Covid-19 and Loneliness

Jamie Stone Excerpts

Tuesday 15th June 2021 Westminster Hall

[Jamie Stone (Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Edward, for the second time today. Who am I to speak in this debate after two terrific speeches from the hon. Members for Blaydon (Liz Twist) and for Southend West (Sir David Amess)? I have been here for four years and a couple of days, and it strikes me that one of the best things that Westminster does is the Westminster Hall debate, which is more like a tutorial. What I have heard in the first two contributions is thought provoking and has altered what I am going to say.

Lockdown was not terribly difficult for me and my wife because we had each other, and my son and his wife, just in the nick of time before the first lockdown, came north with their two little girls, which was a pleasure. However, I want to talk about a constituent of mine called Sally Cartwright. Sally is a widow in her 80s. She has been successful in life. She ran a business with her husband and had a successful small business. She became chairman of the local enterprise company—I think the first female chairman of a local enterprise company in Scotland. She was awarded the MBE. Halfway through the first lockdown, I called her about something or other. I asked for advice and she said, “Jamie, I’m so damned lonely. I am not in a bubble. I can’t go out. I am not daft. I am not very good with mobility, but I am a thinking lady, and it’s really getting me down.” That shook me because this lady is a pillar of society and one would not expect that to come from her.

I then took to ringing Sally on a regular basis to say, “How’s it going?”. In fact, I spoke to her today to get permission to use her name in this debate. My excellent constituency officer manager, Heather Macmillan, said, “You ought to get in the habit of making perhaps 10 calls a day, and I will suggest people you can call.” The reason I am telling Members this is because I was relatively comfortable in my own home in lockdown and I had not seen it for what it really was, and it shook me to the core. So what is the answer?

I am speaking only briefly in this debate and I am speaking only because of Sally. I thought, “Damn it, I will take part in this debate.” I do not normally go on about things in the north of Scotland, as Members know. However, yesterday—this takes me back to the hon. Member for Southend West—hot and bothered I walked from this place to my flat. It had been a really hot day and I longed to get in, pull myself a glass of lager and put my feet up. I heard music as I walked towards St John’s, Smith Square, and it got louder and louder as I walked past that beautiful church heading towards Pimlico. I realised the doors of the church were open because of the heat, and the orchestra was in full practice. I thought, “What are they playing? Is it Prokofiev? What is it? I don’t know.” At that moment, it hit me like a bolt of lightning, exactly as the hon. Gentleman said: music touches the human psyche more than we all realise.

We all have different tastes, but music is a sort of strange common language that works, and I think that it is possibly part of the solution—although there are no solutions to this—but it could be part of the way we can approach it. The next time we have to go through this awful process again, and I fear that we will because viruses mutate and there will be new viruses—although, God, I wish there weren’t—I think more music will be part of the solution.

The second thing is that every time I spoke to Sally, she told me that one of her grandchildren had zoomed in and, for all the difficulties of this way of talking to each other through a small screen, the grandchild saying, “Hello, Granny. How are you?”, really gave a little lift to her day. Perhaps we could, in each of our communities, develop the idea of having teams of people, including young people, who can talk to one another. Sally said to me, “I’m not so mobile, but I’ve got a brain on my shoulders,” and so she has. She is, as we say in Scotland, as sharp as a tack. If I put a foot wrong in politics, she is on to me just like that. I was saying, “Sally, if we have to go through this again, how would it be if you did some telephoning or whatever and we just opened this up?”

I do not know the solution, but I have made two suggestions to the Minister. I have enormous respect for the Minister—a lady of compassion. I suspect that we are sowing our seeds on fertile ground, in terms of what the Government might come forward with.