Following the disgraceful scenes in in Clapham last Saturday and the concerns that I expressed in this column about the abrogation of our civil liberties, a large number of correspondents have asked me to vote against the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill to-night on the basis that its provisions will further constrain our ability to protest and demonstrate lawfully.

The Bill does indeed grant further powers and rather too much discretion to the Police.
Nevertheless, the Bill covers a great deal of ground, most of which I approve of -especially its provisions to toughen the sentences for violent and sexual offences.
I wouldn’t want to throw the baby out with the bath water.

Even part three of the Bill, which deals with demonstrations, addresses concerns that I have had for a long time about the need to pre-empt demonstrations which intend to unlawfully disrupt the commercial and social lives of law-abiding citizens. I think particularly of those demonstrations that blocked-off access to airports, attacked enterprises, and brought London to a standstill, all of which place a massive burden on the police, denuding counties of their own policemen and their proper expectations of law enforcement and protection.

Nevertheless, I do agree with my correspondents that the Bill gives too much latitude to police forces and there is a need for the provisions to be much too tightly defined. It also gives the Government the ability to change the balance subsequently through regulations.
I’ve learnt the lesson of the danger that arises from regulatory powers in the last year as the most intimate aspects of lives – whom we may meet, where we may meet them, even what we must wear on our faces- have been ordered by regulations under the Public Health Act 1984.  So I am loathe to grant sensitive regulatory powers in this Bill.
None of this however, is sufficient in my opinion to vote against the Bill in principle at Second Reading.

The proper way to proceed is to address these important issues by forceful argument and amending the Bill during its progress in the legislative standing committee and at its  report stage.

First let me say that Hampshire Constabulary have been exemplary, and a lesson to other forces in the sense of proportion and patience that it has shown.

Policing in the pandemic was never going to be easy. Frankly, some of the regulations are unenforceable, and others require enormous sensitivity. Not all forces have covered themselves with glory. From the start of the first lockdown Derbyshire Police showed their crass stupidity by poisoning an azure lake, in order to deter visitors.
There have been plenty of other instances where officers have overstepped the mark, well beyond what is acceptable in a democratic society under the rule of law.

I have previously expressed my concern about the way in which government guidance  has been confused with regulation when police officers have issued instructions to citizens. Guidance is no more than the opinion of ministers and it is not enforceable. Only the law are police officers charged with enforcing. I make no bones about it: a ‘police state’ is where officers enforce the opinions of ministers, It is the very opposite of the rule of law.

I have been worried by the lack of media coverage afforded to the way that a number of protesters have been unnecessarily roughly treated on a number of occasions. Saturday’s policing of the vigil on Clapham Common however, has achieved the notoriety and opprobrium that it deserves. The scenes were quite shocking and the result of a woeful want of judgement by those in command.
The attempt to clear the vigil was made because some of the women were about to make speeches.
Good grief! Not that! Surely, it had to be prevented at all costs?

I have, since the very beginning of the first lockdown been staggered by the lack of protest at the abrogation of our civil liberties including right of assembly and freedom of expression. Perhaps the disgraceful scenes in Clapham will be the spark to ignite a rather more robust response in defence of our liberties.

We have a common law right to protest and in addition there are legislative provisions that enhance that right which the police are under a duty to facilitate.
It is far from clear as to the extent that the Health Protection Restrictions made last year using powers enabled by Public Health Act 1984, have lawfully removed our right to public protest.  It certainly hasn’t yet been tested in the courts. So, I do hope that crowd funding will prompt and enable those facing £10,000 fixed penalty notices to challenge them there.

There are even signs that politicians in our hitherto supine Parliament, are waking up to the monster that we have created.

As a believer in free markets and small government, I’m hardly comfortable with the fact that the administration which I support has delivered the highest proportion of our national income being taken in taxes than has been the case for many years.

My prejudice is that, on the whole, individuals make better decisions on what is best for themselves, their families and their communities than government can make on their behalf. Consequently, we should tax them less but expect them to do more for themselves, rather than do more for them and charge accordingly.

