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Hello and welcome to Spectator Out Loud, where every week we ask three of our writers to read their piece from a new issue of the magazine.

I'm Fraser Nelson. Now this week we're going to be joined by Sam Carlisle, who's a mother of a disabled child, Elvey.

She says her family have been abandoned by the government during the

pandemic. We'll also hear from Oxford University's Dr. Alberto Jubilini on whether another

lockdown is ethical and as a scholar in the subject he'd know. Have the alternatives, he says,

been rationally assessed? If he hadn't, it's not an ethical consideration. And finally,

for the first time on the podcast, our great writer Tacky, who's been with us since the early 70s,

hasn't missed an episode even when he was in prison, tells us why the New Yorkers are fleeing

the city. First up, Sam Carlisle. When lockdown starts, all kinds of things stop. The first

one in March was the worst time of my life as a parent, not because of my daughter's severe

disabilities, but because of the lack of support. Elvys 19. She has a mental age of three, sleeps four hours a night and can't walk.

She has to be showered, dressed, fed and physically moved around our home. I have learned so

much from my beautiful, funny daughter. She works incredibly hard to achieve the smallest things. We were told

Elvie wouldn't live past two and that she was unlikely to speak. In the summer, she said her first

five-word sentence. I want crisps, please, mummy. Through necessity, being Elvie's mum has made me resilient and resourceful, but the

pressure of caring in lockdown nearly broke me and thousands of other parents. And so this second

national lockdown is terrifying. The provision for disabled children was inadequate before anyone

had heard of COVID-19. In 2018, the disabled children was inadequate before anyone had heard of COVID-19.

In 2018, the disabled children's partnership discovered a 1.5 billion funding gap

...