I do agree, and I will come on to business support in a minute, but let me make the points in support of the case we make today.
The first point is this: we have been here before. On 10 June, the Prime Minister told us for the first time of his “whack-a-mole” strategy to control local infections. He told us it would be so effective that restrictions would only be for a few weeks or even a few days. That was far from reality; Leicester, for example, has just gone into the 154th day of restrictions, and by the time these regulations run out on 2 February, Leicester will have been in restrictions for 217 days. So that 10 June proposal did not work.
Roll on to 22 September: by now, infections are rising in 19 of the 20 areas then under restrictions. The Prime Minister announced new restrictions, including the rule of six. He told the House that the rule of six would
“curb the number of daily infections and reduce the reproduction rate to 1”.—[Official Report, 22 September 2020; Vol. 680, c. 798.]
That is what he said about the rule of six. So that did not work.
Two weeks later, on 12 October, with the precise opposite happening, the Prime Minister stands up again—for the third time—and introduces a three-tier system. Again, he said that this will work: he told the House that this would deliver the reduction in the R rate locally and regionally that we need. That did not work.
Nineteen days later—the fourth attempt now—in a hurried press conference on a Saturday, the Prime Minister announced that the tier system had failed, the virus was out of control and a national lockdown was now unavoidable.
The reason that this all matters is that there is a pattern here. The Prime Minister has a record of overpromising and underdelivering—short-term decisions that then bump into the harsh reality of the virus.
And then a new plan is conjured up a few weeks later—we are now on at least the fifth plan—with an even bigger promise that never materialises. After eight months, the Prime Minister should not be surprised that we and many of the British people are far less convinced this time around.