Coronavirus

Chris Clarkson Excerpts

Wednesday 16th June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Chris Clarkson (Heywood and Middleton) (Con)]

Throughout, this process has been heartbreaking, debilitating and wearing, so to be here again talking about a further four-week extension is the worst possible outcome for so many of us—it is so, so disheartening. However, I say that knowing that I will be supporting the Government tonight. Unfortunately, my constituency neighbour the hon. Member for Blackley and Broughton (Graham Stringer) is no longer in his place, but he made an eloquent speech talking about why he could not support these measures on the grounds of civil liberties and I wanted to remind him that about a quarter of his seat is in the city of Salford, where I was a councillor for a while. The city’s motto is, “Salus populi suprema lex” or, “The welfare of the people is the highest law”. The infection rates in Greater Manchester are some of the highest in the entire country, with Manchester and Salford having the highest rates. His seat straddles those areas, so he cannot say that he is putting the welfare of the people in his constituency at the highest level.

I wish to turn to something that was brought up by the hon. Member for Luton North (Sarah Owen) when she was talking about getting the politics out of this issue. I completely agree with that, which is why it was so frustrating yesterday that in the Manchester Evening News the lead member for health in Rochdale Borough Council was dismissing the vaccination programme as a gimmick and a slogan, and was hinting that the Government were withholding vaccines from certain areas. Anybody with the slightest idea about how logistics work knows that the programme is rate-limited purely by supply. I say to Members: we have four weeks to nail this down. We cannot have another extension. We cannot keep going through this process. We are going to have to work together. We are going to have stop sniping at each other and trying to make little jibes to score a little point here or there. There are people who are depending on us to do the right thing now.