Public Health

Debate between Lord Mackinlay of Richborough and Lord Brady of Altrincham

Tuesday 30th November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Sir Graham Brady]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. It is a very serious concern that we might be entering a world where we lurch from one set of restrictions to another, where no business and no individual can get used to the idea of the freedoms they are able to exercise or what restrictions might be in force at the time.

What really concerns me—I think we all know and recognise this—is that we are dealing no longer with a pandemic, but with an endemic virus that will be with us for many, many years and probably forever in some form. Further variants will emerge. They might do so every couple of months or every year. We tend to have a new flu strain on an annual basis and some are much worse than others. But surely, we need to get back to an assumption that people will make decisions for themselves and have control over their own lives. We cannot move, as we appear to have done, to an environment in which the Government simply assume they can instruct us whenever there is the first small evidence from anywhere in the world of a new strain that might behave in a different way, and new and potentially swingeing public health measures are put in place. I ask Ministers to consider the implications of that and for looking at other diseases. Will we start to treat other diseases and viruses in the same way, assuming the best thing to do is to compel people and instruct them on what actions they need to take?

[Craig Mackinlay (South Thanet) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is starting to explore the issue of what happens when there is a variant. What we see from the Government thus far is a load of new measures and, possibly, the pharmaceutical companies saying, “We can make a new vaccine for that within about 90 days”. We would then have many months to get it in everyone’s arm. Having done that and gone back to a sense of freedom, another variant would emerge and we would be on that track all over again. Has he considered the madness of that type of policy?

[Sir Graham Brady]

We should all be afraid of the madness of that kind of policy. The difficulty is that 18 months ago, when some of us started raising these concerns, it was possible for some people to suggest that we were being fanciful. We have now lived it for 18 months and we can see this reaching ahead. We think back to when the Coronavirus Act 2020 was renewed again, taking us through to spring next year, and the assurances we were given that that would be the last time. I thought we would not need this kind of legislation again, but we see the Government’s immediate assumption that they should reach for new controls, new compulsion and new rules to inflict on the British people. We need to move away from that and back to a world where we trust people, engage with the public and recognise that the Government are there to serve the people, not the other way around.