Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (All Tiers) (England) Regulations 2020

Lord Dobbs Excerpts

Tuesday 1st December 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dobbs (Con) [V]]

Parliament: a word whose very definition means “to talk, to discuss”. It has come to mean, over the years, to take responsibility. Not so long ago, we fought a referendum on the basis that we wanted to return more powers to our Parliament. That is what the Prime Minister said then, and I want to take him at his word.

In a war, you are confronted by an enemy. You send in the drones and missiles, you decide to take the swine out using lethal force but, before you do it, do you not first stop to consider the potential unintended consequences and collateral damage? Will innocents suffer? How many will suffer? How long will they suffer? This is pretty basic stuff. The question behind every such decision is simple: is it worth it? Yes, we are told, we have to save the NHS, but we have not; we have sent the NHS into a spiral of inadequacy. We are infringing personal liberties on a massive scale, as sometimes has to be done in war. Then there is the massive economic and social damage, long-term mental health issues, the undermining of democracy and of Parliament itself. Again, is it all worth it? Perhaps it is, but that is why we have asked for a cost-benefit analysis, so that we can respond to the question, is it worth it. We know the cost of Covid; what we want to know is the cost of the cure.

Apparently, the oil lamps have been burning late inside the Treasury: officials have been running around with scissors and paste pots, and what they have come up with is a 48-page document, hurled so untimely and ill-formed into the streets during the dark hours of yesterday. It is filled with very pretty graphs and bar charts, lots of wiggly lines and wandering statistics, but, for a cost-benefit analysis, it is remarkably lacking in costs or benefits. It is a thing of shreds and tatters. We had been promised crystal clarity; instead, what we have is Ministers squabbling over whether people should eat Scotch eggs. I think Marie Antoinette said much the same thing.

We need information in order to do our duty as parliamentarians, and we do not have it, or not enough of it. I am not suggesting that the Government are trying to drag us like lambs to the slaughter but, at times, it feels a little as if they are trying to pull our own wool over our own eyes. In another world, at another time, the Treasury rushed forward to offer all sorts of terrifying predictions, stretching years into the future, about the monsters that would leap out and devour us if we dared vote for Brexit. So, today, we ask—and it is our duty to ask—what is the expected rise in unemployment? How many pubs and other businesses will close? How many non-Covid patients will die because they can no longer get prompt treatment? If Ministers cannot answer those basic questions, is it because the work simply has not been done, which would be astonishing, or because they do not want us to know the answers, which would be frightening?

This morning’s Times newspaper said that, indeed, there is an assessment—let us not call it a forecast, let us call it an assessment—that has been circulated within government, not for sharing with the public, in which a dozen different sectors are rated red: the disaster zones. So, I ask my noble friend: is there any truth whatever in that report on the front page of the Times? Does any such dossier exist?

I try to be a loyal Tory Back-Bencher; really, I do. I desperately want this Government to defeat this disease and move on with all their glorious ambitions for post-Brexit Britain. This is not the way to do it. We are not properly informed, we are not adequately consulted and it is clear that we are not trusted. Indeed, we are accused of shirking our responsibilities and wanting to let the disease rip. Those remarks are unworthy of any reasoned debate.

We are curtailing fundamental civil liberties in a way that is simply unprecedented in peacetime. We are damaging innocent lives on a massive scale. We are demanding sacrifices. We are starving our economy and our society for years to come. All I want to know is: is it worth it? I want to support the Government, but if I cannot wholeheartedly support them, I can at least encourage them. So, this evening, in order to do just that, I hope to have the opportunity to vote for the amendment in the name of my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe.