My Lords, your Lordships should take no more attention of my speaking from the Cross Benches than you have of my noble and learned—and very welcome—friend Lord Clarke of Nottingham speaking from the Bishops’ Bench. I trust that we will both get back to normal soon. It is also a pleasure to welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Clark of Kilwinning.
I start by thanking the Minister for his prodigious personal efforts over all these months. We are asked to follow the science, but what science? Is it the science that said that there would be half a million deaths? If that is so, we have done remarkably well. Or is it the science that said that 20,000 deaths would be a good figure? In that case, we have done considerably less well. Perhaps it is the science that points to the tens of thousands of excess, non-Covid deaths that we have
been suffering because of people not going to the doctors and getting the treatment that they require, or the science that predicts that there will be many tens of thousands of deaths in the long run if we go into a period of endless recession. This is not a matter of science but of judgment—political judgment—as we search for a balance between impossible demands.
I want to share two concerns today. The first is that, despite all the Government’s best efforts, the judgments that are being made are exceptionally confusing. Let me use young people as an example. We have just sent them off to university, where we have often locked them in and told them that they may not get back for Christmas. I do not know what they are going to do for Christmas; perhaps they should all gather at Barnard Castle, where apparently, we can all have a jolly good Christmas. What future are we offering our young people with this economic policy of stop, start, stop, stumble again, then stop? The latest ONS figures show that the number of under-45s who have died from coronavirus amounts to 1.1% of the national total, whereas the over-65s amount to 89.3%. Yet, we treat them all the same, when clearly, they are not. Why do we devastate the entire economy and the future of young people? Can we not find a better way of protecting the vulnerable while allowing the young to carry on with something like a normal life?
My second concern is the damage being done not just to health and the economy but to our fundamental rights and democratic accountability. We are infringing on individual rights on a massive scale. After seven months of this Covid nightmare, we need to revisit not just our policies but their legislative basis. We must not forget the lessons of Brexit. Government got too far from the people; as one Prime Minister said, government was done to the people, not for the people.
I wish to help my Government and support them in their fiendishly difficult task. I believe that the way to support them tonight is to support my noble friend’s Motion if he asks us to.
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