Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, for saving me up till last. It is difficult to say something new at No. 67 on the list.
Let me say at the outset that I recognise the seriousness of the situation, particularly given the new strain of the virus. I recognise the huge pressures on hospitals and I pay tribute to them. However, I am not convinced that another hurriedly announced national lockdown is the right solution. That is why I am loth to vote for the regulations, especially when we have had just three hours to debate the biggest infringement of our constituents’ civil liberties that I have ever had to vote on as an MP, and given that Parliament could have sat all this week, and we would then have considered the regulations before they came into force.
The sunset expiry date of the regulations has been surreptitiously moved to the end of March rather than the end of January as we were earlier led to believe. The regulations have no impact assessment, and there are measures in them that were brought into law in the first lockdown, but later removed or relaxed.
I have said all along that the Government have a difficult job to balance advice about risk from the medical experts with the economic impact and the public’s confidence in abiding by the regulations. After 10 months, that confidence has been sorely tested and there is a high level of lockdown fatigue. It is therefore even more important that what we ask our constituents is logical, consistent and fair. Banning golf, tennis, angling and other outside pursuits was not considered logical previously and was relaxed in earlier regulations. Banning people from buying beer from outside closed pubs rather than crowding into supermarkets and off-licences was also inconsistent and relaxed in earlier regulations. It is therefore frustrating and regressive to see those and many other unnecessary and illogical restrictions creeping back in again. I ask the Secretary of State to be sensible and sensitive to the lobbying to remove them before they undermine confidence further.
My main point concerns the vaccine. It must be the Government’s single biggest imperative. We need a national effort—a “little ships” effort—to deliver, buoyed up by the sea of vaccine the Government wisely bought up early. So when Ministers and clinicians proudly claim that we will be vaccinating 12 hours a day, seven days a week, my reaction is to ask: what about the other 12 hours—the other 50% of the day? We should be vaccinating 24 hours a day, seven days a week, until everyone who qualifies is jabbed. Many volunteers have
come forward to work shifts in the middle of the night—many little old ladies in Worthing who would readily bring tea and biscuits round at 4 o’clock in the morning, with others to run the technology. If they are offered a jab at 4 am rather than four weeks hence, people will turn up.
We should be getting more juice, as the Secretary of State put it earlier, including by approving the Moderna vaccine already given the go-ahead in the US, for example. Create drive-through jab centres, develop online booking of slots, allow walk-in services for spare appointments, allow diabetics to self-jab when they get their insulin. Only when we are vaccinating full-time can the Government claim to be doing absolutely everything they can, at pace, to get us out of this revolving pandemic lockdown door.