Covid-19 Update

Jonathan Ashworth Excerpts

Monday 14th June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Jonathan Ashworth (Leicester South) (Lab/Co-op)]

I thank the Secretary of State for advance sight of his statement. I congratulate Sir Richard Sykes on his new role and I thank Dame Kate Bingham.

Tonight’s announcement was both predictable and, sadly, predicted. Many of our constituents and local businesses will be deeply disappointed. Our constituents did what was asked of them. They queued up for vaccination. We praised them in this House. The Secretary of State shed tears on the news and boasted, “Cry freedom,” on the pages of The Spectator. Yet we are now in the grip of a delta wave that is spreading with speed, and our constituents face further restrictions.

The Prime Minister’s complacency allowed this variant to reach our shores. On 25 March, there were warnings of a new variant in India. It is reported that Ministers first learned that the delta variant was in the UK on 1 April. The Government red-listed Pakistan and Bangladesh on 9 April, but did not red-list India until 23 April, by which point 20,000 people had arrived from India. Our borders were as secure as a sieve, and all because the Prime Minister wanted a photo call with Prime Minister Modi. It is astonishing that these Ministers promised to take control of our borders and conspicuously failed to control our borders at the very moment it mattered most.

Not only did the Prime Minister open the back door to this variant; he failed to take measures to suppress it when he could. It has been growing in prevalence among school-age children, yet mandatory mask wearing has been abandoned in secondary schools, and the Secretary of State has never explained why, despite being repeatedly asked. We know that isolation is key to breaking transmission, yet, 16 months on, people are still not paid adequate financial recompense to isolate themselves. When asked at the Select Committee last week, he claimed that people would game the system. The only ones who gamed the system are the mates of Ministers, Tory donors, spivs and speculators who made a fortune supplying duff PPE.

The Secretary of State seeks support for extending restrictions by pointing to plans to go further on vaccination. We will support extending restrictions in the Lobby, but even after extending the doses that he has outlined, there will still be large proportions of the population left unprotected, having had one dose or none—exposed to a variant that, if left unchecked, could accelerate and double every week, putting us on track for tens of thousands of infections per day by the end of this period. That will mean more hospitalisations, more long covid, more disruption to schools and more opportunities for variants to emerge. Will the Prime Minister lift restrictions in those circumstances, as he appeared to promise tonight, or will infection rates and hospitalisations have to fall before he does so?

Vaccination will get us through this in the end, so what is the Secretary of State’s plan to bring down infections and to extend vaccination rates in hotspot areas? We have learned that in Leicester surge vaccination has been abandoned. In parts of the north-west—in Chorley, Mr Speaker, in Tameside, in Salford and in Wigan—the dose numbers have gone down. Has vaccination surging been abandoned in those hotspot areas?

Finally, we are likely to see more infections in the coming days, and we are likely to see more contacts of infected cases in the coming days. Will the Secretary of State finally give those people isolation support so that they can isolate and quarantine themselves from the rest of society?

The chief medical officer said tonight that we would be lifting restrictions if it were not for the delta variant. The Prime Minister should have moved at lightning speed to prevent the delta variant reaching our shores. Instead he dithered, and tonight he is responsible for this delay.

[Matt Hancock]

I think that in that response, we saw a lifting of the veil on the Opposition’s position. The right hon. Gentleman knows that he has supported the Government’s position for a very large part of the crisis. We will be grateful for their support in the Lobbies, and quite rightly, because the Labour party has clearly accepted the logic of the position.

However, the logic of the questions the right hon. Gentleman just raised moved towards a position of never escaping from restrictions. I want us to escape from restrictions, and the vaccine is the way for us to escape from restrictions. The truth is—it is not the easy thing to say, but it is the right thing to say—that in this country and around the world, covid-19 will be with us and we will have to learn to live with it in the same way that we have learned to live with other deadly diseases like flu. The vaccine will help us get to a state in this country in which we can manage it and live our normal lives. The logic that the right hon. Gentleman set out is one in which we never escape.

It was a logic based on flawed thinking about how things work in practice, because the right hon. Gentleman’s other argument was that this is all due to the Government not taking decisions on India, based on information that we did not have at the time. His argument is that he has now seen in the published data that there was a problem in India—too right! And as soon as we saw the data, we acted on it. The whole case that he set up was that on 2 April we should have acted, but on 2 April neither the original B1617 Indian variant strain, nor the B1617.2 delta strain, had yet been designated a variant under investigation or a variant of concern.

Captain Hindsight over there is arguing, “Never escape from restrictions, and base your logic and evidence on things that haven’t been recorded yet.” That is no way to run a pandemic. Instead, we will put the interests of the British public first. We will take a cautious and irreversible approach. We will take difficult decisions if they are necessary, but we will get this country back on the road to recovery.