Covid-19: Response and Excess Deaths
Debate between Andrew Bridgen and Graham Stringer(7 months, 3 weeks ago)
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Graham Stringer
I agree with the hon. Gentleman to a point. In March, when the first decisions were made, nobody knew what was going to happen. There was a panic to go into lockdown, which was understandable while people were seeing what was going on, but very soon after that people did know. What I think was, and is, indefensible was to carry on with policies that we knew were damaging the economy and were not protecting people. I therefore voted against my own party, which supported the Government and more on this issue. I went through the Lobby with a small number of colleagues from my party and the hon. Gentleman’s party to say that what was happening was wrong, and that the damage being done by the policies was probably worse than covid. It might be hindsight for March and April 2020, but not for the rest of the time and the second lockdown.
Once we knew the profile of the disease, we knew that we were damaging children. I go into schools and meet eight and nine-year-olds who were locked down when it was known that children were not at risk. A very small number of children died and, as far as I know, they all had comorbidities—I stand to be corrected—so covid was essentially safe for children. We have damaged both their mental health and their ability to learn. I go into schools from time to time, as I am sure the hon. Gentleman does, and teachers tell me that it is very difficult to catch up. I am still annoyed about the response, and I do not think it is hindsight.
I went through the Lobby with a minority of colleagues. One of the two failures of our democracy’s normal checks and balances was that this place was not functioning, as the Easter holiday was extended. Surely the most important thing in a crisis is for our democratic institutions to function properly. We could not ask proper questions and there were no follow-ups. We kept our Select Committee going but, with the best will in the world, it was a pale imitation of what had gone before. There was a complete failure to insist on more accountability from the Government while the economy was shut down. Some of us, although we were not very many, came here to try to keep it going.
Our democracy’s second important check and balance is the fourth estate. These publications are not normally my politics but, with the exception of The Daily Telegraph and The Spectator, and the Daily Mail to a certain extent, the rest of the media, led by the BBC, were quite uncritical of what was happening. People say that BBC reporters were told not to criticise and not to ask difficult questions, and political journalists—not specialist health journalists who might have asked more pertinent questions—were sent to the press conferences. It was a political question, but it was also a science and health question. We were really let down by the BBC primarily, and by other parts of the media.
The hon. Member for Christchurch and other hon. Members have talked about the Hallett inquiry. I supported the inquiry but, having seen the way it has gone, I have given myself a good talking to. I do not think I will ever again support an inquiry. Do we really want to spend half a billion pounds on this inquiry? I attended the previous debate on recompense, and we heard how lawyers are getting fat on all these inquiries. I do not know when the Hallett inquiry will report, but it may well last for years and cost half a billion pounds. It certainly will not provide us with any advice on what to do if there is a pandemic next year—I suspect that advice is what we all want. By the time it reports, there may have been another Government or two and it will be a historical document. Sweden is not a perfect society, but its inquiry has reported. The motion before us calls for the fourth part of the inquiry, which will be on vaccines, but is the inquiry really the technical body to do that? I do not think so.
In the first stage, the inquiry has shown an extraordinary bias towards believing in lockdowns. I would want to know a number of things from an inquiry: did the lockdowns work? Did they save lives? Have they cost lives? Where did the virus come from? The inquiry is not even looking at that and it is not dealing with any of those things, but it is taking a long time. It has made it abundantly clear that it is going to look at the impact of the virus on social divisions and poverty. I am a member of the Labour party and I can tell the inquiry, because I know, that poor people come off worse from diseases. It can go back to look at the Black report from 1981, I believe it was, if it wants to see that, as it talks about both regional and class disparities. We do not need to look at this issue, as we know that poor people do badly when there are epidemics—that has been true for all time.
Andrew Bridgen
The hon. Gentleman is making an eloquent point. Given our experience of inquiries, be it the current covid inquiry or the ongoing Post Office Horizon inquiry, is it any surprise that even the sub-postmasters have come to the conclusion that there is no justice in these inquiries and they are now considering bringing private criminal prosecutions to get their own justice?
