argyrotsipi/train-dataset huggingface dataset:
Public Health — House of Commons, 2020-12-01
Topic: Health
Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson (Conservative, Centre-right): Yes, indeed. This is a point that many of my hon. and right hon. Friends have made to me and to the Government with great force and eloquence over the past few days. We want to be as granular as possible as we go forward to reflect the reality and the human geography of the epidemic, and we shall be so. What I can say is that, from tomorrow, across the whole country, not just gyms, leisure centres and swimming pools will be open, but churches, synagogues, mosques and temples will reopen for communal worship, organised outdoor sport will resume and, in every tier, people will be able to meet others in parks and in public gardens, subject to the rule of six. Every one of those things has been, by necessity, restricted until today. Every one of them will be allowed again tomorrow. Of course, I accept that this is not a return to normality—I wish it were so—but it is a bit closer to normality than the present restrictions. What we cannot do is to lift all the restrictions at once or to move too quickly in such a way that the virus would begin to spread rapidly again. That would be the surest way of endangering our NHS and forcing us into a new year lockdown with all the costs that that would impose.
Public Health — House of Commons, 2020-12-01
Topic: Health
Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson (Conservative, Centre-right): I love Slough, but I understand what the hon. Gentleman is saying. I appreciate people’s feelings of injustice, and people do feel it. There is no question but that people feel that they have been unfairly attracted by proximity into a higher tier than they deserve. People also feel that the tiering is not working for them. I want to repeat the answer that I gave to my hon. Friend the Member for Workington (Mark Jenkinson), which is that, as we go forward—I mean this very sincerely —the Government will look at how we can reflect as closely as possible the reality of what is happening on the ground for local people, looking at the incidence of the disease, looking at the human geography and spread of the pandemic, and, indeed, looking at the progress that areas are making in getting the virus down. We will try to be as sensitive as possible to local effort and to local achievement in bringing the pandemic under control.
Public Health — House of Commons, 2020-12-01
Topic: Health
Edward Julian Egerton Leigh (Conservative, Centre-right): In the week up to 25 November, Market Rasen ward had six cases and is to go to tier 3; East Ham ward in London had 40 cases in that week and is to go into tier 2. What I want from my right hon. Friend is an absolute personal commitment that he and his right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care will look personally at the case of Lincolnshire and do their level best to get us out of tier 3 by Christmas.
Public Health — House of Commons, 2020-12-01
Topic: Health
Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson (Conservative, Centre-right): My right hon. Friend is quite right to raise the position of Tunbridge Wells, and I know that the feelings of the people of Tunbridge Wells are shared by many people across the country who feel this sense of being unjustly attracted into the wrong level of tiering. I repeat the assurance that I have given to my hon. Friend the Member for Workington and my right hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough: we will look in granular detail at local incidence—at the human geography of the pandemic—and take account of exactly what is happening every two weeks. To repeat my point, it is in the power of Members to help their local area to move down the tiers.
Public Health — House of Commons, 2020-12-01
Topic: Health
Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson (Conservative, Centre-right): We are rolling out lateral flow testing across the country and it is open to people to get a lateral flow test, but in general the testing system is available at the moment for people who have symptoms. I urge people who are worried that they may need to be in the company of those who are elderly or vulnerable to seek to get a rapid-turnaround test. [Interruption.] The one thing the right hon. Gentleman could do for his constituents if he wants to help them to move out of the tier they are in is to encourage them all to take part in mass community testing of the kind that the Government are rolling out This depends very much on the co-operation of local leaders and local authorities of the kind that we have seen in Liverpool, where, since 6 November, over 284,000 tests have been conducted, and, together with the effect of national restrictions, the number of cases fell by more than two thirds. This is the model that I would recommend. We are now proposing that from tomorrow Liverpool city region and Warrington should be in tier 2 whereas previously, obviously, they were in tier 3. We want other regions and other towns, cities and communities to follow this path. That is why, with the help of our fantastic armed forces, we will be offering community testing to tier 3 areas as quickly as possible.
Public Health — House of Commons, 2020-12-01
Topic: Health
Andrea Jacqueline Leadsom (Conservative, Centre-right): What assessment has the Prime Minister done of compliance with previous lockdowns? Does he share my concern that people have just had enough and that the risk of non-compliance is very great, and that those who are compliant will then have the added frustration of watching those who will not comply doing whatever they want while they have to sit at home?
