Coronavirus Act 2020: Temporary Provisions

Lord Clarke of Nottingham Excerpts

Monday 28th September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Clarke of Nottingham (Con) (Maiden Speech)]

My Lords, for about 50 years now, I have been in the habit of making parliamentary speeches quite regularly. I retired from that when I left the other place in November last year. So I am particularly honoured to find that I can now resume this practice in this most illustrious setting with such distinguished colleagues on all sides, including many old friends. I trust I will not abuse the privilege of being back in parliamentary debate, but my maiden speech will be the first time I have ever attempted to make a speech subject to a four-minute time limit. Many of my noble friends will be, at this moment, doubting my ability to manage that.

I echo what my former Commons colleague the noble Baroness, Lady Clark, said about the welcome new Peers receive here. This is, in every way, a remarkable institution. Fellow Peers—not just old friends—are especially welcoming, and I share her gratitude to all the staff here, who go out of their way to help people utterly baffled by the rabbit warren of corridors and the somewhat strange new practices we have to take on.

The major change I am having to face is that I find that this historic Chamber has all its logistics based on the use of IT of various kinds which I have previously scorned. It is most surprising that, in this particular House, a 20th-century man is being forced to get into the 21st century. Trying to open and switch on a laptop and an iPad, then contemplate how to use them, is my biggest problem at the moment, because of the generosity of all those who are helping me in every other way.

On this subject I can only say that I have every sympathy with the Government, as a former Secretary of State for Health and a former Chancellor of the Exchequer. This is the worst health crisis to have hit this country and the worst depression—no, recession, so far—and economic crisis that has occurred in my lifetime. The difficulty of dealing with it is that it is shrouded in total uncertainty. All forecasts on all fronts are quite useless because the disease is new, its behaviour is unknown and therefore the range of scientific and medical opinion about the way in which it can be controlled and what is going to happen is not a unanimous science: it is immensely varied. Quite unprecedented choices have to be made on the tensions between the life-saving prospects of doing one thing and the damaging economic consequences that step will have. Everybody is going to second-guess every decision that Ministers come to as they go along. As we are now in the days of public inquiries, with the wisdom of hindsight everybody will be able to see what should have been done in the light of what we know has happened, and everybody will say how obvious it was that steps should have been taken.

Yes, the Government have made mistakes; every western Government have made mistakes. The mistake at the beginning was not being tough enough. It is quite obvious that we should have gone into lockdown probably about three weeks before we did. It is quite obvious that we should have quarantined flights in from places such as Spain and Italy almost instantly. We should obviously have been more aware of the dangers to the residents of care homes and ended the practice of discharging patients from hospitals to care homes without testing before doing so. But, if the Government had done those things at the beginning of March, they would have faced all the protests about civil liberties, excess infringements, controls and so on that we are hearing now. We must not repeat that. The policy succeeded after that because we had only about 60,000 excess deaths and, although we are as bad as almost any other country in the world, people have now got used to the small level of deaths—each of them tragic—and disaster we are having. The demand now is: let us have more liberty and protect our freedom and let us not step things up.

The Government should subject themselves to more parliamentary scrutiny of the next steps. I totally agree with all who have voiced that. It would strengthen them and give them more authority. It would give them a better defence when they make an obvious mistake—and they will make more. The position now is that they would also be strengthened by the support they would get. The majority of the public support the measures that the Government are now taking. The rule of six is not particularly severe, while closing pubs at 10 pm takes us back to the days of my teens but is not actually a tremendous infringement of civil liberties. Opinion polls show that the public would accept tougher measures from the Government and I think that, after proper debate and scrutiny, the majority in Parliament would allow most of them. That would, however, save us from the occasional strange dilemmas and slips that we know have occurred. The Government, the public and the nation will be held together better if we scrutinise more firmly, but not on the basis that we second guess every decision that any Minister makes and start politicising it in this extremely dangerous world.