SUNSET CLAUSE WOULD RETURN THE COVID DEBATE TO PARLIAMENT

DEEP IN the undergrowth of the House of Lords, of all places, a notion is being hatched which we might all support. It is complicated, but let me try.

When the country is hit by an emergency the appropriate legislation has to be passed and by the nature of things it has to be rapid.

Hopefully the emergency will pass in three to six months and the matching laws can lapse. In their duration however they can be extremely burdensome, even dictatorial.

But in the case of Covid they just go on and on. Our normal citizens’ rights are removed by the barrow load, our accustomed daily freedoms trashed. And that is exactly what has happened, with no end in sight. Here’s the rub. The powers-that-be are not going to hand them back – they love their new-found dictatorship.

The laws we accepted last spring as “temporary” have no “sunset clause”. This technical phrase means that after a reasonable period – three months? six months? – the laws that reduce us to powerless servants of the all-powerful officialdom have to be reconsidered and passed again. Then our elected MPs have the power to do what they know we want.

Hence the growing plan to force the Government to introduce sunset clauses to bring us back under parliamentary control, not that of the jobsworths. The ruse is a compulsory debate in the House of Commons. This can – by custom at least – be achieved if 100,000 citizens sign an online petition.

It worked in the case a few years ago of the wrongly convicted and imprisoned Marine A. The petition forced a debate, the debate a rethink, then a retrial. Result – unjust verdict overturned, sentence quashed, Marine Sergeant set free.

The group of peers under Lord James of Blackheath wants to see if we could get a reconsider of the laws that presently keep us in legal chains. This means a debate, triggered by a petition. If it comes, let’s sign it.

SOLDIERS deploying overseas should absolutely be vaccinated.

In a sense they are doing a key worker role and if they are being deployed to somewhere like Afghanistan, there is a danger.

Not just because of the instability and insecurity but also biosecurity, which is now front and foremost of everybody’s mind.

We cannot predict whether social distancing will be honoured in places like Afghanistan.

Kenya is a great example. I served there and we were given malaria and yellow fever jabs and other precautions were taken.

The very nature of this pandemic shows how dangerous it is, particularly in the developing

world. Our duty of care to our Armed Forces means they should be given a vaccine.

This won’t impact on the rollout here in the UK because the number of jabs involved is tiny.

And I would like to see RFA Argus, the Royal Navy’s hospital ship, repeating what it did with Ebola, and lead vaccination programmes in Africa and other parts of the world.

That would be a great example of UK leadership in the pandemic.