Public Health — House of Commons, 2020-12-01
Topic: Health
Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson (Conservative, Centre-right): I normally find myself in agreement with my right hon. Friend, but I must say that I do not think she is right in this instance. If we look at what the British people have achieved in the past few weeks by following the guidance, and by deciding to work together to get the R down, they have done just that. Collectively, the people of this country have got the R back down below 1. That was not by non-compliance—it was by the people of this country deciding to follow the rules, do it together, and get the virus down I find it extraordinary that the official Opposition, represented by the right hon. and learned Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer), currently have no view on the way ahead and are not proposing to vote tonight.
Public Health — House of Commons, 2020-12-01
Topic: Health
Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson (Conservative, Centre-right): I hope that the hon. Gentleman will really think carefully about what he just said. We are trying to look after pubs, restaurants and businesses across this entire country, and no one feels the anguish of those businesses more than this Government I do think it is extraordinary that in spite of the barrage of criticism that we have, we have no credible plan from the Labour party. Indeed, we have no view on the way ahead. It is a quite extraordinary thing that, to the best of my knowledge, the right hon. and learned Member for Holborn and St Pancras, who said that he would always act in the national interest, has told his party to sit on its hands and to abstain in the vote tonight. The Government have made their decision, we have taken some tough decisions, and the Labour Opposition have decided tonight, heroically, to abstain. I think that when the history of this pandemic comes to be written, the people of this country will observe that instead of having politicians of all parties coming together in the national interest, they had one party taking the decisions and another party heroically deciding to abstain In the story of 2020, there are two great feats from which we can take a great deal of comfort. First, our country has come together in an extraordinary effort that has so far succeeded in protecting our NHS and in saving many lives, while our scientists have been zeroing in on the weaknesses of covid, telescoping 10 years of work into 10 months, and now their endeavours are about to deliver the means, as I say, to rout the virus. That is clear The Government are backing not one potential vaccine but seven. We have ordered 100 million doses of the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine, which is now seeking regulatory approval; we have ordered 7 million doses of the Moderna vaccine, which has almost 95% effectiveness in trials; and we have ordered 40 million doses of the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine, which, if approved by the regulator, could start being administered before Christmas.
Public Health — House of Commons, 2020-12-01
Topic: Health
Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson (Conservative, Centre-right): No, I am coming to the end In total, our vaccines taskforce has secured more than 350 million doses—more than enough for everyone in the UK, the Crown dependencies and our overseas territories. All we need to do now is to hold our nerve until these vaccines are indeed in our grasp and indeed being injected into our arms. So I say to the House again, let us follow the guidance, let us roll out mass testing, let us work to deliver mass testing to the people of our country, let us work together to control the virus, and it is in that spirit that I commend these regulations to the House.
Public Health — House of Commons, 2020-12-01
Topic: Health
Katherine Fletcher (Conservative, Centre-right): I have a biology degree and I am going to take a wild punt that I am one of the few Members of this House to have used the word "epidemiology" in anger before January this year. We have choices to control this virus: we can have a lockdown, we can have a tiered system, or we can have no lockdown, where lives, such as those of John and Ken, family friends who we have just recently lost, are lost to this awful covid. Why will the right hon. and learned Gentleman and the Labour party not tonight support these measures that are saving lives?