Graham Stringer
No, I am not surprised about that. Inquiries take a long time and their reports and recommendations often gather dust. I have never made this point before, and I hope I am not going off-piste too much, Madam Deputy Speaker, but every time there is an horrific murder of a child we get a report with 90-odd recommendations, and the question is: does that protect the next child? No, it does not. I do not believe that these inquiries do. We need serious cultural change in many of these organisations, rather than another report on something. That is an easy thing to say and a very difficult thing to achieve.
Let me come on to the other part of the debate, which is about excess deaths and the number of deaths. It appears that just over 200,000 people were killed in this country by, or died of, covid. I had my doubts about these figures from the beginning. On a number of occasions, right from the start of covid, the Science and Technology Committee heard from statisticians. We had Sir Ian Diamond and Professor Spiegelhalter in to talk to us about the statistics. We heard from people from what is now the UK Health Security Agency but was then a named part of the NHS. We asked them whether they had the statistics on the difference between people who died from covid and those who died with it. If someone was dying of cancer and went into hospital, there was a fair chance that they would have got covid, because there was not perfect protection within hospitals. Such a person would then be registered as having been a covid death, but clearly they were going to die of cancer. From the very beginning, that obscured the statistics.
Graham Stringer
I am not suggesting that at all. I am suggesting that at that time, when it was difficult to examine people because there was a distance between clinicians and the people who had suffered death, there was a temptation and a view that covid should go on the death certificates. I suggest no conspiracy, though. I do not believe in conspiracies.
Andrew Bridgen
The hon. Gentleman will be aware that the AstraZeneca vaccine was withdrawn eventually in the UK and around the world. It was withdrawn because of the rarest of blood clots on the brain. It was not put down on any death certificates in the UK by doctors until after the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency admitted, due to international pressure, that there was that risk. After that, the death certificates started to appear with vaccine-related harms. I put it to the hon. Gentleman that that was because doctors were intimidated by the idea that their reputations would be smeared for putting anything down as a vaccine harm or by having the GMC on their back.
Graham Stringer
The hon. Gentleman has made his point. I do not believe in conspiracies. I do believe that, from time to time, one gets a view, both in professions and outside professions, that pushes judgments in one particular direction. I believe there is one point on which we can reach a consensus in the debate: Government Ministers said that the vaccines were 100% safe—it was particularly egregious when that was said about children— but no vaccine or treatment, as right hon. and hon. Members have said, is 100% safe. I think it was a mistake to say those things.
Excess Death Trends
Debate between Andrew Bridgen and Graham Stringer(10 months, 3 weeks ago)
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Andrew Bridgen
I agree with the hon. Gentleman. He is a medical doctor, so he clearly has some knowledge. Correlation is not causation, but it is an alarm bell. Alarm bells are going off all over the building, but no one wants to open the door to see whether there is a fire.
Future generations will ridicule us for what we have done in response to a seasonal airborne virus. We have apparently lost our collective minds. We have imposed a brand-new type of quarantine on a healthy population, in breach of all previous public health advice and our own carefully crafted expert pandemic plan, and in flagrant breach of the sensible and experienced advice of many professionals.
The noble dissenters are inevitably being vindicated, one by one, as the suppressed, shaming, real-world evidence finally emerges. I will not mention those who harass, discredit and ridicule the dissenters; they loudly parade their egotistical virtue on social media, in the press and on television. I know exactly how harassment feels.
We inflicted social distancing, masking and school closures on healthy children who were at no risk from the virus. We did that to protect adults, at the expense of our children’s social and mental health. People raised the alarm, but nobody listened. A society that consciously and knowingly sacrifices perfectly healthy children for adults is sick. This time will not be looked on well by future generations. That will be our legacy, and I call on this House and those in authority to right that grievous wrong quickly. With unbearable cruelty, we isolated even those who would gladly have made the individual choice to see their grandchildren.
