Since the very beginning of the Corvid19 outbreak, constituents have been writing to me demanding the quarantining of all overseas travellers, and many more demanding a ban on passengers from overseas entirely.

I disagreed. First, because my email inbox was daily being filled with desperate constituents who had been on holiday or working abroad and were then having tremendous difficulty trying to come home.
The last thing I would have wanted to do, was to lobby ministers to close the airports to make it even harder, or even impossible for them to get back.
Second,  scientific modelling predicted that once the disease was already spreading in the UK, restricting air travel would make little very difference -perhaps slowing the progress by only some three to five days. (In fact, Italy was first-off-the-blocks to impose an early ban on all flights from China but that did not alter the severe spread of the disease there).
The reality was that once the disease was spreading in the UK, travellers from overseas would be as likely to catch it here as they were to have brought it with them

Of course, had we been a remote Island with a small population and had we shut down flights at the very outset, as did New Zealand, then we might have fared as well as they have done. But the UK is not in a remotely similar position to New Zealand, on the contrary, we are the very centre of international finance and culture. We simply could not have acted in that way in time to contain the disease

As the rate of spread in the UK now diminishes and the number of new infections and hospitalisations falls sharply, is it now the time to impose quarantine to prevent infected travellers from re-seeding a renewed spread in the UK?

Clearly, there is some logic to this, but -like the lockdown itself- such actions come at a cost.
I have already used this column to point out that a severe recession will not be avoided even had we carried on without restricting commercial and social activity whatsoever. This is because we would still -as a trading nation and financial centre, have been hit by the shock to the world economy. In addition, the change in consumer behaviour – already responding before the lockdown, would have been even more pronounced as the disease spread.
Sweden avoided a lockdown but is not going to avoid a sharp recession.

Now however, just as we are trying to re-start our economy and mitigate some of the consequences of the damage that has been done to it, is this the time impose a severe restriction on commercial and holiday travel?
We need to be sending the world a signal that we are open for business, but we appear to be doing the very opposite. I know a number of businesses locally that will be further damaged: the imposition on their contractors working on short but important trips to the continent will be very costly.
Let alone the enormous damage that further reductions to inbound tourism will have on our earnings.

I believe that the blanket quarantine decision is a huge mistake and ought to be replaced by the sort of sophisticated airport testing regime which we have now developed, but was simply not available anywhere at the outset of the pandemic.

For the last week we have now enjoyed the benefits of voting in Parliament from the comfort of our own homes, one could even do it without getting out of bed, such is the convenience of modern technology.
To be fair, it does take just a little bit of getting used to: the Chancellor managed to vote against the Government in a division last week by pressing the wrong button, but I’m sure he’ll get the hang of it soon enough. It wouldn’t have happened in a physical division because a Government whip would have been barring the way.

When I was first elected in 1997 there was a huge influx of new MPs, partly because there had been an unusually large retirement cohort, but more so because of the huge Labour landslide wiping out so many previously safe Conservative seats. The result was a great deal of overcrowding in whichever division lobby the Labour Party happened to be voting in -whether it was ‘aye’ or ‘no’ the crush was just the same.

With so many new MPs not having experienced this crowded and prolonged voting system previously, there was an immediate demand to move to electronic voting.
A new committee was set up to examine the possibilities: The Select Committee on Modernisation.
It took some 18 months to produce its report, but by then it fell on deaf ears.
The new MPs had by then had quite long enough to grow used to voting by filing into separate lobbies and being marked off by the  division clerks as they emerged. More importantly, they had had long enough to appreciate the huge advantage of being often able to rub shoulders with colleagues and senior ministers, even the Prime Minister himself.
This is the huge advantage of the Westminster way of voting: it provides the opportunity to exchange information and grab the attention of the key decision makers where they cannot get away, and they are unprotected by officials and spin doctors. An enormous amount of important business takes place in the division lobbies.

What we managed to see off for years with the Committee on Modernisation, has been achieved in mere days by Covid19: we now have a fully functioning electronic voting system, and even if you are physically present in the Chamber of the House of Commons when a division is called, you are not now allowed to go into the lobbies to vote: you have to go to a PC, IPAD, or smartphone to record your vote.
This system is, of course, only a temporary expedient during the Covid19 pandemic, but these temporary things have a habit of surviving. How convenient to vote from home and not to have to trouble yourself with travel to London at all, and just think of the savings.
Already there are rumblings from MPs from more distant constituencies, and those with young families, and with private commercial interests which demand their time and presence.