Public Health — House of Commons, 2020-12-01
Topic: Health
Adam James Harold Holloway (Conservative, Centre-right): First, I pay tribute to the continued amazing performance of NHS staff and, indeed, to the Government and Kate Bingham’s team for the incredible developments in respect of the vaccines I do not underplay the difficult and complex decisions being made by people in the Government and, of course, the terrible toll on families affected, but it seems to me that with every difficulty and milestone reached the Government are acting on largely uncontested information. It feels like there has been a serious lack of diversity of opinion, analysis and evidence when it comes to many of these restrictions. The Covid Recovery Group does not want to "let it rip"; they just ask for proper economic impact assessments Let us take, for example, the hospitality industry. We are talking about using an enormous amount of taxpayers’ money to pay the industry not to open or to pay people not to go to work, but the payments will go nowhere near the losses that the businesses will make, and many of them will still go to the wall, despite that money. Why are we looking at not keeping them open, given the very limited evidence for closing them Prior to this latest lockdown, I joked with the proprietor of the Compass Alehouse in Gravesend that going into his place was like being put under his control: "Stand there, scan here, anti-bac your hands, walk along that path, sit down there" and so on—Members get the picture. The point is that the hospitality industry has spent an absolute fortune and thought long and hard about how to run establishments safely. We should be reopening well-run pubs and restaurants such as the Reliance fish bar and Bartellas in Meopham, and the authorities should be merciless in closing and fining pubs that risk NHS capacity I would much rather my constituents socialise in well-run venues than squeeze on to the sofa back at home with their friends. I would have thought that mixing in venues was much better than mixing at home in tiers 2 and 3. I would have thought that encouraging personal responsibility was rather better than the nuances of how much people have to eat with their beer. As others have said, we must make sure that restrictions make sense, or we will drive down compliance We have to have a bit more diversity in the advice—perhaps there should be a few people with private sector experience, and perhaps even some more diverse scientific voices. I do not understand why we are using infection rates and not intensive care unit occupancy to guide policy. Why can we not move people around the country? I do not understand why we are preventing millions of people from working when we have not even made a dent in the surge capacity of the Nightingale hospitals—
Public Health — House of Commons, 2020-12-01
Topic: Health
Adam James Harold Holloway (Conservative, Centre-right): I thank the hon. Lady for intervening and giving me a bit more time, and that is where I would like to see money spent. I would like to see money spent on surge capacity in the NHS, rather than on paying people not to work You know what, like it or not, my constituents are going to be thrown into more weeks of extraordinary lockdown, and there is no possibility of this not now happening given the Opposition’s decision to abstain. Well, I am going to support the Government’s decision and message to comply and, indeed, our remarkable Prime Minister in particular, but I will be hard pushed to support the Government in future if there is a realistic possibility of the Government being forced to seek a different path. Churchill himself had a wide mix of generals and advisers.
Public Health — House of Commons, 2020-12-01
Topic: Health
Desmond Angus Swayne (Conservative, Centre-right): Why will you be able to buy a pint in a sports venue without getting anything to eat, but if you order a pint in a pub, you will have to have a substantial meal? I will leave that hanging as the great existential question of the day Suppression in anticipation of vaccination is the reason for the measures before us today, but people have been writing to me for months terrified that a vaccine will be compulsory. I have responded by saying, "Don’t be so absolutely ridiculous—that could never possibly happen. We are a Conservative Government, after all." Yet now we discover that vaccination may be a passport to the acquisition of your civil liberties, without which you will have all sorts of things that you would otherwise be able to do denied to you. That would be absolutely disproportionate to a virus with a mortality rate verging on 1%. It would equally be a terrible precedent to set for other vaccines and medicines. I therefore hope that we can get away from that The way to persuade people to have a vaccine is, of course, to line up the entire Government and their Ministers, and their loved ones, let them take it first, and then get all the luvvies—the icons of popular culture—out on the airwaves singing its praises. To have any kind of suggestion of coercion absolutely feeds the conspiracy theory that we are being cowed and our liberty is being taken away.
Public Health — House of Commons, 2020-12-01
Topic: Health
Jeremy Paul Wright (Conservative, Centre-right): For the first time in 10 years on a matter of policy, I will be voting against my Government tonight. That is not because I am unwilling to share responsibility for difficult decisions—I took my share in Government and I have voted for every set of covid restrictions that the Government have proposed so far—and not because I oppose a move away from nationwide restrictions towards a localised tiered structure. I do support that, but the logic of that approach is that we make the restrictions as local as we can, consistent with accurate and reliable virus data. We have that data at borough and district level, so why do we not consistently impose our restrictions at that level I am afraid that the Government have been heading in the opposite direction. My county of Warwickshire was assessed alone the last time tiered restrictions were imposed, but this time it has been assessed as part of a much wider area that includes Coventry and Solihull. That means that the restrictions soon to be faced by the people of Warwickshire, and even more so in south Warwickshire, are bound to be based on data less relevant to where they live. My Warwickshire colleagues, including the Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, my hon. Friend the Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Nadhim Zahawi), and the Vice-Chamberlain of Her Majesty's Household, my hon. Friend the Member for Nuneaton (Mr Jones), as members of the Government, and I have been working together to have Warwickshire considered separately again and to ensure that everything possible, including new testing, is done to control the virus. However, it is difficult to explain to our constituents why they will be waking up to tier 3 restrictions tomorrow morning. The case rate in Warwickshire was higher when we went into the November lockdown in tier 1 than it is as we come out of it into tier 3, and in my constituency in south Warwickshire it is even lower This is not just an inconvenience; it is profoundly damaging to hospitality businesses in particular, which will be obliged to close during the most lucrative part of the year. Let us be clear: a decision to relax restrictions at a review on 16 December would take effect only from 19 December, meaning that most, if not all, of the crucial pre-Christmas season would be lost in an area where the visitor economy is crucial. Some of the businesses I am talking about will not survive further economic damage inflicted by these tiered restrictions, which are a blunter instrument than they need or ought to be. I am being asked to support them for my constituents based either on data that is out of date or on data that applies to different places. This is not just a parochial point. In the management of this pandemic, it really matters that we can be sure that the Government are restricting only where they have to. If they impose restrictions when they are not justified, people are less likely to obey them when they are justified. That will make the Government’s already difficult job harder and do much wider and more lasting damage.
