May I start by associating myself with the many Members who have paid tribute to Jo Cox? As we have heard from the tributes, she transcended intake and party in bringing people together, and my thoughts are with her family at this time.
There have been many excellent speeches from both sides of the Chamber. People who will be voting different ways often made many similar points. I believe that shows the disappointment that we all feel that we are here once again, grappling with many overlapping and multiple considerations.
There were some particularly thought-provoking Opposition speeches, by my hon. Friends the Members for Blackley and Broughton (Graham Stringer), for City of Chester (Christian Matheson), for Luton North (Sarah Owen), for Leeds East (Richard Burgon) and for Stockport (Navendu Mishra). I particularly enjoyed the speech by my hon. Friend the Member for Luton North and her repeated use of the word hopeless—a word that I am sure is on many people’s lips at the moment. She was right that we have been here before—at Christmas, with the Prime Minister dangling the carrot of freedom before pulling it away at the last minute. It is the hallmark of a Prime Minister who struggles to deliver bad news to the public.
My hon. Friend the Member for Leeds East made the similar point that there is a pattern here of the Government making the same mistakes over and over again. He also rightly highlighted the continuing failure to provide adequate financial support for those who self-isolate—a point that was also made by my hon. Friend the Member for Stockport and is particularly apposite today, when a
Government report has reached the news which states that the current self-isolation policy has “low to medium” effectiveness and that there are “barriers” to self-isolation. That is a point that we have been making since the start of the pandemic, so it is about time the Government listened to us and to their own advisers and fixed it.
It would be remiss of me not to highlight the fantastic contribution from my neighbour and hon. Friend the Member for City of Chester, who drew attention to how the announcement came out, once again, via the media. He also raised an important point about the enhanced measures that a number of areas, including our own county of Cheshire, have been put into this week. Unfortunately, we have seen a surge in cases, but there is apparently no prospect of our getting a rise in vaccines.