My fear is that some newer MPs have not been in Parliament long enough to have fully appreciated the importance of the lobby voting system to their effective performance as an elected representative. After, all they were only elected in mid-December, then there was Christmas and not a great deal of voting in the weeks thereafter, and hardly time to settle into their role before the ‘virtual Parliament’ was imposed on us.

The battle over this ancient, but vitally important Parliamentary procedure is looming

Since the advent of the Covid19 pandemic the Government has always based its policy on the scientific advice that it has sought. Last week I listened to an interview on the wireless with Lord Howard a former Home Secretary and a former leader of the Conservative Party (whom I served as parliamentary private secretary during that period of leadership) and for whom I have enormous respect. He insisted that the Government was relying on the ‘best’ scientific advice.
How does he know, and can we be sure?

Certainly, there is no shortage of scientific advice, often contradictory advice. How are we to judge whether we have been led by the ‘best’ advice or by deeply flawed advice?

I am nervous about the extent to which the Government appears to have relied on advice from Professor Neil Fergusson’s modelling of the pandemic. Although he has now resigned from the Government’s scientific advisory group following the exposure of his lover’s breaking of the lockdown rules, it was apparent nevertheless that he had very significant influence at a key moment.
His computer modelling predicted that some half a million deaths would result from the our earlier voluntary approach to social distancing and reliance on building up a herd immunity in the population. That devastating prediction prompted a rethink from which the current policy of lockdown was the result.

There are plenty of scientific voices that reject Ferguson’s methodology and his assumptions.  At the time of his prediction his computer model had not been released for peer review. The code has now been made available to the scientific community and is subject to some pretty critical commentary.
I am not qualified to comment on the validity of the criticism of the computer code that he has released.
What we non-scientists can appreciate however, is that Professor Fergusson ‘has form’: He predicted that 136,000  of us would die of mad cow disease; that 200 million worldwide would die from avian flu. The reality however, was deaths of a few hundred in each case. 
In the current pandemic his model has been used to predict the deaths that would have resulted from the Sweden’s comparatively relaxed social distancing policy up until the beginning of this month. The result was predicted deaths 15 times greater than the actual number of deaths.

The pandemic’s damage to our livelihoods could not have been avoided, not least because we are a trading nation and the effect on international markets has been severe, nevertheless the policy of lockdown has imposed severe additional damage to our economy and costs that we will have to bear for many years. It was done for the best possible motive -to save lives.

Recession and unemployment also take a heavy toll of life too

I have had a large correspondence from elderly people who have been horrified by suggestions in the media that one of the ways in which a lifting of the lockdown for most us might be facilitated, would be by continuing to confine the over-seventies.
I expected protests, and they have arrived. It is unsurprising given that my parliamentary seat has one of the more elderly populations compared with other constituencies.
My correspondents protest that they are fit and well, and indeed many of them fitter than their younger neighbours. They are outraged that the lockdown could be lifted for the rest of us but not them.

I believe they are they are quite right. Aside from being male, and the vulnerability arising from other underlying conditions (co-morbidities as the clinicians describe them), the principal risk-factor in making one susceptible to a particularly dangerous dose of Covid19, is being overweight.
The key measurement is ‘body mass index’ (Bmi) which is calculated -in ‘English money’ – by dividing your weight  in pounds by your height in inches squared, multiplied by 703 (If that is a bit of a challenge and you’ve forgotten how to use a slide-rule, or not seen your log tables since school, then there are any number of calculators and charts available with a quick internet search).
If the result to the calculation  is 24 or under, then you aren’t overweight.

So, were we to say that anyone with a Bmi over 24 were to continue in lockdown after the rest of us have been released, I imagine that there would an absolute furore.  Just think how humiliating and intrusive any kind of enforcement would be: If a copper suspected you of being too fat to be out and about, would he be expected to stop you and demand that you step onto his scales, then stand still as he gets out his measuring tape?

The very idea is absurd, utterly disproportionate, and Bmi -as the designated criterion- quite arbitrary.
It is, nevertheless, no less arbitrary than a given age as the chosen criterion, be it seventy or any other. Equally, the enforcement of an age threshold would be no less intrusive: people looking too old would be stopped and asked to provide proof that they were younger. The prospect is just horrid.

I hope that, by very briefly touching on how we might differentiate between  at-risk groups -for their own protection of course, when emerging from lock-down, I have also drawn attention to the enormous power that we have already placed in the hands of the state to control every aspect of life.
Media reports suggest that the public are untroubled, that my concerns are not widely shared, indeed, that a majority have a preference for stricter conditions and harsher enforcement.
Certainly, there has been no lack of zeal with which they have sought to report to me breaches of the rules by their neighbours, and I find that deeply worrying.

