Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (England) (Amendment) (No. 3) Regulations 2020

Lord Blencathra Excerpts

Thursday 25th June 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blencathra (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I welcome the changes announced by the Prime Minister on Tuesday, which render discussion of these regulations rather academic. I suggest one more essential tweak to what was said on Tuesday. We are told that the one-metre rule needs additional mitigating factors. That is unnecessary waffle. We should say that at one metre face masks are compulsory for everyone, no ifs or buts.

Today, I want to turn to the investigation of death anomalies and how that must be done carefully and thoroughly. As my noble friend knows, there is a huge industry out there ready to denounce everything about our country as institutionally racist. There is no coherent BAME community. It consists of black ethnicities, Asian ethnicities and all other minority groups who are not white. While their death rates are higher than whites’, there are wide variations between them, so the Government should report on the individual ethnic groups, not just this grouping called BAME.

We must also get to the bottom of why men are three times more likely to die than women, fat people twice as likely to die and people with diabetes—and possibly a lack of vitamin D—also twice as likely to die. None of these conditions is anything to do with racism, but the anomalies are just as great, so we need to know if underlying health conditions are the root cause of death variations. Perhaps they are or perhaps they are not, but we must have an authoritative and detailed analysis so that it is not exploited by those who wish to find institutional racism where none may exist.