Author: johnredwood

On Tuesday night Parliament will have the chance to debate and vote on the Rule of 6 and the related restrictions against larger gatherings.

The decision will be about the Coronavirus Restrictions (No 2) (England) Statutory Instrument.

As someone who wishes to see more moves to relax controls that damage business and prevent large sectors that need social contact from working, there is a good case for not supporting this measure. As someone who wishes to see the death rate down and agrees that too much social contact can spread the virus too far too fast I need to listen to those who say there is a case for trying these controls for a bit longer.

The rule of 6 is the government’s latest attempt to create a simple universal rule that might provide some brake on the spread of the disease. It has not been going for long, so the government says it should be tried for longer. You can also argue that we have had controls in place for many months, but they have not proved able to keep the disease down in the way a near total lock down for most did in April. Some think the virus has a life of its own regardless of controls and see the fall from April as a coincidence. Others seek to find patterns in the numbers to prove controls do reduce the spread.

The Conservative party membership is shifting its view from a substantial majority behind lock downs and strong government action, to the largest group now favouring the more relaxed Swedish approach to create a better balance for business and normal life. Polls of the wider public still favour tough action to limit social contacts. There is a lack of specific scientific data to show which of the various measures tried in the areas visited with extra controls have a beneficial impact. There is also a worrying delay in getting results in those special areas and in some cases no evidence that the controls are working. The 10pm curfew is the most dubious and contentious ban, but that is not up for a vote on Tuesday.

I am interested in your views as I make up my mind concerning Tuesday’s vote, particularly if you are a constituent.

60% of the passenger use of the railway was commuter traffic into our main cities and towns prior to the pandemic.

Today commuter traffic is massively down. There are many businesses talking of adopting a new model even after the pandemic has gone, with more working from home and flexible working.

The railway needs to research and assess these trends. It will need new fare offers, as we have discussed before, to encourage part time office goers to use the train, allowing them flexibility over when they travel. It might, for example, be necessary to offer a system of rebates or free tickets when people reach certain totals of tickets purchased for the same journeys.

The railway has a leisure business. This often relies on heavily discounted tickets. If the base load of commuters are going to spread their journeys out over different times of day there may not be the same amount of empty capacity to offer. What is a realistic target for leisure travel? What kind of financial contribution should it make to cover costs?

There is business travel. Currently this is down by a huge amount, as people hold their meetings, customer contacts , exhibitions and conferences on line. How much will return to physical meetings, and how much of the train travel will return?

Trying to determine how much train travel there will be in 2021 and 2022 is difficult, but becoming a necessary task. The government has nationalised the losses and taken control of the whole railway. We now need from it a vision of what a modern railway looks like and who it will serve. It is going to take some brilliant marketing, new fares structures and compelling offers to fill the trains again.

I supported the Brady amendment by co sponsoring it on the Order paper. I apologise to readers for a rare mistake of a bad forecast in thinking the Speaker would accept it for debate and decision as a majority of the House clearly supported it.

The important thing is that nonetheless the amendment served its purpose. It did result in the Speaker warning the government they needed to change and to allow debates and votes in government time on the controls, just as we had argued. He had legal advice against taking the amendment which I do not question. The government agreed to come to Parliament over these powers. As an early demonstration of good faith, there will be a proper debate on 2 Statutory Instruments imposing controls, with a vote on each next week.

Many of the Statutory Instruments which have imposed the restrictions on our freedom of movement were not debated or voted on in the past but will now need to be to comply with the Speaker’s ruling. Many of them were not put into effect by the government under powers in the Coronavirus Act but under other emergency powers  legislation, so trying to vote down the Coronavirus Act would not have dealt with the issues many people are raising. The Coronavirus Act is the source of authority to assist public bodies manage the crisis, which I and others did not wish to stop all the time the restrictions are in place. We want to get at the freedom removing SIs which are mainly issued under the 1984 Public Health (Control of Disease) Act. That will become clearer next week.

A petulant EU has refused over many months to simply discuss a Free Trade Agreement which they agreed would be at the core of our future relationship. Now in a tantrum they propose to take us to their court to tell us they think we are wrong! Meanwhile, a rattled EU nonetheless rejigs the talks and is at last prepared to discuss a Free Trade Agreement.

The UK government should reply to their incoming letter with a short and courteous reply. It should say

Dear EU

Thank you for your letter. We have left the EU and do not accept the future jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice . We made clear in the legislation that put into effect the Withdrawal Agreement that we reserved the right to follow UK interests, with our clear sovereignty clause in the legislation. We will use this power which expressly overrides the Agreement to guarantee the UK interests set out in the Withdrawal documents should you not negotiate a simple Free Trade Agreement in good faith as you promised.

We will not of course participate in ECJ proceedings , which would be a silly political stunt. We note that you are now willing to negotiate, and trust you will respond favourably to the draft Free Trade Agreement we submitted for your approval or modification some time ago. The EU’s interpretation of the Withdrawal Agreement is not international law, it is an unhelpful negotiating ploy.