PPE

When I was being trained for nuclear, biological and chemical warfare, we called it IPE (individual protection equipment) but, for the avoidance of confusion I’ll use the new name, PPE.
A most important principle taught us at Sandhurst, was that -having given the order to suit-up, the commander should be looking for every opportunity to order its removal: prolonged use of PPE degrades your mental and physical capabilities, it reduces the ability to communicate and is psychologically disorienting.
That principle seemed to have been lost somewhere when I returned to regimental training: I recall spending the best part of a week fully suited-up in Kielder Forest, it was pure misery (though it did afford protection from midges). I remember following the soldier in front of me in the blackest of nights for miles, only to discover that he was actually a smudge on my lens, and that I was completely alone.
The only time I expected to use the kit and the drills for real, in Iraq in 2003, I ended up not using them at all.

The NHS is getting through 60 million visors per week. I did suggest to Matt Hancock at the start of the Covid19 outbreak that, given there is no immediate danger of a chemical/nuclear/biological attack, he should commandeer all the military S10 respirators and allocate them to NHS staff. These do not need replacement, all you have to do is change the cannister (if I recall the drill correctly, you change it: when damaged, if immersed in water, when ordered to do so, or after 40 hours of continual use – but 20 in a forced-air environment. Amazing how it all sticks in the memory).
Anyway, Hancock turned down my suggestion. I concede that the appearance of the S10 respirator might well ‘spook’ the patients. So, congratulations to Southampton University and Hospital for designing and manufacturing a much more user-friendly PPE respirator from scratch to full production and use, in a matter of days.

I get quite a few emails  from the ’outraged’ of the New Forest, who from their armchairs tell me how they would have so much better managed the distribution of PPE.
In a matter of days the NHS has had to move from supplying PPE to just 233 hospital trusts, to the current 58,000 separate healthcare settings.
the term ‘PPE’ covers a large number of different items, several with quite different supply chains. And all this at a time of unprecedented international demand.
Mercifully we have military assistance. The Chief of the Defence Staff, General Sir Nick Carter commented this week that ‘this is the greatest logistic challenge’ in his forty-year military career (armchair generals: take note).

A big thank you to those local firms that have turned to manufacturing PPE, supplying it at cost, and even free of charge to the NHS.

Elsewhere there have been complaints that manufacturers have failed to elicit responses from their offers and consequently their output is being exported.
We are actively engaging with over 1000 UK companies, but there has to be due diligence that products meet exacting standards. Spain is an object lesson: where PPE was acquired but turned out to be defective, leading to the quarantining of health workers who used it. There are already plenty of scams operating.

There are complaints that we failed to participate in EU procurement initiatives early on, but those initiatives have, thus far, failed to deliver a single item to any of their participants.

And into this fog-of-war a teacher emails me to demand to be issued with PPE to protect himself from the possibility of being infected by pupils. Well, what about some for the pupils to protect themselves from him?
If this goes any further we’ll all end up wearing space suits

The College of Policing has published guidance from the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) as to what constitutes a reasonable excuse for leaving your home and it can be found at the Police College Website.
It is certainly much closer to the regulations themselves which I published in this column previously and can still be found at my own blog The Regulations

Of course, ultimately, only a court will determine what really is a reasonable interpretation of the regulations -should anyone wish to challenge an on-the-spot fine levied against them.
Nevertheless, the interpretation in this new CPS guidance is welcome. It clarifies that you can drive a somewhere to take exercise (the exercise should take longer than the drive) and it puts paid to that nonsense with park benches being cordoned-off to prevent walkers sitting down.

Constituents complain to me about any number of the aspects of the regulations.
Why are potentially solitary pastimes like angling and golf prohibited?
Why, if supermarkets can function with proper social distancing, cannot garden centres also open on the same basis?
So, the questions go on.
I can’t answer them because, astonishingly, these regulations which confine us to our homes were never approved, scrutinised and debated in Parliament.
The Government made the regulations under existing powers, not requiring parliamentary approval, empowered by the  Public Health (Control of Disease) Act, passed -appropriately enough in view of George Orwell’s classic title, in 1984.

I hope that, as Parliament resumes this week, we will be able to seek opportunities to debate and question the regulations along with a stack of other issues, including the plan for lifting them, But I can’t be certain.