Worst of all, we bypassed the procedures, protocols and science to inflict on a healthy population a brand new and untested product that had never before been used outside clinical trials, never mind approved. There was no long-term safety data. The safety analysis in the trials was eight weeks, and then the control group was vaccinated. There was no age stratification for recipients of an experimental medication for an illness with an average mortality age of 82. There was no liability under any circumstances for the manufacturers of those experimental treatments. Furthermore, there were good reasons, based on the science known at the time, for thinking that those products might be harmful. Rather than ridicule us, future generations may come to loathe us. We will forever be the poster boys and girls of a society that collectively lost its mind and its moral compass. They will hang that millstone around our necks for eternity.
What is the flaw in human nature that latches on to things and destroys all before it? It has been dubbed by some as the madness of crowds or a kind of mass formation psychosis. It is the sort of thing that allowed China to commit population Armageddon with the one-child policy for decades. It is the sort of thing that allowed us to slaughter millions of cattle during the apparent foot and mouth outbreak, when we were persuaded not by the science but by the plausible patter of provable idiots such as Professor Neil Ferguson—yes, the very same. His advice led to the bankruptcy, immiseration and utter despair of countless farmers who were forced to destroy their livelihoods in a futile attempt to prevent the spread of an airborne virus, which had already managed to pass in the air all the way from France to the Isle of Wight. How many times must the so-called experts be caught with their pants down as their models fail yet again? How long must we be subjected to debunked drivel dumped in our political discourse? How long must decision makers deal with discredited modelling and moribund and captured institutions? Why will no one listen to reason when they have been proved wrong so many times?
There are many other examples in medicine, from bloodletting with leeches to pointless lobotomies to not washing hands between the mortuary and the labour ward. Doctors and scientists are far from immune from groupthink, and the current batch are living proof.
Graham Stringer (Blackley and Broughton) (Lab)
This will not be the first, or I suspect the last, Government in history not to follow the evidence when it comes to difficult issues. When Governments make mistakes, protect themselves and do not look at the evidence, we as a democratic society should expect there to be an inquiry that establishes what happened, what should have happened and what should happen in the future. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the inquiry that we set up is failing to do that job, and is assuming that lockdown was right from the beginning?
Andrew Bridgen
I agree wholeheartedly. This is not a political issue; it is a public health issue that affects every constituency. The so-called covid inquiry has already set out the answers it wants to get. It has all the appearance of a whitewash. It was deeply disappointing that it announced this week that the module on the safety and efficacy of the vaccines has been put off indefinitely—certainly until after the general election, which is extremely disappointing.
I contacted every public and media body I could think of in 2014 to tell them again and again that the sub-postmasters were innocent, but no one listened. I knew the sub-postmasters in my constituency were completely honest; anybody who knew those pillars of society knew it. The innocent were falsely accused of dishonesty over the Horizon scandal and were relentlessly pursued by a merciless, mendacious and malicious bureaucracy. It is the coldness that shocks most—the imperious arrogance and the mercilessness that capture institutions and cowards in authority when a single narrative closes our collective minds to nuance, to experience and to the inconvenient truths. No one listened to the sub-postmasters; no one cared. No one in power moved a muscle to help, but now, all of a sudden, one media programme has shifted the narrative to reveal that the experts were wrong, our institutions were wrong, those in authority were wrong and an infallible computer system was, in fact, fallible. Even our justice system got it so tragically wrong, with thousands of court hearings and judges making wrong judgments. Will the Post Office lessons be learned regarding the covid insanity?
Who is actually dying now? It is not the old and frail, as it was with covid; in fact, deaths from dementia, a key benchmark of elderly deaths, have been in deficit ever since covid, as we would expect after a period of high mortality. Instead, particularly for cardiovascular deaths, there has been incessant week-on-week excess mortality for months and months in the young and middle-aged. Every age group is affected, but the 50 to 64 age group has had it worst—I declare an interest. They were struck with 12% more deaths than usual in 2022 and 13% more in 2023, and at least five in six of those deaths this year had nothing to do with covid whatever.
