Public Health

Lucy Allan Excerpts

Tuesday 1st December 2020 Commons Chamber

[Lucy Allan (Telford) (Con)]

I want to start by thanking the Prime Minister for steadfastly battling to get us through this crisis. Anyone in his position would have no option but to take the measures he is proposing today, and he has my support.

Each and every one of us in this place cares passionately about the lives and livelihoods of our constituents, and in a liberal democracy such as ours, it is right for MPs to challenge accepted narratives, explore alternative perspectives, examine the facts and seek to form an opinion. In so doing, we are serving our country and our constituents, and I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Wycombe (Mr Baker). It is our right and our duty to engage in critical thought and to come to different conclusions, and then feel free to speak in this place.

Throughout lockdown, it has been a repeated assertion about those who question the science and refer to the terrible costs of lockdown and its impact on our communities that, “They just want to let the virus rip, kill granny, prioritise profit”, and about those who want the hardest possible lockdown, “They’re the good, responsible people who care about lives”. This has become a divisive narrative, which is inhibiting proper debate. We must be free to take different perspectives, and we must not demean those who do. It is incumbent upon all of us to ensure that this place is a bastion of free speech. Whatever other freedoms covid has taken from us, we should not let it take that.

The state has sought to control the minutiae of our daily lives with the arbitrary, the capricious and the prescriptive—whether we can eat chips or beer, or who should cook the turkey at Christmas. The more arbitrary the rules, the more inured people become to rule breaking, and when it comes to the really important rules, like isolating when we get a positive test, these rules too become much easier to break. If the Prime Minister were not such a libertarian and if he were not the freedom-loving man I know him to be, I too would find it very hard to support these measures this evening, but I firmly believe that anyone in the Prime Minister’s shoes would have no option but to bring forward these proposals.

I would just caution the Minister, for whom I have huge admiration: please can we show some humility? We are not going to be getting everything right. We are doing our best. We are doing everything we can to get the country through this time. Our constituents understand that, and it does not diminish our standing to show some humility. It shows our humanity. I should be grateful to her if she would take that back to her Department. This is a new science and we do not have all the answers.