My Lords, this is not an argument between tackling the virus and ignoring it, as my noble friend the Minister put it in his opening remarks. It is about whether, if one wants to change people’s behaviour, one chooses persuasion or compulsion. In this country, the theme behind our long migration from royal dictatorship to parliamentary democracy is that we think it possible to persuade people to do socially responsible things—not just because we recognise the rights and liberties of individuals but because it works better. Compulsion is often inefficient and counterproductive as well as cruel.
Why have we suddenly abandoned this for a purely authoritarian approach? Command and control, whether in the Ming Empire or in modern North Korea, always lead to misery, not because the commissars were not clever enough or not paid enough but because it is an impossible task to encompass in detail the complexities of deciding how society should be organised from the top down.
I fear that the current approach is taking away people’s agency, undermining their sense of responsibility and preventing them facing up to the challenge of stopping the epidemic through their own actions. As my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe said, all the hard work that firms did to make their workplaces safe has effectively been snubbed. We have Ministers and officials trying to devise minutely prescriptive rules about whether a scotch egg is a meal, whether Monopoly is safe to play, how long one can linger over a pint or whether one should take one’s own serving spoons to Christmas lunch with one’s relatives. I quote paragraph 14 of the legislation published yesterday:
“For the purposes of this paragraph, a ‘table meal’ is a meal eaten by a person seated at a table, or at a counter or other structure which serves the purposes of a table and is not used for the service of refreshments for consumption by persons not seated at a table or structure serving the purposes of a table.”
That is reminiscent of the sumptuary laws of the Middle Ages on who was allowed to wear what.
Konstantin Kisin, a comedian, said yesterday,
“I followed the rules during Lockdown 1.0 to the letter. I followed rules that made sense to me during Lockdown 2.0. I will openly disobey any further attempt at lockdown”.
Command and control stirs bloody minded recalcitrance, alienates people from the police and officials, foments conspiracy theories, fuels quack beliefs and boosts anti-vax nonsense. We need evidence that this authoritarian approach does more good than harm. SAGE published a document on 22 October to justify the closure of most pubs and restaurants. Christopher Snowdon of the Institute of Economic Affairs went through the eight footnotes in the section on epidemiology and found that each referred to a study that gave little or no support, directly or indirectly, to the argument that pubs are a problem. One of them is about traditional markets, religious gatherings and wedding parties in Indonesia, for example—it is not about pubs at all. The new legislation for tiers ends with this line on page 75:
“No impact assessment has been prepared for these Regulations.”
As my noble friend Lady Noakes said, the impact statement rushed out this weekend erects a ridiculous straw man that the only alternative is chaos: an exponential
increase in infection and the overwhelming of the health service. Yet the increase has not been exponential since early October at the latest. Just four hospitals are currently busier than they were this week last year. That is partly because many of the Covid cases in hospitals are being caught in hospitals. It need not be this way. There are lots of places in the world that are controlling this virus with moderate, pragmatic and flexible initiatives that focus on what matters and do not try to define scotch eggs. To quote this week’s Spectator:
“Sweden believes that people, if treated like adults, tend to heed advice—so compulsion and lockdowns are not needed to control a virus in a mature democracy.”
Sweden has had no more death than Britain per head of population, and a far less severe economic shock, a far smaller increase in debt, and a far less brutal impact on the physical and mental health of people. Other Scandinavian countries have been almost as flexible. The Danish people have rejected a dictatorial law. A new study in Frontiers in Public Health has concluded that neither lockdowns, nor lockdown stringency, achieve lower death rates. It analysed data from 160 countries over the first eight months of the epidemic.
The pattern of excess deaths this autumn, occurring in precisely those areas that largely escaped the virus in the spring, points to an obvious explanation: that the virus naturally depletes the more susceptible population and then fades with very little help from lockdown. I have great respect for my noble friend the Minister, and for this Government’s brilliant work on securing vaccines, but I think he and his colleagues have been badly let down by their advisers who, as my noble friend Lord Lilley said, bounced them into this second lockdown with the most misleading and outdated set of charts ever used to influence policy. Unless the Minister shows us clear evidence that these new tier restrictions will do more good than harm, I will be voting for a regret amendment tonight because I think there is a better way. As the young journalist Tom Harwood put it yesterday,
“We mustn’t forget all that makes life worth living. After this the govt must repay a debt of liberty—with interest.”