Nevertheless and notwithstanding my prejudice, I approved of last week’s tax-raising budget because my honest-finance gene is stronger than my ideological gene: You have to pay for what you’ve spent. Whilst I’d prefer not to have government spend so freely (particularly when much of it was to stop enterprises trading and pay employees to do nothing), it’s too late now -the £470 billion bill is coming in and has to be repaid.

There is, of course, a vital agenda to increase investment, productivity and enterprise so that greater tax revenue is generated by increased economic activity  and any chancellor of the Exchequer needs to be alive to the danger that his proposals to raise levels of taxation reduce the potential for revenue growth through economic growth. I think that Rishi Sunak was careful to avoid that danger last week in the way that he structured the tax increases for businesses and incentivised investment.

I have never however, shared the belief -that appears to be held by a number of my colleagues-  that deficits can be very largely financed by cutting taxes in the expectation that revenues will rise sufficiently consequent upon the change in economic behaviour prompted by the tax cuts.
The ‘Laffer Curve’ as it is known amongst economists, predicts that in certain limited circumstances cutting tax rates can lead directly to an increase in tax revenues. Equally, an increase in tax rates can reduce the tax revenue taken. A chancellor would be negligent not to look for these opportunities and dangers, but it is never a panacea for filling a large deficit. And if it clinches the argument (it should, given the prejudices of those of my colleagues who embrace it) Mrs Thatcher certainly never believed in it.

We’ve spent the money, and we have to pay-up.

The Government has been pulled in both directions. Not only has it been under pressure from me and many like-minded members of Parliament who doubt the wisdom of lockdown and want it lifted as soon as possible. On the other hand and largely outside Parliament there has been a growing lobby over the last months, who demand a continuation of restrictions until we can deliver a state characterised as ‘zero-covid’.
The best thing about the Governments ‘roadmap’ to ending the lockdown is that it settles this question. The Prime Minister could not have been more explicit in his statement to the House of Commons:
“There is therefore no credible route to a zero-covid Britain or indeed a zero-covid world, and we cannot persist indefinitely with restrictions that debilitate our economy, our physical and mental wellbeing, and the life chances of our children”
Hallelujah!. At least we’ve sent the zero-covid lobby packing. They’d have locked us down indefinitely.

Where I depart from the Government’s plan is that I believe it to be too cautious. There needs to be a much greater sense of urgency about the costs that lockdown is piling up, the damage it is doing to our health and to the futures of our children. We simply do not have time to be timid about this.

The Government has been overcautious. The modelling on which scientific advice has been based is itself too cautious. As with all modelling, its findings depend upon the assumptions that were fed into it in the first place. The calculations are based on a levels of vaccine efficacy and vaccine up-take that are significantly below the levels that we are currently actually experiencing.
This would not be too much of a problem were the plan genuinely not date driven, but data driven, as the Prime Minister claimed.
Despite this claim, the PM announced a series of ‘not before’ dates for each phase of lifting the lockdown. These dates are only flexible in that they will be delayed if the level of hospital admissions, daily infections, deaths and the impact of new variants decline less swiftly than anticipated.
The dates will not be advanced however, if the data on admissions, infections, deaths, and variants proves much better than was expected.  Given the pessimistic assumptions fed into the model, there really ought to be an swifter relaxation if things improve so much more quickly.

But let’s end on a positive note. From March 8^th political activity will resume with door to door leafleting and canvassing. O Joy!
Were there to be a trade-off however, I rather suspect that most people would have preferred the shops and pubs to have been opened instead.

