Last night, Richard Fuller MP was called to speak in the COVID debate where he questioned how Parliament, the executive, the opposition and backbenchers like him had conducted themselves over the past year during which unprecedented restrictions on societal freedoms have been implemented.
The full speech can be read below and watched here.
General debate: Covid-19 - 22 February 2021
Richard Fuller:
The most telling aspect of today’s debate is the focus on specifics rather than on principle: on trends in data and details of subsidy, rather than of the eager pursuit of freedom; of continuing comfort with the State making choices for us rather than a clamour by us for the freedom to be responsible for ourselves.
As Oxford University ranks the stringency of the UK’s response the fourth most restrictive in the World after Cuba, Eritrea, and Ireland, this absence is telling.
One year ago, few would have suggested that the State could ban you from leaving your home, from leaving the country, from getting married, from touching a loved one in their final moments; to stop a child receiving education or to keep an elderly person living alone from the comfort of a neighbourly chat over a cup of tea.
Do we fully appreciate the scale of what we have done?
This has been a year of ambiguous choices when each of us in Parliament has had to wrestle with our conscience to render judgements with many unknowns. Yet each of us, rightly or wrongly, has allowed essential freedoms to lapse and thus been party to the creation of a new, illiberal precedent that may imperil the meaning of liberty for decades to come. We should each reflect on our judgements to determine how we can repair our common heritage of freedom.
For the House to reflect whether it has provided effective legislative scrutiny. Whether casting members away gave too much allowance for executive decree. Whether the experiment of remote technology has substituted a pretence for the substance of scrutiny, parading a Potemkin Parliament as the real thing.
For Government Ministers to reflect whether speed of response became an excuse, rather than a genuine requirement, for presumptive executive action. Whether the drift toward law making without the sharing of adequate data, questioning or accountability with Parliament became a lazy path routinely chosen for convenience rather than need.
For the Opposition to consider why their response to the greatest power grab by the State has been to demand more state, more restriction, and more control. A series of cynical, tactical moves designed to wrongfoot Government in mid crisis, at best setting out a vision of even greater repression and control, whilst heightening public fear and worry.
For myself and for my colleagues on these backbenches, to reflect whether a more vigorous defence of our liberties was called for and, if so, why we did not heed that call.
For our citizens we should ask to what purpose we removed these liberties a year ago, and again today for the withholding of these liberties yet further. For the decision has not so much been one of medical necessity but rather a presumed political necessity. So we should reflect, candidly and fearlessly, whether the accumulated costs in diminished livelihoods, in debts, in school closures, in missed diagnoses, in loneliness and in lives lost as a result of these measures, has been worth the reduction in COVID deaths and avoiding an annual rate of death for our population that was commonplace and went unremarked barely two decades ago.
Whatever the conclusions of our reflections, we must now resolve together to lead the recovery of these liberties with every moment and every strength we have.