My constituent, Steven Miller, was a healthy IT engineer in his 40s. He had two doses of AstraZeneca jabs in the summer of 2021 and was ill shortly afterwards. His side effects were so bad that he lost his job, and in November 2021 he was rushed into hospital. He now has cardio- myopathy and ventricular failure with a maximum of five years to live, taking him to 2026, unless he has a heart transplant. When I saw him last, he had a resting heart rate of 145 beats per minute. He has subsequently lost his partner and access to his child, and he is at risk of losing his house. He now has a diagnosis from Glenfield Hospital in Leicester of vaccine-induced cardio- myopathy, and I want to help him to try to get his compensation. However, he is just one example among my constituents who will probably have 30 years of his life stolen from him. His child will lose his father. How is £120,000 of compensation possibly adequate for that?
High Speed 2
Debate between Andrew Bridgen and Graham Stringer(9 years, 8 months ago)
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Graham Stringer (Blackley and Broughton) (Lab)
I believe that the case for HS2 is so overwhelming that it is not a question of why we are doing it, but why we are not doing it quicker, although I realise that people would not get that impression from the debate. I congratulate the right hon. Member for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs Gillan) on obtaining the debate. She is a doughty fighter for her constituents, and no doubt had she achieved her ambition to represent Manchester she would have been just as doughty a fighter for HS2 as she is against it now.
Reading the report of the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee and listening to the debate have made it clear to me why this country is so appallingly bad at major infrastructure projects. How many new arterial routes have we had in this country in the past 40 years? The answer is one—leaving the country, as part of an international treaty: HS1. The real reason we need HS2, going both west and east of the country as it gets further north, is that the motorway system is clogged. The M1 and M6 are congested a great deal of the time. The west and east coast railways are often congested and are reaching their limits. There is not enough capacity on the rail system for freight. HS2, with the investment of possibly £50 billion, will free up capacity on all those systems. People say that alternatives have not been looked at, but do they believe that there is any possibility that we will build new motorways west and east of this country? There is simply no chance. HS2 is the only way to free up that capacity.
Certainly some things can be improved in this country. It is interesting, in terms of both cost and speed, that on the high-speed route from Tours to Bordeaux the civil engineering work on 200 km of line was achieved—started and finished—in two years. There is a lot we can learn, to lower the cost and improve the speed of what we do. The arguments are big.
Andrew Bridgen
Does the hon. Gentleman agree that given that London is the finest city in the world, or certainly in Europe, its gravitational pull—its social, economic and cultural traction—means that the faster people can get there, the quicker they will do so? It will just draw in talent and money from the regions. The big beneficiary of HS2, if it goes ahead, will be London.
Graham Stringer
The Transport Committee is in favour of HS2 and has not been quoted. The experience from French cities is that it depends on how much effort a city makes. I expect that the creativity of Leeds, Manchester and Sheffield will produce an experience much like that of Lille, where there has been real economic benefit.
High Speed Rail (Preparation) Bill
Debate between Andrew Bridgen and Graham Stringer(11 years, 5 months ago)
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Graham Stringer
I hope I am not falling into that trap. I think that a high-speed system that will eventually join Edinburgh and Glasgow, through Manchester and Leeds, to Birmingham and London will be of enormous benefit to the country. I do not believe it is a perfect system and I do not believe it is being constructed in the best way, but it has all-party support and it can be improved. I personally believe that we should be building north to south, as well as south to north. I believe, as my right hon. Friend the shadow Secretary of State said, that we should be building a link directly through to High Speed 1. However, I do not believe that any of those problems are sufficient to stop us investing in infrastructure that will help the whole of the country.
Graham Stringer
I will not, if the hon. Gentleman will forgive me. I have already given way twice.