In this column last week  https://www.desmondswaynemp.com/ds-blog/holiday-in-hell/
I cautioned against a ‘precautionary’ approach to viral variants, on the grounds that mutation into new variants is the bread and butter of what viruses do.
Since when I’ve read a very interesting email exchange between Professor Anthony Brooks of The Department of Genetics & Genome Biology at The  University of Leicester and other scientists.
Basically the argument runs like this: the Darwinian principle of natural selection favours variants of viruses that mutate to milder causes of disease. After all, the virus will spread much more successfully if its host remains active rather than being laid low in bed.
The problem is that social distancing and lockdown may  skew that process of natural selection in favour of variants that are more infectious: -infectious enough to get round aspects social distancing; and potent enough to gain hospital admission because that’s where some of best opportunities for greater spreading are to be had.
This artificial advantage for more infectious and potent variants afforded by our lockdown in response to Covid-19, applies not just to covid-19 itself, but to every virus that is out there.
This may have implications for future flu and other epidemics.
It’s another good reason to get back to normal life -urgently.

Regular readers of this column will recall that my main effort has been  to focus attention on the number of hospital admissions as the key to release from lockdown: once there is no danger of the NHS being overwhelmed then, I submit, the lockdown restrictions on our lives -that are so costly- should be lifted.
Alas, the goal posts have been moving from hospital admissions to  the number of infections, or the number of deaths. The danger arising from this ‘mission creep’ is that we will find it ever harder to escape from lockdown at all, with evermore devastating economic and social consequences.

Last September I raised the issue of ‘false positives’ in the Commons with the Secretary of State. I was not satisfied with his answer (see my blog https://www.desmondswaynemp.com/ds-blog/false-positives/ ). Now however, given the shift in policy towards a target of reduced infections, typically being touted at below 1000 new cases daily as the condition for lifting lockdown, the issue of false positives will loom ever larger.
I have seen estimates for false positives ranging between 1% and 6% over the last year. The Secretary of State told us it was 1%.  Inevitably, it will vary dependent upon the type of test and the different laboratories processing results.
Let’s be really conservative however, and take the  published false positives figure for the lateral flow test at a mere 0.32%.
Now, imagine that Covid-19 died out overnight -it completely disappeared off the face of the earth.
Nevertheless, with 500,000 or so tests carried out the next day we would still detect 1,600 new cases from the false positives and consequently refuse to lift the lockdown.
It gets worse because the ambition is to increase the level of testing tenfold in project ‘Moonshot’ , so the false positives will take us ever further from the desired level of infections.

The same principle will apply to any target based on the level of deaths from Covid-19, because all hospital cases are tested on admission and weekly thereafter.
The only sensible discussion of ‘acceptable’ death rates from Covid-19 would have to be based on a ‘tolerable’ excess over the current winter deaths from all respiratory conditions which, pre Covid-19, was typically 300 per day. Any question of tolerable death levels, is sensitive one, which is why it is essential to stick with a daily level of hospital admissions with which the NHS can deal effectively.

So don’t move the goal posts.

 

(I am indebted to Professor Anthony Brookes of The  Department of Genetics & Genome Biology at University of Leicester)

I Have been taken to task for ‘spreading misinformation’ because in this column on the 5th of September 2020 I stated that UK deaths in the preceding 12 months had been by no means exceptional.
A critic however, has provided figures clearly showing a 15% increase in deaths in 2020 over the average of the preceding three years.

First, the criticism is based on figures for the whole of 2020, where my column was written at the beginning of September before the surge in infections and deaths consequent upon the advent of the new variant. Only two weeks after publication of the column, the Secretary of State told me from the despatch box, on the record, that average deaths were consistent with the long-term average. I consider my column to be a fair analysis at the time it was written.

Furthermore, when I wrote the column I was considering a much broader sweep of recent history than my critic.

From early in the pandemic I have complained about how we are manipulated by the ways in which statistics are presented, especially without context.
Most recently I have been appalled by the way that last year’s figures for deaths have been presented with attendant hyperbole.
On the morning of their release the BBC R4 Today Programme trumpeted that they were the worst since WW2. The statistician in attendance said that this was a quite illegitimate comparison given the number of profound changes since then, not least the vast increase in population. Nevertheless, the BBC persisted with the characterisation.

