Public Health

Alistair Carmichael Excerpts

Tuesday 1st December 2020 Commons Chamber

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

It is pleasure to make a short contribution to this debate, which has been compelling to follow. The constant thread we find, no matter which way people will vote tonight, is enormous frustration in all parts of the House, the roots of which are to be found in the fact that the Government have lost their way in tackling covid. There is a lack of coherent strategy and of route maps from one tier to the other. I say to those on the Treasury Bench that my Liberal Democrat colleagues and I will not take part in the Division tonight; we feel it would be irresponsible to leave the country in a situation where we did not have regulation after midnight, but that should not necessarily be taken as a green light for the Government to continue to act in this way in the future.

I also hope that the listening extends not just to the Department of Health and Social Care, but to the Home Office. I am sure I was not the only Member who looked at the TV screens at the weekend and saw police officers in London enforcing the Home Secretary’s rule of two. People speak about the cost of the cure being perhaps greater than that of the disease and we tend to think of that in financial terms, but clearly the way in which we have tackled covid has a cost that goes well beyond that. I have little sympathy for those arrested on the streets in London at the weekend. I agree with almost nothing that they say, but it is important that in this House, of all places, we should be able to support their right to assemble, and to protest peacefully and within the law. We walk away from that at our peril, because these freedoms were hard-won and if we give them up, they will not be easily brought back.

I wish to say a few short words about the position facing the travel industry, which is in many ways the Cinderella service in all this. I have been speaking to travel agents in my constituency. In the early days they kept their doors open. They were having to work around the clock to process cancellations and the rest of it, making sure that people got refunds. Since then, they have seen their business fall off a cliff. There is lots of help out there for other aspects of hospitality, and rightly so, but these are people who are now being left with nowhere to go. These businesses work not in weeks or months, but in months and years, and they are being left behind. There are very few simple things that require to be done, but the Government have to listen to them now.