I refer to the declarations that I have made relating to the Covid Recovery Group.
I am especially pleased to follow my right hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper), with whom I agree. I will try to elaborate on some of the arguments made by my hon. Friend the Member for Altrincham and Sale West (Sir Graham Brady) and my hon. Friend the Member for Winchester (Steve Brine), who made a particularly brilliant speech.
My starting point is that today�s debate is not really about the incremental inconvenience of the mandating of face masks. I repeatedly chose to wear one on the train recently when it was not mandatory to do so, but that is not the point today. As my hon. Friend the Member for Altrincham and Sale West implied, the issue is that we are taking away the public�s right to choose what they do, based on flimsy and uncertain evidence. We do not know the extent to which this new
variant will escape the vaccines and we do not know how harmful it would be. This debate goes to the heart of the nature of the society that we are creating.
The hon. Member for St Albans (Daisy Cooper) talked about the harm principle. I entirely endorse the idea that our liberty should be constrained by the harm that we do, but in an intervention my hon. Friend the Member for Altrincham and Sale West made the point about flu: now that we have got the case fatality rate down to a comparable level with that of flu, we should be living with coronavirus like we live with flu. As my hon. Friend asked, are we going to manage other diseases like this ?
Let me turn to the point that I really want to flesh out. The Government�s approach seems to be to say, �Better safe than sorry. You can�t be too careful.�. The trouble is that we really can be too careful. There is a problem that I call tunnel vision and my friend, Professor Paul Dolan from the London School of Economics, calls situational blindness, whereby we end up looking only at the disease. My hon. Friend the Member for Winchester has set out brilliantly the harm that will be done to children. I cannot begin to understand the psychological harm to children of being in masks all the time; we cannot go back and repeat the experience of a missed nativity play, and so on.
The economic cost of the coming pingdemic will be huge. Only today, the problems that Virgin Atlantic will have were on the front page�and fleshed out in the business section�of The Daily Telegraph. If the Government keep going down this path in these circumstances, when, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean said, the disease is going to be endemic and we must learn to live with it, and if we panic every time that there is a new variant�and there will be new variant after new variant�we will make entire sections of our society uninvestable, such as airlines, hospitality and tourism�many of the things that give us joy, hope and something to look forward to.
Where is the hope from the Government? I know young people who are demoralised and depressed, and who have been telling me that we will go back into lockdown, and I have been saying, �No, because the vaccines are working and I do not believe that Conservative Ministers will do this to us�, but we have already started to see the scope creep, the mission creep, and the goalposts perhaps being slightly unshackled from the ground, ready to be moved.
Today�s debate is not about face coverings or the coming pingdemic through self-isolation measures. It is about how we react and the kind of nation and civilisation that we are creating in the context of this new disease. What is the relationship between the state and the individual? Are we to be empty vessels or mere automata�things to be managed, as if a problem? Or are we free spirits with, for want of a better term, a soul? We are free spirits with a soul�people who deserve the dignity of choice and the meaning in our lives that comes from taking responsibility. It is possible that meaning in our lives comes from little else. This is a fundamental choice between heading towards heaven and heading towards hell. If we continue to react to these fears and uncertainties by taking the authoritarian course, without impact assessments�because the regulations are only temporary, you know�we are embarked on that downward course.
Even loneliness shortens lives. Again, Paul Dolan has been very clear with me that loneliness cuts lives short, and yet we find an official going beyond Government policy to say that we should not have unnecessary socialising. The most extraordinary set of choices are being taken because of an overwhelming, narrow focus on the one issue of coronavirus. It falls on Ministers to provide the lead, the breadth of thinking, the vision and the values to set out what broad kind of society we are trying to create. Where are we going as a society and civilisation? What will be our redemption and salvation? How will we provide that hope for our future? I believe that it will be by having faith in one another. The public are not fools. We are not here to govern idiots. I have faith in the British public that they can choose for themselves to do the right thing: to wear a mask when it is sensible, to pay attention to the level of cases, to choose for themselves whether they go to a restaurant, and, indeed, to choose whether they visit vulnerable relations in care homes�I could tell a sad story about that point.
Before I finish, I need to put on the record one constituency case. I have a 75-year-old constituent who is stranded in South Africa, with flights out of the country cancelled. He has a pre-existing anxiety disorder and will run out of medication in a matter of days. He is struggling to find accommodation, and now has to find a local source of new prescription medication. If that man is suffering for the greater good, let my hon. Friend the Minister say so. The rights of individuals really matter; justice is about how individuals are treated. Yes, of course we should care about overall social outcomes, but the rights of individuals really matters, and how we treat those people really matters. That man matters. He should not be stuck in South Africa. He planned to go there and come back, and his plans have been cut short, causing him immense suffering.
There is no plausible path set out before us that leads to a genuine public health emergency, yet the Government are choosing to react in this way. As a result, I am afraid that the Government are choosing that downward path towards, frankly, hell�the hell of minute management of our lives by edict, with nothing that we can do about it and not even a say in advance in Parliament�and, incredibly, a clear majority of this House is going along with it. Some of us today have to take a decision to vote no to everything. I, for one, intend to chart a course towards heaven, and I hope that hon. Members will come with me.
3.16 pm