast or we would have gone down during the pandemic. Honestly, it was so close.” …
Most troubling, she thinks, is the hangover from the pandemic that will impact people for years to come.
“During our research for the Two Nations report we heard about infants with huge speech delays, because after they were born their mothers were isolated; there were babies who couldn’t use their mouths to smile because they had never seen a smile; eight year-olds with the social skills of a five year-old because they hadn’t been socialised. It was terrible for young mums who had to give birth in hospital, without their husbands being present because of the lockdown rules. How inhumane was that? We are only now starting to count the cost of all those missed opportunities.”
She is particularly passionate about the impact on Gen Z, the most anxious generation on record. “I can see the impact of lockdown on my own youngsters, and we were the lucky ones – we had resources and a garden and each other.” Earle talks about how one of her children’s friends “died by suicide during lockdown; anxiety levels were extreme and still are”.
Worth reading in full.
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