SEVERAL stories in today’s edition of the Oxford Mail remind us what heroes we are lucky to have in our local emergency service workers.

The men and women of South Central Ambulance Service are so exalted that they are featuring in a new TV series which started on Monday, and will tonight feature them racing to the rescue of a fellow NHS worker in Kidlington (see page 2).

Meanwhile, the terrifying picture on today’s front page of the car crash on the A40 on Monday reminds us how vital our firefighters and police can be.

All of which goes some way to strengthen the case made by our firefighters on page 6 today, who are saying that a proposed pay freeze, expected to be imposed on them from today, is ‘brutally unfair’ – especially when their fellow key workers in the NHS are set to be exempt in the Chancellor's new budget.

The fire brigades union says that such a division pits emergency workers against each other, when really they are all part of the same big machine.

One thing is for sure: we do not envy the Chancellor in having to make any of these decisions.

From the start of this crisis, Rishi Sunak has achieved the almost impossible as a Conservative minister and won a reputation for being a lavish and generous public funder: from the first lockdown he seemed to open the public purse wide and distribute as much as he could to help the millions of people suddenly in urgent need.

Of course, no sector of our society 'deserves' a pay freeze right now: most workers who have battled on through these extraordinary times are due time-and-a-half, but our Government is already deeply into the red, and will accrue more debt before this is all over.

It will also rely more heavily yet on all public sector workers who allow the country to keep going and, we trust, will do so irrespective of whether they are forced to endure a pay freeze.

All of which, again, just goes to remind us how incredibly lucky we are to have them.