Desmond Swayne – 2021 Speech on Covid-19 Restrictions
The speech made by Sir Desmond Swayne, the Conservative MP for New Forest West, in the House of Commons on 14 December 2021.
On a typical winter’s day, between 200 and 350 people will die of flu. Do we hide behind our masks? Do we lurk at home, working from home? Do we demand that people provide their bona fides before going to a venue? Do we require people to be vaccinated as a condition of keeping their jobs?
The question whether the measures before the House today are proportionate comes down to a matter of opinion. Do we take seriously some of the extraordinary extrapolations that we have been given, particularly given the previous record? The fact is that those are things that might take place, and we have to balance them against the known costs and damage to enterprise, economy and society.
In the end, it comes down to a matter of opinion—a matter of our prejudice. Typically, we are capable of organising our lives and making those decisions for ourselves. We decide what our risk appetite is and what we are or are not prepared to encounter. Notwithstanding the carnage on our roads, which is certainly killing more people than covid at the moment, some of us still decide to drive. It is a matter of opinion.
It comes down to letting loose the dogs of war—getting the fear factor into it and getting the officials, the members of SAGE, Independent SAGE and SPI-M and all those who speak in their private capacity out there twisting the fear lever. What about the Health Protection Agency? What Stalinist minds thought up that nomenclature? Get them out there, twisting the fear button, and by and large you will get the reaction that you want: people will crave more enforcement and fiercer measures to protect them from the great danger that is out there. Let hospitality be just collateral damage—let the industry endure the deluge of cancellations at what should be its most productive time. That is the situation that we have delivered.
The Government, having administered this Ministry of fear, are absolutely complicit with their officials and organisations who have designed and delivered it. In doing so, they have abandoned any principle of social democracy or liberal democracy, absolutely beyond anything that we have endured in recent living memory, in the history of this pandemic. As a consequence, having abandoned what might have been their ideology, they are rudderless and so much more at risk of the opinions and predictions of the advisers to whom they are in hock.
