Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (All Tiers) (England) Regulations 2020

Baroness Garden of Frognal Excerpts

Tuesday 1st December 2020 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Ridley (Con) [V]]

My Lords, this is not an argument between tackling the virus and ignoring it, as my noble friend the Minister put it in his opening remarks. It is about whether, if one wants to change people’s behaviour, one chooses persuasion or compulsion. In this country, the theme behind our long migration from royal dictatorship to parliamentary democracy is that we think it possible to persuade people to do socially responsible things—not just because we recognise the rights and liberties of individuals but because it works better. Compulsion is often inefficient and counterproductive as well as cruel.

Why have we suddenly abandoned this for a purely authoritarian approach? Command and control, whether in the Ming Empire or in modern North Korea, always lead to misery, not because the commissars were not clever enough or not paid enough but because it is an impossible task to encompass in detail the complexities of deciding how society should be organised from the top down.

I fear that the current approach is taking away people’s agency, undermining their sense of responsibility and preventing them facing up to the challenge of stopping the epidemic through their own actions. As my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe said, all the hard work that firms did to make their workplaces safe has effectively been snubbed. We have Ministers and officials trying to devise minutely prescriptive rules about whether a scotch egg is a meal, whether Monopoly is safe to play, how long one can linger over a pint or whether one should take one’s own serving spoons to Christmas lunch with one’s relatives. I quote paragraph 14 of the legislation published yesterday:

“For the purposes of this paragraph, a ‘table meal’ is a meal eaten by a person seated at a table, or at a counter or other structure which serves the purposes of a table and is not used for the service of refreshments for consumption by persons not seated at a table or structure serving the purposes of a table.”


That is reminiscent of the sumptuary laws of the Middle Ages on who was allowed to wear what.

Konstantin Kisin, a comedian, said yesterday,

“I followed the rules during Lockdown 1.0 to the letter. I followed rules that made sense to me during Lockdown 2.0. I will openly disobey any further attempt at lockdown”.


Command and control stirs bloody minded recalcitrance, alienates people from the police and officials, foments conspiracy theories, fuels quack beliefs and boosts anti-vax nonsense. We need evidence that this authoritarian approach does more good than harm. SAGE published a document on 22 October to justify the closure of most pubs and restaurants. Christopher Snowdon of the Institute of Economic Affairs went through the eight footnotes in the section on epidemiology and found that each referred to a study that gave little or no support, directly or indirectly, to the argument that pubs are a problem. One of them is about traditional markets, religious gatherings and wedding parties in Indonesia, for example—it is not about pubs at all. The new legislation for tiers ends with this line on page 75:

“No impact assessment has been prepared for these Regulations.”


As my noble friend Lady Noakes said, the impact statement rushed out this weekend erects a ridiculous straw man that the only alternative is chaos: an exponential increase in infection and the overwhelming of the health service. Yet the increase has not been exponential since early October at the latest. Just four hospitals are currently busier than they were this week last year. That is partly because many of the Covid cases in hospitals are being caught in hospitals. It need not be this way. There are lots of places in the world that are controlling this virus with moderate, pragmatic and flexible initiatives that focus on what matters and do not try to define scotch eggs. To quote this week’s Spectator:

“Sweden believes that people, if treated like adults, tend to heed advice—so compulsion and lockdowns are not needed to control a virus in a mature democracy.”


Sweden has had no more death than Britain per head of population, and a far less severe economic shock, a far smaller increase in debt, and a far less brutal impact on the physical and mental health of people. Other Scandinavian countries have been almost as flexible. The Danish people have rejected a dictatorial law. A new study in Frontiers in Public Health has concluded that neither lockdowns, nor lockdown stringency, achieve lower death rates. It analysed data from 160 countries over the first eight months of the epidemic.

The pattern of excess deaths this autumn, occurring in precisely those areas that largely escaped the virus in the spring, points to an obvious explanation: that the virus naturally depletes the more susceptible population and then fades with very little help from lockdown. I have great respect for my noble friend the Minister, and for this Government’s brilliant work on securing vaccines, but I think he and his colleagues have been badly let down by their advisers who, as my noble friend Lord Lilley said, bounced them into this second lockdown with the most misleading and outdated set of charts ever used to influence policy. Unless the Minister shows us clear evidence that these new tier restrictions will do more good than harm, I will be voting for a regret amendment tonight because I think there is a better way. As the young journalist Tom Harwood put it yesterday,

“We mustn’t forget all that makes life worth living. After this the govt must repay a debt of liberty—with interest.”

