RETURNING to work, a Rage Room and levelling up were the topics raised by columnists and contributors in the newspapers.

The Daily Mail

Janet Street-Porter said that if the current driver shortage (estimated at 100,000) continues, ‘never mind saving Christmas, our supermarket shelves will be empty well before it’s time for the Advent calendars.’

“There are hundreds of thousands of jobs available, but nobody wants them,” she said. “They’re poorly paid, at anti-social times, or involve working outside in the British weather. Covid has turned us into a nation of semi-productive home-bodies - reluctant to swap the last eighteen months of leisure wear and Zoom for a wet and windy commute.”

She said almost half of the country- and most of the civil servants - are resolutely refusing to take off their track bottoms and get back to the daily grind.

She asked why the rest of the country should obey the Prime Ministers’ back to work edict and help make Britain Great Again if he can’t even succeed with his own team?

“Why would you walk to a station or a bus stop, mix with the possibly-infected, just to show your face in the office in the vain hope of promotion?”

The Daily Express

Virginia Blackburn said in March this year a venue called Adventureland opened in sunny Sunderland and now it has unveiled the area’s first ever Rage Room - ‘a place that allows you to have a smashing time. Literally. You take your implement of choice and smash things up.’

“I would prefer a Rage Room based on the House of Commons debating chamber, empty of people, of courseBut we could all access our inner Michael Heseltine and start swinging maces about,” she said. “Or perhaps we could have Rage Rooms with ­simulated real-life situations: being stuck in a traffic jam caused by Insulate Britain idiots, listening to an interminable recorded ­message on the telephone because the bank/doctor’s surgery/Inland Revenue has failed to employ enough staff, almost suffering a heart attack when a cyclist jumps the lights in front of you.”

The Guardian

Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham said the has shone a brutal spotlight on where the places of real need are – and they are largely in the north of England.

“We have moved from the specific promise of a “northern powerhouse” to the altogether more ambiguous language of “levelling up”,” he said. “And now, if the post-pandemic pot of money is to be reduced, as the chancellor is suggesting, then the levelling-up largesse will be spread so thin that no one will notice it.

“Greater Manchester has tried to provide Boris Johnson with a solution. We have put a big positive offer to the government in the form of a Levelling Up Deal for our city-region, linking zero-carbon public transport to new and retrofitted zero-carbon housing and creating thousands of good jobs.”