Likewise, The Guardian ran with a headline on the 12 January 2021 that “2020 was deadliest year in a century in England and Wales.” Such a sensationalist headline looking at deaths recorded in a calendar year did not account for the size or composition of the population. 

A useful measure for understanding deaths is the Age-Standardised Mortality Rate (ASMRs). ASMRs take into consideration both the population size and age-structure allowing comparisons over time. The ONS notes that the provisional ASMR in 2020 for England and Wales was 1043.5 deaths per 100,000 population which was around 8% higher than the five-year average. Since 2001 the ASMR has decreased annually but an increase was seen in 2019 and 2020. It is granted that the ASMR was higher in 2020 than recent years but it was surpassed in 2008 (1,084.2), 2007 (1,085.1), 2006 (1,099.1), 2005 (1,137.6), 2004 (1,155.4), 2003 (1,224.8), 2002 (1,225.5) and 2001 (1,229.8).

Another way of assessing the number of deaths in the UK is the Crude Death Rate (deaths per 1,000 population). Based on ONS’s monthly deaths spreadsheet and population projections for 2020 a provisional crude death rate for England and Wales can be calculated at 10.1 deaths per 1,000 population, compared with 8.9 in 2019. The ONS’ Annual data: Deaths (numbers and rates: total, infant, neonatal) shows that the crude death rate in England and Wales was higher than 2020 when records began in 1953 (11.4 deaths per 1000 population) until 2003 (10.2 deaths per 1,000 population) in every single year.    

There is little doubt that the UK had a greater number of deaths in 2020 than in the preceding decade. However, it is far from exceptional. Under the Age-Standardised Mortality Rate (ASMR) measure the rate of mortality was higher in every year prior to 2008. Likewise, under the crude mortality rate every year preceding 2003 saw a higher mortality rate than 2020.

In any event, given that my principal complaint is that lockdown is a failed policy: It comes at an astronomic economic and social cost. So, the more dramatically one presents the death rate, the more its abject failure is manifest.

Scientists and politicians ought to be able to dispute the interpretation of data sensibly and without rancour or name-calling.

I despair.
Apparently the polls show a large majority approve of ten-year prison sentences for anyone caught trying to evade quarantine after a visit to Portugal etc.
This new offence and sentence will come into effect without either a debate or vote in Parliament.
What have we come to?

Imagine ending a trip confined to your hotel room for ten days, and having to pay a whopping bill, in addition.

The UK is not some backwater that can cut itself off from the world, on the contrary, we are one of the world’s greatest trading and travelling nations. Restrictive measures may have devastating consequences for our national income and livelihoods.

The danger is that it is always easier to impose a quarantine policy than to lift it.
The policy is a direct precautionary response to new strains of Covid-19 that have emerged in specified countries.
Will the Government feel able to lift the quarantine once our vaccination programme is sufficiently advanced?
Or will there be a temptation for further precaution against the possible emergence of new mutations of the virus?
 After all, mutate is what viruses do. What’s more they do it anywhere, not just in the designated destinations. Indeed, currently the world’s most successful mutant variant originated in Kent.
The fear of a new mutant variant need not be confined to Covid-19, any virus could be mutating anywhere.

If we are ever to return to normality and prosperity we have to encounter risks with a proper sense of proportion.

Speeches from Hansard that I made years ago in debates about the repeal of Section 28 and reducing the age of sexual consent have surfaced, in which my antediluvian prejudices are quite shocking, even to me.
How could I have ever believed such things, let alone said them?

My transformation from extreme social conservative to libertarian deserves some explanation. How was it that I opposed those measures only to become the champion of the Equal Marriage Act, the Lord Commissioner responsible for whipping it through all its stages in the Commons.

Long term readers of this column would have witnessed that transformation as it took place in these blogs. I call it a transformation not an evolution, because it was sudden.
I put my original prejudice down to intellectual laziness. I simply never challenged, or even thought about the views that I held. Furthermore, when I received a very large correspondence in support of my position and against the liberalising measures that we were debating, it was so much easier to simply reply by stating that I agreed with them, rather than investing any intellectual effort in the matter.