[The Deputy Speaker (Baroness Garden of Frognal) (LD)]

The noble Lord, Lord Farmer, has withdrawn so I now call the noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

This has been a fascinating evening, has it not? I wonder whether the Minister has any support. I also wonder what the Labour Party is up to, because they do not seem to be taking part at any level at all. We have had precisely two Labour speakers, and no more, one of whom is yet to speak and will undoubtedly tell us what is what.

I have a lot of sympathy for my noble friends Lord Robathan, Lady Neville-Rolfe and Lord Cormack, and I will support whichever of their proposals goes to the vote. I am sorry but this is becoming a complete shambles. We had a little family debate at the weekend about whether we should put granny by the window or whether we did not want her to get pneumonia. We decided that we wanted her not to get pneumonia, because who on earth would end up doing the washing up? When you have senior officials in the Government talking about putting granny by the window, you really know that you have lost something.

At the same time, there is a serious point here. There is a catalogue of misery within the health service of people who cannot see their relatives, of the disabled who are stranded and lonely in homes, and the NHS does not appear to care. Why do we have a Minister for vaccinating people but no Minister for sorting out the NHS—for opening hospitals, opening surgeries, and getting visitors back into homes where people have been isolated, often for months? They are not a compassionate Government; they are in the grip of a handful of so-called experts, one of whom I remember had the distinction some years ago of having half of the cattle in Britain slaughtered quite needlessly. I hope that he does not turn those latter abilities to the general population.

Last Saturday, the shroud-waver in chief, the Cabinet Minister Mr Michael Gove, told us that we would be physically overwhelmed, with

“Every bed, every ward occupied”,

and all the capacity built into the Nightingales and requisitioned from the public sector too. Let me ask this of the Minister: as of today, how many Nightingale beds are full, both as a number and as a percentage? How many of the private sector beds are full, and how many are sitting there, not taking in private sector patients because they are getting big dollops of public money—I speak from some knowledge because I have a number of friends in the medical profession—for leaving the beds empty and not taking in patients? This is the rather sad state that we are in.

What do I propose, apart from what I have said already? We need a wider view among the people who make the decisions. Why are people like Professor Heneghan and Professor Gupta voices in the wilderness? With all their scientific abilities, why are they not at least in the room where the decisions are made? They would be a small minority, but at least they would be able to put forward their views. Why are we not listening to the Chancellor and to industry? We are bankrupting the country. We are running it into debts that it will take years to pay off because we are obsessed with a handful of supposed experts—I say “supposed” because I do not think they are. I also do not think that we can continue to bankrupt the country, which is what we are doing.

I am sorry for those in the Labour Party, but their answer is always, “Give us a chequebook”, and never, “Let us sort out how to get back to normal.” That is what I want to see. I also want to see something that has been alluded to many times in the debate, which is an end to the withdrawal of civil liberties and the chip-chipping away at everything that we stand for. Let me say this: half of the people of the city I live in, which is Cambridge, do not understand the regulations. The other half who do are interpreting them in their own way—and that does not necessarily mean that they are obeying them, because many are not doing so. The Army is now involved in vaccinating people. We are beginning to look like Poland in the 1980s and we need to step back from this. Will the Minister please take tonight’s debate as a serious contribution?

Also, and finally, we must stop persecuting people. Some 45 years ago, I first met Mr Piers Corbyn. When Labour had a leader called Jeremy, people used to say, “What do you think of him?” I would always reply, “You should meet his brother.” What I will say is this: you cannot conduct society on the basis of persecuting a handful of loonies who run around demonstrating. Please stand back, think about it, calm it down, and start all over again.

[The Deputy Speaker (Baroness Garden of Frognal) (LD)]

The noble Baroness, Lady Hoey, and the noble Lords, Lord Shinkwin and Lord Moylan, have withdrawn so I now call the noble Baroness, Lady Jolly.