Coronavirus

Kieran Mullan Excerpts

Wednesday 16th June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Dr Kieran Mullan (Crewe and Nantwich) (Con)]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I have listened carefully to the contributions this afternoon and we have done a good job at articulating the challenge we face. Basically, what is reasonable to do to stop coronavirus spreading, infecting and killing enormous numbers of people and overwhelming the NHS? The answer to that asks us to consider what the costs are for doing something, and what the costs are for doing nothing.

There has been a cost to freedom from lockdowns, but freedom is complex. What freedom would people aged 50 years and up have had to venture out of their homes when coronavirus ran rampant and left them with at least a one-in-200 chance, or worse, of dying if they caught it?

There has been a cost to businesses, particularly those in hospitality and other businesses that people have been prevented from visiting. I am certain that had our NHS been overwhelmed, had one in 200 people aged 50 started dying en masse, and had the news shown patients being turned away from intensive therapy units, the impact on those businesses would have been similar to, if not the same as, that of lockdown.

There has been a cost to children’s welfare. Which parent would really have carried on sending their children to school, knowing that there would be no help if there was an outbreak of meningitis or measles? How traumatised would the nation’s children have been when one in 200, or more, of their grandparents died in the space of a year or two?

There has been a cost from lockdown to people with illnesses such as cancer. Where exactly would cancer patients have gone after their operations when ITUs were full? Which immunocompromised patients having chemo would have risked visiting their local hospital for treatment and catching covid? It is wrong for critics of lockdown to think that they alone care about freedom, hospitality businesses, children and those suffering from other illnesses; we all do. I do, but I just took what I thought was a rational choice in weighing up the costs across the board. I must take issue with people today who have talked about our freedoms not being used to support the NHS, as if that were some kind of abstract concept. What we are talking about is supporting the patients, their friends and their family who would have been prevented from accessing the NHS if the restrictions had not prevented the NHS from being overwhelmed.

It was always inevitable that, over time, these judgments would have become more finely balanced, as they have done, but I will not be told that I am not capable of continuing to make these finely balanced judgments. It is right that the next phase means a new discussion. Like others, I find these types of restrictions—restrictions that stop us living out our fundamental desires to mix, socialise and spend time with each other—a heavy, heavy price to pay. I have no doubt that the public will be willing to pay a similarly heavy price to remove most, if not all, of them. That is not to say that people will not mind wearing a mask on the tube, for example.

We have some tough decisions ahead of us, and I welcome the recognition of that from the Government. It is now time for the Government to state more clearly and starkly what these choices are, so that the British public can decide together what sacrifices we are and we are not willing to make.