In response to the Government’s ‘Plan B’ guidance, that pupils should wear face coverings whilst seated in class, someone anonymously  sent me a surgical mask on which they had inscribed “putting germ/ bacteria ridden cloths over kids’ faces for 8+ hours is ABUSIVE’.
I photographed it and broadcast it on twitter with the caption ‘whoever sent me this anonymously, I agree with you’
Later in the day a journalist asked me to respond to the storm of protest over the tweet which has ‘upset so many people’.  Well, as I’ve conceded in this column previously, I use twitter infrequently to broadcast only: I do not read any of the responses to my tweets. First because I’m sure they would drive me insane and second, because there are only so many hours in a day (the tweet in question having attracted 4,343 replies).  So, having not read any of them, I was unaware of the ‘twitter storm’ until the journalist tracked me down. Perhaps he’d taken the trouble to read the comments which I hadn’t. The only measure that I had was that some 47 thousand readers had flagged the tweet indicating that they liked it, which seem a pretty good score to me.

On Wednesday I raised the classroom face covering requirement in the Commons with The Secretary of state for Education. I was surprised and delighted that a number of other colleagues did so too (I had previously got the impression that I was a lone voice). I was even more delighted that the Secretary of State responded by acknowledging that the requirement was indeed a dreadful imposition and he wouldn’t let it last a day longer than he believed was absolutely necessary.
In support of the measure however, he referred to a study that purported to show a 0.6% lower Covid-related absentee rate in Schools that had required face coverings last November, than in schools that hadn’t.
Actually, having now read the study myself, all I can say is that it is so heavily caveated as to be pretty worthless. I then heard  Karl Heneghan, Professor of Evidence Based Medicine at Oxford University, deconstruct it in a radio interview in which he concluded that, in fact it, showed that the very opposite: that schools with face coverings fared worse!
The report itself acknowledges that it is not peer-reviewed and that ‘there is a level of statistical uncertainty about the result’.

There have been reports in the papers that in some schools whole classes have simply refused to comply. As I have pointed out to many of the parents who have written to me to complain about the requirement, it isn’t actually a requirement at all: It is merely guidance not regulation. Even that guidance acknowledges that face coverings should not be worn where clear sound or facial expressions to communicate are relied  upon– as a former teacher, I’d say that in class, that’s  ALL OF THE TIME!
Parents and pupils should know that they are not compulsory, but that you may end up having a row with your school.

And now I’m utterly vindicated: the former Children’s Laureate, Julia Donaldson – the author of the Children’s best-seller The Gruffalo has called the requirement ‘dystopian’ , the very word I used to describe face covering from the outset.
We really must stop making children do things just to make adults feel safer.

Next, Boris himself referred to ‘mumbo-jumbo’ -remember where you heard it first: I’m on a roll.

I’ve said this before, but the volume recent correspondence makes it worth repeating: Constituents who disagree with me often insist that, as their elected representative it is my duty to represent their views rather than my own.
Of course, it would be a foolish politician, reliant on the support of voters, who took no account of their opinions. Nevertheless, I am not the personal ambassador or advocate for any my constituents.
Though I typically receive 200 emails per day, they are overwhelmingly for the same correspondents.
My responsibility is to all my constituents, the vast majority of whom have never expressed any opinion to me at all, save through the ballot box. It would be entirely wrong were I to know-tow to the opinions of those. who shout loudest or longest.
The chief duty that I owe to my constituents is the exercise of my judgement in the debates and decisions in Parliament.
Of course,  I am influenced by arguments and experience that constituents bring to my attention, but when I differ, they often complain that I ignored them. I didn’t: I just disagreed with them, which is a very different thing.

Having tested our citizens for Covid more than the rest of Europe combined, the fact that we are now running out of testing capacity just about sums up our national hysteria about this virus. Apparently, some people are even hoarding test kits in the same way that they hoarded loo paper back in March 2020.
Given that the symptoms of Covid are common to any number of ailments: cough, sore throat, headache, fever; it seems quite reasonable to take a Covid test if you experience any of them just to ensure that you do not go about spreading it to those susceptible to a more serious bout of the illness. The reality is however, that the tests are overwhelmingly being taken by people who have no symptoms at all. Even worse, we are imposing a huge administrative burden on the education system by requiring the mass testing of asymptomatic children.
This vast enterprise is costing a fortune, were we all to follow the government advice of testing twice per week, In England there are 56.3 million of us, that’s 104 tests annually, 6 billion for all of us put together. The tests come in at £5 each, which amounts to £30 billion per year.
Is this a sensible way to spend such a vast sum of money, (instead we might increase England’s NHS budget by fully 40%)?
In the USA, where they tend to be very cautious in medical matters, people who have had Covid can return to ordinary life after 5 days if they no longer have symptoms – there is no requirement for further testing. That is an example we could usefully follow.