I’ve been a whip both in opposition and in government. Indeed, I have been the Government Pairing Whip, whose responsibility is to get government supporting MPs to Westminster and, as far as possible, to keep them there in order to secure Government legislation in the division lobbies.
I am surprised therefore, to now be in receipt of a communication from my own whip telling me to stay at home and that instead we will have a virtual Parliament online.
Hold on, before we can have a virtual Parliament we first have to debate the details and decide proceed with it, which means that -if it is to be done democratically- MPs must be physically there to do it.
There are any number of issues quite unresolved.

‘Parliament’ derives from the French ‘Parler’: To speak. It is all about debate and conversation both inside and outside the chamber of the House of Commons. In the chamber a minister might triumph or equally ‘lose the House’ in the unique chemistry of that place.
It is outside the Chamber however, that the real challenges to ministers and their policies are hatched. It is in the tea room, smoking room, and in committee corridors that rebellions are hatched, and spines are stiffened amongst like-minded colleagues against the blandishments and threats of the whips.
Will this real practice of democracy thrive with MPs hundreds of miles apart and in proceedings confined to their Zoom ‘thumbnail’ in a grid on a computer screen, muted until their given allocation.

I fear that a virtual Parliament, might turn out to be virtually no Parliament at all

When you really, really need a telephone number that you can’t find, you can ring a directory enquiry service, but beware: they charge. I always remember the 118 service because of the adverts involving that rather bizarre pair of sporty twins with identical fake moustaches.

It would never have occurred to me to call up the BBC to get somebody’s telephone number. The main headline news on Friday on the BBC was that somebody had done exactly that.
We were told that the unnamed head of an NHS Trust had called the BBC to get the telephone number of Burberry, the clothing manufacturer, so that he could see if he could get hold of some PPE aprons for which his NHS trust was in desperate need.

On this-morning’s News broadcast the BBC admitted that the caller had not been the NHS official that the BBC claimed he was at all.
The original item was the lead news item, but to-day’s admission was way down in the pecking order -funny that

And the correction has not extended to all the other news sources and websites that picked up the original story

The Moral:
Never trust anyone asking for a phone number

A number of constituents have complained to me that an additional budget of £10,000 has been made available to MPs to assist them in working from home. As I’ve said in this column several times before, when MPs determined these things themselves they  were rather more sensitive to political realities -having to look our constituents in the eye. Now however, we have no role in these decisions whatsoever.

A Google search will reveal that I significantly underspent the budget available to me, and I can assure constituents I will not be using any of the additional £10,000.

I was speechless when Churches closed their doors, then incredulous to discover that clergy were forbidden to enter them even for private prayer. Now a new horror has arisen. At first I thought it might be fake news, but it was printed in The Times.
Apparently, the Bishop of Chelmsford, soon to be promoted Archbishop of York, has banned chaplains from ministering to patients at their bedsides.
As I remarked in this column last week, during the interdict that the Pope imposed on England in 1208, priests were at least allowed to hear the confessions of the dying, but not now apparently.
Given the valiant ministry of the Saints and the Church throughout plague and warfare, even stretching back to the Gospel accounts of Our Lord’s ministry to lepers, we have now come to a pretty poor state of affairs.

It’s enough to turn one Presbyterian

As the death toll from Corvid19 mounts with relentless news bulletins to match, for an instant -and it was only an instant, I thought I might have preferred things as they were last year with Laura  Kuenssberg ever on the airwaves describing the latest twists in the BREXIT saga.
Then just on cue, an email campaign started up demanding that, because of the coronavirus pandemic, our departure from the BREXIT transition period on 31 Dec this year should be delayed. Gadzooks emails with BREXIT and Corvid19 rolled into one!

The email addresses from which these demands emanate seem somewhat familiar: I suspect they are the same addresses from which earlier demands were made that BREXIT be abandoned altogether.

We will have to see how things pan-out, but my prejudice is not to abandon the December deadline. The Government has already demonstrated its ability to negotiate successfully with the EU in short order.

Furthermore, were we to extend the transition we would face steep increases in financial contributions as we entered the new 7 year budgeting period.
Rather more worrying, given the state of the Eurozone, is the possibility of being roped into bailouts and ballooning liabilities of the European Investment Bank.
EU law might well constrain policy options as we seek to boost economic a recovery from the pandemic. 

As an afterthought, one correspondent added that Coronavirus protective equipment should not be subject to VAT. Of course, we can’t change EU VAT rules until the transition period ends.

Far from prolonging our departure from the transition period, we should seek to accelerate it.