Hospitals can’t dictate how to run society, says Rees-mogg

SOCIETY cannot be run with the aim of stopping hospitals from being full, Jacob Rees-mogg has said, as he called for “proportionality” in the Government’s Covid restrictions.

The Leader of the Commons used his “Moggcast” to suggest that people who are not in the most vulnerable nine categories are unlikely to be at risk from the Indian variant and that it would be “odd” to keep restrictions in place until all over-18s have had two vaccines.

His comments appear to put him at odds with the Prime Minister, who on Monday said he had been convinced that delaying stage four of the unlocking roadmap to July 19 would save thousands of lives and prevent the NHS from being overwhelmed.

“Ultimately, the NHS is there to serve the British people, not the British people there to serve the NHS,” Mr Reesmogg told Conservativehome. “And therefore, we may need to spend more money on hospitals, but you can’t run society purely to stop the hospitals being full otherwise you’d never let us get in our cars and drive anywhere, or do any of the other things that people want to do. So there has to be some proportionality within that – that the Government doesn’t have the right to take charge of people’s lives, purely to prevent them seeing the doctor.

“We’ve got to think about who is at risk, and if everybody in the top nine categories has had the double vaccination and has had two weeks afterwards, then people below those categories aren’t at particular risk.”

It is understood that the podcast was recorded before Boris Johnson announced that the end of lockdown would be delayed, but his comments suggest division in the Cabinet.

The decision is said to have been signed off by the “quad” of Mr Johnson, Rishi Sunak, Matt Hancock and Michael Gove.