Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (No. 2) (England) (Amendment) (No. 5) Regulations 2020

Lord Blencathra Excerpts

Tuesday 20th October 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I support these regulations, and I apologise to the Minister, because that is probably the most helpful thing I will say in the next two minutes. I am heartily sick of the media producing so-called experts who contradict everything Whitty and Vallance say within seconds of their briefings concluding. There is a never-ending stream of attention-seeking professors who are undermining public confidence in everything the Government do.

The others undermining government efforts are the police service of this country. I was a Police Minister and I defended the police every day of my life, but no more. They are a national disgrace, because they are deliberately refusing to enforce the laws passed by this Parliament. The Times revealed yesterday that, despite tens of thousands of breaches of the face-mask-wearing rules in shops, in the last three months, three-quarters of the police force have not given a single fine for breaking the law, and only 28 fines have been handed out by the rest of the police. They have just handed out 18 fines for mass lawbreaking. No wonder Covid is on the rampage in some of our major cities, when people see the police turning a blind eye to blatant law-breaking.

Can we also stop these idiotic euphemisms of circuit breakers and fire breaks, which are just code for total shutdown again? Shutdowns do not cure Covid; they just suppress it for a few weeks, then it takes off again. We have to learn to live and die with it, and survive by using social distancing, face mask wearing and handwashing.

We are told by the Government that we have to save the NHS, but why? I thought the NHS was supposed to save us, not the other way around. We are told the NHS must not get overwhelmed, but it already is. In its fetish to empty hospitals in case Covid kicks off, it has dumped tens of thousands of cancer patients and people with heart attacks, strokes and other serious illnesses. Some 90% of operations and treatments have been cancelled. These people will die prematurely and that is a disgrace. We can all clap the NHS medical staff, but the incompetent NHS bureaucracy is still stuck in Soviet-style government.