Health Protection (Coronavirus) (Restrictions) (England) (No. 4) Regulations 2020

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Wednesday 4th November 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, we have to remember that on Sunday—Remembrance Day—when we commemorate those who gave their lives and their health for our freedom, we will be one or two inches nearer to living in a benevolent police state or a benign autocracy. That is a matter of enormous grief to me and to many others. It has been the subtext of a number of speeches today, particularly the moving speech of my noble friend Lord Shinkwin.

I have two questions for the Minister. On the subject of churches, we had a perfectly benign but totally unsatisfactory Answer yesterday to my noble friend Lord Moylan’s Question from my noble friend Lord Greenhalgh. He was not able to produce a single shred of evidence to suggest that it was unsafe to go to a place of worship. Yesterday, the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Archbishop of Westminster, other leading Anglicans, the Chief Rabbi and many other faith leaders wrote to the Prime Minister spelling out how important it was to keep open places of worship for public worship. We have had no answer. I say to my noble friend that the House has every right to demand a proper answer. Where is his evidence to justify this draconian step, for that is what it is? We should resist it if we possibly can.

I go from the sublime to the earthy: why are we preventing people from playing on golf courses? Nothing is safer than regulated exercise in the open air. I am not a golfer; I have never played golf in my life and I do not want to. A petition was launched on Saturday of last week and, by Monday, it had a quarter of a million signatures. If you are expecting people to obey orders, you should make orders that you can justify; you should not alienate normally law-abiding people such as those who play golf or go to churches and synagogues. You should not alienate them, because the price you will pay as a Government will be a very large price indeed. I rest my case.