My mind changed when the Government presented Parliament with the Sexual Orientation Regulations. The purpose of this measure was to prevent the providers of any commercial service from discriminating against a potential client on the basis their sexuality.
It prompted a huge lobbying campaign by certain elements of organised religion. I received hundreds of letters, most of them containing the same example: a Christian couple running a B&B would be required by regulation to accept as guests a gay couple, notwithstanding the offence to their deeply held religious beliefs.
In a flash of enlightenment the question occurred to me ‘ what Gospel is it they could possibly have been reading?’
How on earth could they imagine that, were Our Lord the landlord, that he would have turned the quests away?
Having made that leap, I then put time and effort into studying the Scriptures. The result of which study I put to use when the controversy arose when the Equal Marriage Bill was before Parliament. I published a number of defences of the Bill from a biblical perspective. One of which, entitled Too Much Leviticus, was even written-up in The Guardian in a column by Chris Bryant MP (a former Vicar) and which prompted an attempt by a national evangelical association to reclaim me for the ‘truth’. It resulted in a very unpleasant meeting, the only one in which I’ve ever had to ask my guests to leave.

It is easy to forget the virulence and bitterness of the Campaign against the Bill. My stance led to a significant number of resignations from my political association. I was assured that I was destroying marriage, to which I responded that the marriages to which they were objecting would be occasions of joy and celebration to the participants, their friends and relatives, but wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference to anyone else.
Events have proved me right: marriage has survived and, I believe, it has been strengthened.

There are examples of politicians having radically revised their opinions. The ‘journey’ of John Bercow comes to my mind. Many of my colleagues derided him for it, but -though I still disagree with him about almost everything- I rather respect him for it.

For months now, I have been attempting to keep the focus of the Government and of the readers of this column, upon what was the stated Aim of our Coronavirus policy. (I have never doubted the wisdom of that aim, although I have always questioned the government’s lockdown policy as a means of achieving it)
We’ve all seen and heard it so often, and can call it to mind instantly: our united purpose is to save lives by protecting the NHS.

The logic is simple: if the NHS is overwhelmed by too many hospital admissions then not only will it be unable to provide care to those with suffering with Covid-19 – resulting in many more of their deaths, but equally it will be unable to treat people with many other serious and life-threatening conditions, so they will die in greater numbers too.
So, we aim to save lives by limiting the number of hospital admissions.
The aim is not just to save lives themselves, but to do so by protecting the NHS.
This is an important distinction.
Were the objective just to save lives, then we would only achieve it by a policy characterised as ‘zero Covid’.
This is the very ‘mission creep’ against which I have been warning. Right on cue this week Jeremy Hunt, Chairman of the Commons Health Select Committee, has argued forcefully that the aim should, instead of being expressed in terms of hospital admissions,  rather it should be a specific reduced target of daily infections.
By failing to maintain the original aim, we lose the proper sense of urgency about achieving it, as if we had the luxury of delay until some other desirable objectives were achieved in addition.
Of course it would indeed be wonderful, were it possible, if we extended our objective to complete ‘zero Covid’ so nobody had to die of it again, or as far along that path as can be practically achieved.
However fanciful this may sound, there is nevertheless a growing lobby in support of it. Daily it is expressed in cautionary statements about the need to maintain restrictions on our lives and not to lift them too quickly.
The danger is that we are losing proper and realistic appreciation of the cost in terms of the long term damage to livelihoods, education, and a terrible toll on mental health. In short, we’ve lost all sense of the cost/ benefit analysis of current lockdown measures, and the sense that we urgently need to lift them as soon as possible, before they inflict even more lasting harm.
That moment of ‘possibility’ was defined by a level of  hospital admissions with which the NHS could cope. Substituting some other new objective appears to be defined only by the length of a piece of string, keeping us in devastating elements of lockdown almost indefinitely.