Yours etc

In the world of the government advisers the UK has to carry on with major restrictions on our freedoms to contain and reduce the incidence of the virus. They want us to do this until a vaccine is available that works well and is accepted by the bulk of the population.

They do have to tell us that of course the present vaccines in trials may turn out not to be effective, or may show side effects that are unacceptable. There may be long delays in developing a successful vaccine. Even when one is available it will take time to produce enough of it and vaccinate enough people with it to allow removal of the controls.

That is why I have been urging Ministers to have a Plan B, a plan for relaxing controls when there is no generally available effective vaccine. Some scientists think Sweden shows that the virus stabilises or wanes after a period of time, as more people have immune systems capable of warding it off without vaccine intervention. Others have a number of proposals to improve treatments, help containment and protect the vulnerable better, so more people can resume a normal life.

We now seem to know the most vulnerable groups are the elderly and those with other conditions like diabetes and obesity. It is possible to devise ways to offer all those most at risk better safeguarding whilst allowing the rest of the population to behave more normally. All those who wish to shield themselves should have access to support to make this possible for them.

Many of the deaths we experienced in the spring came in Care Homes. There could be stronger rules preventing the return of patients from hospital with CV 19, tests for new residents and regular tests for Care Home staff. It would be best if people can keep in touch with their families through on line systems and the phone. Of course people will also want some face to face meetings. These can be organised in gardens, with suitable ways of keeping warm on colder days, or in large meeting rooms with a good circulation of air designed to avoid contamination.

It is important to ensure good infection control in hospitals, preferably by having designated CV 19 hospitals with other hospitals virus free. I await progress reports on a range of possible treatments that some doctors claim can make a difference.

We need a message of hope. There does have to be plan to get us out of lock down whilst avoiding deaths and helping people take sensible precautions to control the disease. We must not allow a large number of good businesses to be written off because they are not allowed to trade at all or under such constraints that they are not commercial.
I am trying to persuade Ministers they need a new plan to restore our liberties.

Sir John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con): I support the Government’s amendments to the legislation for the reasons outlined admirably by the Minister—it did need a little strengthening and this is a welcome clarification—but I rise mainly to oppose new clause 1.

I am disappointed with the official Opposition, because I was delighted after the clear decision of the people in the last general election that the Opposition said that they now fully accepted the result of the referendum, although it took place years ago—the previous Parliament blocked its timely implementation. We had a rerun in the general election and the Opposition fully accepted the verdict of that general election, yet here we are again today, with new clause 1 deliberately trying to undermine the British Government’s sensible negotiating position in the European Union.

Whenever there is a disagreement in interpretation of that original withdrawal agreement between the United Kingdom and the European Union, the Opposition and most of the other opposition parties rush to accept the EU’s—very political—interpretation of the situation and rush to say that anything the UK Government wish to assert in this Parliament, or in a court of law if it came to that, is clearly illegal.

It is preposterous that we have so many MPs who so dislike the people of this country that they are still trying to thwart the very clear wish to have a Brexit that makes sense.

Karin Smyth (Bristol South) (Lab): Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

Sir John Redwood: I must not take up too much time. I wish to develop my argument quickly.

We have to recognise what we are dealing with here. The EU withdrawal agreement was pretty unsatisfactory and one-sided because the previous Parliament stopped the Government putting a strong British case and getting the support of this Parliament in the way the British people wanted. The Prime Minister wisely went to Europe and did his best to amend the withdrawal agreement but it was quite clear from the agreed text that a lot was outstanding and rested to be resolved in the negotiations to be designed around the future relationship, because we used to say that nothing is agreed until everything is agreed and that the withdrawal terms had to run alongside the future relationship.

The EU won that one thanks to the dreadful last Parliament undermining our position all the time. This Prime Minister is trying to remedy that and the only ​reason I was able to vote for the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018—much of it was an agreement that I knew had lots of problems with it—was that we put in clause 38, a clear assertion of British sovereignty against the possibility that the EU did not mean what it said in its promises to my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister and did not offer that free trade agreement, which was going to be at the core of the new relationship. We therefore needed that protection, so I am pleased that the Government put it in.

That made me able to vote for the measure to progress it to the next stage, but I was always clear that the EU then needed to get rid of all its posturing and accept what it had said and signed up to—that the core of our new relationship was going to be a free trade agreement. We were going to be a third country, we were not going to be under its laws and we were not going to be in its single market and customs union, but it has systematically blocked that free trade agreement. The UK has tabled a perfectly good one based on the agreements the EU has offered to other countries that it did not have such a close relationship with, but it has not been prepared to accept it. Well, why does it not table its own? Why does it not show us what it meant when it signed up to having a free trade agreement at the core of our relationship? If it will not, we will leave without a deal and that will be a perfectly good result for the British people, as I said before the referendum and have always said subsequently.

