Children’s Mental Health

Danny Kruger Excerpts

Tuesday 8th February 2022 Commons Chamber

[Danny Kruger (Devizes) (Con)]

We have heard some very powerful stories in the debate. My constituents have written to me with similar very distressing tales of self-harm and attempted suicide, and I am particularly conscious of the crisis in eating disorder services. To the appeal for further services and further investment, I say yes; I recognise what the Government are doing in that space and I support that.

On the wider policy that the Government and the whole country adopted on covid-19, I think we have all been partly guilty of the abuse of language. Ideals of duty, sacrifice, community, and putting friends and family first have been suborned to a totally different imperative: to stay apart, to isolate, to cut off our relationships and our obligations, and to trust the agencies of a remote bureaucracy who knew better than we did what we should do and who we should see and what balance to strike between seeing a loved one and protecting them and others. I do not blame Ministers personally for any of that—I voted for it all. We did this together across the House and, indeed, with the support of most people in the country.

We outsourced social responsibility to the state and the state gladly took up the burden. We saw mass testing, including asymptomatic testing, which drove the figures so high, and that led us to mass lockdowns, despite the early evidence that the first lockdown, even if it was necessary to slow the spread of covid, had health costs that outweighed the health benefits in some respects, to say nothing of the economic and social costs, including those that we are debating today. Lockdown was so awful that it created the pressure for the vaccines, so after the mass testing and mass lockdowns we moved to mass vaccination. Despite the early assurances that it would only be for the elderly and the vulnerable, it was soon for everyone, even children, unnecessarily. Despite the early assurances that it would only be voluntary, we piled on the pressure with covid passes and, I regret to say, compulsory vaccination for health and care workers, which I am hugely pleased that the Government have now dropped.

I pay tribute to colleagues who resisted much of that, and to the Prime Minister and the Cabinet who, after the vote on 14 December, corrected course and faced down the voices who were calling for further lockdown. We are now one of the freest countries in the developed world, and that is testament to our parliamentary system and to this Conservative Government. Look at what is happening elsewhere, not just in Europe and Asia but in places with the common law tradition; what has happened to the traditions of English liberty that we exported?

We have to lead the way. No more lockdowns, no more mass vaccination and, most of all, we must put children and young people first. We owe them all our help in the years ahead. I know Ministers agree with that and I hope we will work across the House to make things right.