Edward Leigh
Main Page: Edward Leigh (Conservative - Gainsborough)Department Debates - View all Edward Leigh's debates with the Cabinet Office
(4 years ago)
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Matt Hancock
The first duty of any Government is to keep the citizens of the country we serve safe. That is the reason we take the actions we do.
Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)
I hope the Secretary of State will not think me too eccentric if I say that on a winter’s morning I like to start my day by swimming the Serpentine and then going to mass. Of course, he abolished both of those things in the past four weeks. More important, he abolished them for hundreds of thousands of people. My question to him is this: under any tier or future lockdown, can we never return to the abolition of healthy outdoor sports or going to religious services? There has never been a shred of evidence that they cause any problem. By the way, this is the first time in 800 years that people have been prevented from going to church in this country, since it was put under an interdict by a medieval pope. We want reassurance on that. As well as having that conversation, could he give us some more reassurance about Christmas carols? We do not want it to be just a holy night; we do not want it to be a silent night either.
Matt Hancock
I very much hope that we will not have another national lockdown at all. One of the reasons that we have toughened up tier 3 is to ensure that, if areas are in tier 3, we can get the virus coming down as opposed to just flattening at a high rate, as we were seeing earlier. In that way, I hope that we can prevent the whole country from ever having to see the sorts of restrictions that we have had to introduce in order to keep people safe.