Of course, it would be better if we could resolve those matters through that free trade agreement. As colleagues will know, many of the problems with the Northern Ireland protocol fall away if we have that free trade agreement, and we are only in this position because the EU is blocking it.

Why is the EU blocking the agreement? It says that it wants to grab our fish. I have news for it: they are not on offer. They are going to be returned to the British people, I trust. I am always being told by Ministers that they are strong on that. The EU wishes to control our law making and decide what state aid is in the United Kingdom. No, it will not. We voted to decide that within the framework of the World Trade Organisation and the international rules that govern state aid—rules, incidentally, that the EU regularly breaks. It has often been found guilty of breaking international state aid rules and has been fined quite substantially as a result.

I support the Government’s amendments, and I support this piece of legislation. We need every bit of pressure we can to try to get the free trade agreement and the third-country relationship with the EU that we were promised by it and by the Government in the general election. We can then take the massive opportunities of Brexit. It is crucial that new clause 1 is not agreed to, because it would send a clear message to the European Union that this Parliament still wants to give in.

Yesterday I made the case again for no more U.K. concessions to the EU in the debate on the Internal Market Bill. I will post the speech later this morning.

The Withdrawal Agreement was based around the promise of a future relationship which had its core a Free trade agreement where the EU would respect the UK’s sovereignty. There is no good faith by the EU over this. It’s time to leave and to be independent.

Sir John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con): The Government rightly want to get the virus down and limit deaths, but they also need to promote livelihoods and economic recovery, and it is proving difficult to get that balance right. I do not accept the criticisms that say, “Well, the Government change their mind.” Of course the Government change their mind, because the virus waxes and wanes and the situation changes on the ground. They have to study the data and do the best they can.

What I would like to hear from Ministers is more in various directions where I think they could improve the position more quickly. The first is the issue of treatments. There has been some excellent work done in the United Kingdom, and it is great that a steroid has now been discovered that can make a decent improvement for various patients. That is great news and I welcome it, but what about the tests and trials we were promised when I raised this, many months ago now, of other antivirals, other steroids, antimalarials and clot-busting drugs? All those may have possible efficacy and they have their scientific and medical support around the world. We have great science here, so can we hear the results, please, Minister? Where have we got to? Are any of those going to work? The more and better treatments we can get and the more we can understand the different strands and features of this disease in different patients, the better it will be for keeping people safe.

We have learned that the Government now agree with me and others that they need to do a better job on isolation hospitals and on segregating patients who have this very contagious disease from all the other people who need to use our health service. I am pleased about that, but can we have some more details? Why cannot we simply use the Nightingale hospitals for covid-19—let us hope we do not need anything like that number of beds for this second wave—and keep all the other hospitals for non-covid? Or, if they are going to have shared facilities, certainly in urban areas where there is more than one hospital, can we have covid-19 hospitals and other hospitals that are open for other conditions? We do not want to see all the death rates for other things shooting up because people feel they cannot get access to their hospital or they are worried about going to their hospital because of covid-19.​

We then have the issue of the damage this is doing to the economy. I understand the strategy, but it seems that the damage is going to fall unduly heavily on hospitality, leisure, travel and tourism, the areas where we need more social contact and where that is thought to encourage the transmission of the disease. As someone who does not normally recommend subsidies, I do think that when people are banned from going to work, running their business or doing their job, they deserve some public support. They are doing that in the public interest, because their Government have told them that their activity is particularly damaging to the public good. If that is true, surely we the taxpayers have to pay for that.

I assume that the Government think we will come out of this sometime, and we want to go back to a world where there are theatres, cinemas, entertainments, good restaurants and all the other things that make life worth while and give pleasure to families. We do not want to live in a world where they are gradually all closed because there is no support and they are not allowed to function at all. We need more intelligence to work alongside those sectors, to see how they can get ways of working and living alongside this virus all the time it is out there and causing us trouble.

There have already been hon. Members today requesting exit strategies, and I quite understand why it is very difficult for the Government to give us one, because they are all sorts of unknowns that I do not know any more than they or their advisers do. We understand that their preferred exit strategy is the discovery of a vaccine and the roll-out of massive quantities of that vaccine for sometime early next year, so that we can then come out of lockdown.

That would be great, but we cannot bank on that. There are ifs and buts in that and it may not happen, so there needs to be a strategy for a situation where we do not have a magic vaccine. That is why we need more work on safeguarding people who are most at risk and more work on how we can get other people back to work, to save those livelihoods and those businesses and to wean them gradually off subsidy, which they are going to need all the time they are banned from doing their job and keeping things ready for us when times improve.

Above all, the nation needs some hope. It needs a vision of a better future. It needs to believe that, in a few months’ time, something good will happen. It certainly does not need the threat of cancellation of Christmas or the threat that thousands of students will be locked away in rather small accommodation in their universities because there is a fear that they might spread the virus more widely.