Covid-19

Alistair Carmichael Excerpts

Monday 28th September 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mr Alistair Carmichael (Orkney and Shetland) (LD)]

I am grateful to you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for the opportunity to take part in this debate.

It does strike me that the mood of the House tonight is very different from the mood that we saw back in March when we first anticipated having to take measures to deal with this. I have to say that the mood of the House is actually reflected in the mood of the population more widely. There is a palpable sense of frustration that we have reached this point, and I think that has come for a number of reasons. I would say gently to those on the Treasury Bench that if that frustration is to be tackled and dealt with, it is going to require a different approach from our Governments, because what is true of Government here in Westminster and Whitehall is also true of Government in Edinburgh, Belfast and Cardiff. As the hon. Member for North Herefordshire (Bill Wiggin) said, we do need to have again the sense of joint endeavour that we had in the early days, but which we have lost.

I think that the public mood, while there is that frustration, is one that is still prepared to do what is necessary and to take the threat posed by covid seriously, but I think that the public are, quite rightly, less likely to tolerate any inconsistencies or illogicalities in the measures put in place. I have to say that, later this week, I would in normal circumstances have taken my parents, who are both in their 80s, to a meeting—with people in relation to the management of their business—in my car. I am not going to be able to do that because it is against the Government’s guidance in Scotland. I can, however, put them in a taxi, although the taxi driver will doubtless have seen some, possibly dozens, of people that day. When we look at the more draconian measures that have been put in place, the element of what we might call “whataboutery” does come into play, because people do ask, “Well, what about this, what about that and what about the other?”

The frustration also comes from the fact that, again, as the hon. Member for North Herefordshire said, we did not know what we were facing in March, but we do know an awful lot more now. Revisiting the provisions of the emergency legislation that we put through, I see so little of it being used and so little of it being justified. The role of this place is in holding the Government to account and saying, “Yes, we were prepared to give you these powers when we did not know, but now that we know what we know, we need better justification than we have had from you.”

The other source of frustration is the inability of all our Governments to deal with things that surely ought to have been foreseeable. It surely ought to have been foreseeable that, when we took students back on to campuses, we ran the risk of seeing spikes and hotspots of the sort that we have. It was surely foreseeable that there would be some sort of lockdown locally as a consequence of that, and it was surely foreseeable that for many young people—yes, it is a great time in their lives, but it is also a time when they are most vulnerable, living away from home, many of them for the first time, in strange communities—there would be a greater need for mental health support in those circumstances. Despite the foreseeability of all those things, none of the measures has been put in place and, yes, I have tremendous sympathy for those of our students who have been left simply swinging in the wind.

One of the biggest difficulties that we have had across the four nations, but especially in Scotland, has been the determination to centralise control. We have had different patterns of behaviour emerging in different parts of the country, but different patterns of behaviour surely demand different answers. The centralisation has got to stop.