My last point comes from the experience of being responsible for building the second runway at Manchester airport. Paying compensation on the basis of free market value at the time is an extremely costly way of building infrastructure. Giving free market value plus 10%, 20% or 30%—whatever is appropriate—will speed up the process and save money. I hope the Government will give consideration to that, and to serious mitigation. If people take legal action because they think they are being treated unfairly, and if there is blight for a long time, that will hinder the project. It is estimated that delays in tunnelling on some high-speed routes have cost as much as the actual tunnelling. I therefore hope that on compensation the Government will not be short-sighted. I hope they will deal with the problems outlined by my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Frank Dobson), and be generous in looking at the problems and pain caused. That will benefit the high-speed system in the end.
European Union (Croatian Accession and Irish Protocol) Bill
Debate between Andrew Bridgen and Graham Stringer(12 years ago)
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Graham Stringer
I am grateful for your guidance, Mr Deputy Speaker.
In looking at what was happening generally in the European Union, I was simply asking, in relation to Croatia’s accession, whether we should continue to adopt an attitude that might have been appropriate 30 years ago but probably is not now. If we want to get some sovereignty back, and if we want to pay less into the European Union, we should negotiate hard at every opportunity, as the hon. Member for North East Somerset said. I do not see the point of being communautaire and good Europeans at one table, then going into the next room and saying that we are not good Europeans and that our objective is completely different. Every treaty and negotiation presents an opportunity to put forward our view.
I also have to say that the Conservative Members who moved amendments were in a minority, as there is a consensus in the House on Europe. It is worrying for our democracy, however, that that consensus is so at odds with public opinion outside, which is profoundly sceptical about deepening and enlarging the European Union, and cries out for its own say in a referendum—not on a specific issue such as Croatian accession, but on basic principles such as the public voting us in to pass laws and to represent them in this place. Should we really have passed so much power and sovereignty to the European Union?
Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Con)
Does the hon. Gentleman agree that my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg) made an excellent speech about the potential impact of the accession of Croatia? Unusually, however, there was a flaw in my hon. Friend’s argument when he compared the accession of Croatia to joining the Carlton club. The Carlton club is a fine institution for people of a certain political leaning to enjoy good company, but all the members pay into the club to join the club. It appears to me, however, that the only people willing to join the European Union are those who are paid to join it. What sort of a club is it when one has to be paid to join?
Graham Stringer
I bow to the hon. Gentleman’s greater knowledge of the Carlton club than I have or am ever likely to have in future. My guess is, though, that his analogy is accurate.
Let me finish on the detail of the Croatian accession. I think there is a fundamental problem in the Government’s arguments. I have good will and everybody should have good will towards Croatia, but it is absolutely clear that the country does not meet the criteria for entry at present. What we are being asked, then, is to believe that if we agree to the treaty now, changes will take place.
There is some history to draw upon, and not just the mistakes that have been mentioned throughout the debate in respect of Romania and Bulgaria. Countries sometimes reform and improve, yet go backwards. Hungary is a clear example, because it is moving away from the rule of law. If it had been carrying on as it is at present it is doubtful that it would have been allowed into the European Union, so to ask the House to agree to something that does not comply with the criteria now on the basis that it will be compliant in the future is, I believe, an act of faith and optimism that is not justified.
I leave Members with this thought. We have had debates in Westminster Hall and in this Chamber about the benefits and disbenefits of the European arrest warrant. In agreeing to Croatia becoming part of the European Union, allowing a country that currently has very poor judicial standards and a very poor judiciary, albeit one that it is trying to improve, we are giving that country the power to arrest British citizens very quickly. I worry about that. It can be problematic enough in France, Germany and other EU countries when people are arrested in this country for things that are not against this country’s law, but those countries at least have well established, albeit different, judicial systems to our own. Croatia, however, does not have that, so it might well leave some of our citizens vulnerable to the European arrest warrant.
I wish Croatia well. There is clearly a huge consensus here for its joining coming the European Union, but I worry about our relationship with the EU and I also worry that Croatia, when it becomes a full member, will not have met all the criteria.