Starmer criticises roadmap rebel Tory MPS
Labour leader urges PM to disregard backbenchers’ ‘irresponsible’ claims on ending virus restrictions
SIR KEIR STARMER yesterday urged the Prime Minister to ignore Tory backbenchers who have suggested the route out of lockdown could be accelerated.
The Labour leader said the principles behind Boris Johnson’s four-step roadmap out of restrictions were “plainly right”, but added that the blueprint was threatened by Conservative MPS’ claims about the virus.
The national recovery is being undermined by “people saying that Covid statistics appear to have been manipulated and that Monday’s roadmap is based on ‘dodgy assumptions’ and ‘false modelling’,” Sir Keir said during Prime Minister’s Questions.
He added that the comments were “irresponsible” and derived from Conservative MPS, in particular the “60 or so members of the Covid Recovery Group [CRG]” who have questioned aspects of the lockdown. “Perhaps the Prime Minister should have a word with them,” Sir Keir said.
Mr Johnson side-stepped the issue, replying that his roadmap would set the nation on a “cautious but irreversible journey to freedom”. He said the data supporting his plan, under which final restrictions will not be lifted until June 21 at the earliest, have been published.
It came after Mark Harper, chairman of the CRG, expressed scepticism about some of the assumptions on which the Government roadmap was based.
“There is a clear and concerning pattern of assumptions not reflecting the (much more positive!) reality,” Mr Harper wrote on Twitter, adding: “At the very least, this raises some serious questions about the extent to which these models should be relied on.”
He suggested that Government estimates may be overly cautious when compared with some other published data on the speed of the vaccine rollout; the jab’s impact on infections, hospital admissions and deaths; and its rate of take-up.
Mr Harper hit back at Sir Keir’s attack, suggesting that if the Labour leader “spent less time flailing over my Twitter threads and considering whether to topple statues, he might do less dreadfully in the polls”. The former chief whip demanded to know which part of his analysis Sir Keir rejected.
Support has grown among some business groups, as well as Tory MPS, for a more rapid easing of restrictions.
Government sources this week told The Daily Telegraph that lockdown could be eased more quickly than Mr Johnson’s roadmap sets out if the realworld data are more positive than anticipated. Jacob Rees-mogg, the Leader of the Commons, also indicated on his Moggcast podcast that there could be “flexibility” if the Government kept
“smashing” vaccine targets. The Government has insisted that the tentative dates for easements in April, May and June are the earliest junctures at which those relaxations could happen.
Gavin Williamson, the Education Secretary, said: “There are no plans whatsoever to be moving ahead and the dates have already been given.
“We want to give the public as well as business confidence and the assurance as to when these next steps are going to be happening. But there’s certainly no plans to be moving ahead of that.”
Sir Keir Starmer is struggling to find a way to put clear political water between Labour and the Government over the handling of the pandemic. His criticism of the tardiness of lockdowns, the paucity of protective equipment or the faltering expansion of testing has been eclipsed by the success of the vaccine programme.
Moreover, Labour also backs the Government’s cautious approach to easing restrictions and would, if anything, be even more prudent. But in his quest for something distinctive to say, Sir Keir assuredly took a wrong turn in the Commons during Prime Minister’s Questions. He urged Boris Johnson to take to task those Tory backbenchers questioning some of the statistical modelling behind the Covid policy. They were, said the Labour leader, “irresponsible and undermining our national recovery”.
It has come to something when the rights of MPS to challenge the methodology underpinning Government policy are to be curtailed. What on earth is Parliament for otherwise? MPS are perfectly entitled to ask questions about the way the data behind lockdowns are compiled and used. It is not being unpatriotic to do so, and nor is it unscientific since a good many experts have also challenged some of the assumptions of the statisticians on whom the Government mostly relies.
Models are only as good as the information fed into them, and are liable to be wrong if that turns out to be exaggerated or overtaken by events. Mr Johnson has said he will be led by “the data not dates”, but if the former is better than the models have predicted, then the latter should be brought forward, whatever Sir Keir thinks.