Learning to live with Covid, if it means anything at all, must surely include behaving normally if we feel perfectly well and not fearing a bogey man around every corner.

At this time of year I’ve often used this column to reflect on doom-laden prophesies about what to expect in the year ahead. After all, It’s that magnificent time when we can wallow in the short dark days and add to the gloom with blood-curdling predictions of disasters.
  A couple of weeks ago, notwithstanding that we are still wrestling with our current pandemic, Dr Jenny Harries, the head of our UK Health Security Agency  -what Stalinist mind thought up that nomenclature? – warned us that the next pandemic could be much worse.
Well, she could be right, but equally she could be spectacularly wrong: There is no scientific basis for her supposition. Whether her speculations were designed to be helpful, or simply to terrify us, is a matter for conjecture, but a number of people have been suggesting -from the outset- that our fears of the current pandemic were overblown. Personally, I was well ahead of Dr Harries: right at the start, I warned in the Commons that one day there may be a disease that will threaten our very survival; but that Covid certainly isn’t it – and that future generations will wonder at our collective acts of self-harm in our response to it.

For those of us who wallow in predictions of the dreadful prospects that the future holds, I recommend my favourite book of all time: The Coffee Table Book of Doom, which was published a few years ago by Art Lester and Steven Appleby. Here is a flavour from the advertising blurb:
“…with the apocalypse at hand, don’t fret about dying uninformed. The Coffee Table Book of Doom is a revelatory, brilliantly funny, superbly illustrated and erudite compendium of all the 27 doom-laden horsemen we need to worry about – personal doom, gender erosion, asteroid impact, pandemics, super storms, sexual ruin – and much more besides.”

I can’t speak for all 27 doom laden horsemen but surely we’ve had enough of pandemics and aren’t tired of the continued interference in our enterprises, personal choices, and our way of life from politicians who believe that they are best placed to make decisions on our behalf, rather that treating us as adults capable of assessing risks and acting sensibly?

 Anyway, there is still plenty to worry about: there is a volcano under a lake near Naples rumbling away and if it blows it will make Vesuvius look like a camp fire. The lava lake under Yellowstone Park could go at any moment, taking most of the USA with it…but then the volcanic cloud it might darken the skies, cool the planet and save us from climate change. Alternatively, it might reduce harvests to the extent that we all starve….

Every generation since we were expelled from the Garden of Eden has speculated that it might be the last, but we’re still here.

I recall some common sense from the Government’s Chief scientific officer, who said earlier this year that “we have to learn to live with Covid”. Well, whatever happened to that? 

The Government continues to be in thrall to scientific modellers with doomsday predictions.
The value of the output from any model -however robust its design- depends upon the assumptions that are fed into it. Some of the terrifying numbers from the modelling that we have seen in the last few days are the result of assumptions that take no account of the data that is coming out of South Africa -that the new variant, despite being more infectious, appears to be milder and consequent hospitalisations fewer and shorter. Many of the alarming numbers aren’t even the output of models at all, they are mere extrapolations: assuming that what has happened, will go on happening at the same rate, irrespective of experience that things rarely do so.

As I said in the Commons at the beginning of last week, this is all part of a ‘Ministry of Fear’ designed to ensure our compliance with instructions that compromise fundamental liberties, and indeed, condition us to demand even greater restraints on that liberty, so overawed are we by the present danger.

Part of this work of terrorising the population is undertaken with enthusiasm by the broadcast media, a job made so much easier by the twenty four hour news cycle which enables us to constantly receive the same bad news throughout the day from the moment that we wake up in the morning, hearing on the radio that we’d die horribly drowning in our own phlegm, repeated until the moment we go to bed.
What is astounding is that, as each new prediction is trotted out, no account is taken of the previous record of the source. Let’s take, for example, one of the media’s favourite modellers, Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London.
In 2001, Professor Ferguson predicted 150,000 human deaths from foot-and-mouth; but under 200 died. In 2002, he predicted up to 50,000 deaths from BSE; in the end, 177 died. In 2005, he said that 150 million people could be killed by bird flu; 282 died. In 2009, a Government estimate based on his advice said that a “reasonable worst-case scenario” for swine flu would lead to 65,000 British deaths; in the end, 457 people died. He predicted 85,000 Covid deaths in Sweden consequent on their policy of avoiding lockdown; in fact, 6,000 Swedes have died. In July this year he predicted that 100,000 daily cases was almost inevitable following our release from restrictions. It just didn’t happen.
Yet the broadcasters will quote the latest models as if they were the Gospel truth.

My prejudice is that the latest scare won’t be anything like as bad forecast. We look to ministers to resist the measures being urged upon them which will damage society and the economy, but then, on the basis of past performance that expectation looks pretty shaky too.