Labour: Let’s lock down Britain
Kowtow to doctors of doom? No – we’re boisterous Boris and smiling Sunak!
Tory fury as Starmer and Khan demand circuit breaker for 2-3 weeks
BORIS Johnson accused Labour of ‘playing politics’ with the pandemic last night after Sir Keir Starmer called for Britain to be plunged back into lockdown.
The Labour leader demanded a national ‘circuit breaker’ in which the country would again be told to stay at home for at least two to three weeks.
The move would see pubs, shops, restaurants, gyms and hairdressers forced to close their doors again – with no guarantee of when they would be able to reopen.
London mayor Sadiq Khan backed Sir Keir’s plan, tweeting: ‘A short, national “circuit break” – as advised by the experts on Sage – will save lives, protect the NHS and support our economic recovery by preventing longer restrictions that will otherwise be inevitable.’
Mr Khan also said it was a certainty that the capital will be moved from tier one to the stricter tier two in the next few days.
Sir Keir’s call comes less than a week after he said the ‘only way’ to tackle the pandemic was to use targeted local measures.
It flies in the face of warnings from Labour leaders in the North who fear further restrictions will ‘shatter’ fragile local economies.
Sources refused to rule out the Prime Minister imposing a circuit breaker in the coming weeks if the pandemic worsens, saying only that it was ‘ not the right measure now’.
Earlier, Labour’s Shadow Health Secretary Jonathan Ashworth acknowledged that a full lockdown would be ‘disastrous for society’ if it lasted for ‘weeks and weeks’.
In an address to Tory MPs last night, Mr Johnson accused Sir Keir of ‘wobbling about like a trolley with a broken wheel’.
A senior Government source also accused Labour of game-playing after Sir Keir ordered frontbenchers to abstain in a vote on the 10pm curfew last night.
They said: ‘Keir Starmer is a shameless opportunist playing political games in the middle of a global pandemic. He says he wants a national lockdown but he’s refusing to vote for targeted restrictions in areas that need them most.’
Former Tory leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith last night urged the PM to ‘stand firm’ against Labour pressure for another lockdown.
‘This is opportunism of the worst sort from Labour,’ he said. ‘They want to plunge Britain back into the misery of lockdown, with no idea how long it would last and no idea how they would pay for it.’
Sir Keir’s intervention came as Downing Street indicated that the PM has relegated the role of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), led by Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance and Chief Medical Officer Professor Chris Whitty.
No10 confirmed that Mr Johnson rejected Sage’s call last month to impose a circuit breaker.
Government sources declined to put a cost on a temporary lockdown, but experts have previously estimated it at £2billion a day. The PM’s spokesman said the Government had instead decided to take ‘robust and targeted and proportionate action ... whilst minimising the impact to livelihoods’.
The spokesman repeatedly refused to say whether Government policy was still being ‘guided by the science’ as it was in the early months of the crisis.
Scientists advising the Government will today publish a report claiming that a short-term lockdown incorporating the October half-term could save anywhere between 3,000 and 107,000 lives.
Sir Keir used his first press conference since becoming Labour leader in April to shatter the uneasy political consensus over the handling of the pandemic. He called for a ‘two to three week’ circuit breaker during which schools could remain open, but shops, pubs and restaurants would be ordered to close. Office workers, including MPs, would be ordered to work from home.
Sir Keir said the measures were ‘needed now to get this virus under
‘Robust and targeted action’
control’ and ‘rectify some of the mistakes the Government has made’ over issues like testing.
Speaking to Tory MPs just minutes after Sir Keir’s announcement, the PM took a thinly-veiled swipe at him.
He thanked Labour mayors for working with him on new measures ‘unlike some others who now seem to be playing politics’.
He also joked some people were ‘enthusiastic’ about the rule of six since they could now avoid their in-laws at Christmas.
Mr Johnson announced the new three-tiered system of local lockdowns on Monday.
But the PM was last night urged to reject calls for tighter restrictions. Former Tory chief whip Mark Harper said a national lockdown would be the ‘wrong call’ when Covid rates vary widely across the country.
London mayor Mr Khan yesterday insisted the capital should move as a whole into higher restrictions despite variable rates across the city. He said London would pass a ‘trigger point’ in the next few days.
UNLIKE the booklet in a new car’s glove compartment, no instruction manual exists for handling a global pandemic.
so the Mail fully accepts Boris Johnson has faced a fiendishly difficult task in tackling coronavirus. That is why we supported March’s lockdown, believing a temporary suspension of our freedoms was a sensible step while the government grappled with the pernicious threat.
But concerns quickly grew that, spooked by his brush with Covid, the prime Minister had fallen under his scientists’ spell.
if it was down to them, of course, we would be cowering in lead-lined bunkers, watching the economy and society go up in flames.
Yet the old adage is true: ‘Advisers advise, politicians decide.’ science should inform decision-making. even in a pandemic, it’s not an autopilot which lets ministers remove their hands from the controls.
We therefore commend Mr Johnson for breaking free from gloomy sage boffins by rejecting their call for a ‘circuit breaker’ of repressive new restrictions. under that grim plan, all socialising would be banned, nonessential shops, pubs and restaurants would shut, and people would work from home.
Yes, it might have halted Covid’s advance – fleetingly. But such a draconian clampdown would have inflicted unimaginable financial and social hardship, just as Britain clambered punch-drunk off the canvas after being pummelled by the lockdown.
instead, he plumped for other constraints on our liberties. still severe, but less so.
it can’t have been easy for him. indeed, no10 might still impose stricter curbs, as the country braces for a second wave of hospitalisations and deaths.
But it’s clear Boris is finally entertaining other opinions – including his Chancellor’s. This is a welcome step in the right direction. now, the pM must hold his nerve.
For this paper – alongside distinguished scientists – has been at the vanguard of demands for a different strategy towards battling Covid. not because of a coldblooded indifference for human life – but precisely because we value it.
Consider, after all, the cataclysmic effects: Businesses going bust, millions of workers handed p45s, homeless families, poverty, and the countless lives lost to untreated conditions such as cancer, due to the oneeyed fixation on the contagion.
even the government’s own study, no less, has found that lockdowns don’t work. in fact, they may actually increase the death toll by prolonging the pandemic.
unfortunately, as the oxford professor behind the most hopeful vaccine has now made clear, no silver bullet is on the horizon. so however difficult, we have no choice but to learn to live with the virus.
Britain simply can’t yo-yo between semifreedom and semi-lockdown. That would be futile. A saner idea would be shielding the old and vulnerable as best we can, while the rest of us function as normally as possible.
Meanwhile, after weeks of fence-sitting, sir keir starmer condemned tighter restrictions on Monday. Then yesterday, in a screeching u-turn, he demanded a national lockdown. Doesn’t the preposterous labour leader realise the ‘rule of six’ applies to people, not policy positions?