Public Health — House of Commons, 2020-12-01
Topic: Health
Tobias Martin Ellwood (Conservative, Centre-right): Mr Deputy Speaker, I think I learnt from you not to let the fact that something has been said in a debate prevent me from saying it again. The same thing has been said again and again and again today, and I hope that those on the Front Bench have been listening. We want a transition from lockdown to the tier system, but it must have proper scrutiny. We have to be honest with the people, but let us also be honest about this place. Most people do not see what goes on here. Votes take place all the time, but the vote that takes place today will affect every citizen, every family and every business. The oversight that Parliament provides is so important—it is our duty—and that has not taken place this time. We face challenging events; there is no doubt about it. Governments across the world are looking at the balance between lives and livelihoods—containing the covid-19 pandemic but also supporting the economy. I would add a third element to that: the will of the people —the consent and the buy-in of the nation to follow the rules. I am worried that the Government might lose that consent if they do not work with the country and Parliament in a stronger way. Communities want to understand why they are in a particular tier. They want to understand what they need to do on 16 December to move to a new tier, and that was not forthcoming in the documentation provided very late in the day yesterday In Dorset, we went into lockdown with very low numbers, and we came out of it with even lower numbers. In the last two weeks, the numbers fell by one third, yet we end up in tier 2. The number of covid patients in Dorset hospitals has gone up a little bit, but we have empty Nightingale hospitals across the country. There is an argument that they cannot be staffed. I have checked with the Ministry of Defence. There are 2,000 medical personnel ready to be MACA’d up if we request them to do so. Let us not use that as a reason to push places like Dorset into tier 2 unnecessarily I say this carefully, and I have stressed it from the beginning. We have a peacetime Government construct, with a Cabinet system that works well and is tried and tested, but we should have moved to a war footing. No. 10 is overwhelmed. There is not the bandwidth to cope with everything that is going on. There is covid-19, the economic intervention, Brexit, the integrated review, preparing for COP26 and then the G7 presidency as well. The people dealing with that are friends of mine, but I am afraid they are not trained in crisis management, strategic planning or emergency response. All the more reason why this place needs to do its job. Let me be the first to say—I say this cautiously—that we need to reconsider the five-day opening up over Christmas if we want to take advantage of the hard-fought gains that we have developed over the year.
Public Health — House of Commons, 2020-12-01
Topic: Health
Edward Julian Egerton Leigh (Conservative, Centre-right): On a lighter note in a deeply serious debate, my wife had to come in for a bit of House of Commons work today and we sat down at the same table. We were immediately told by a member of your staff, Mr Deputy Speaker, to sit at separate tables. It seems that in covid Britain a person can sleep with a woman for 37 years but cannot have lunch with her That raises a more serious point. We do not want to return to the controls of wartime Britain. People romanticise it, but there is a deep attack on civil liberties throughout our country, and we are here to defend the civil liberties of our people. That is our primary duty People in West Lindsey are obviously aggravated and upset that they are now in tier 3 when they are right on the national average. Other areas in Lincolnshire have a far lower infection rate. As I said to the Prime Minister, Market Rasen, where I live, has only six per week while Newham has 40, so clearly there are injustices. There is no doubt about that and we all accept it I have a commitment from the Prime Minister that he wants to look at a more granular approach. With other Lincolnshire MPs, I went to see the Health Secretary yesterday. He wrote to me just now and said, "I understand the force of your arguments. I know that you made them in the best interests of your constituents, as you always have done. As I made clear in our meeting, we will formally review the data and tier allocations for all areas across England on 16 December." So what am I to do? The fact is that this virus does not care whether an area is represented by a Labour or a Conservative MP and it does not care how we vote—all it knows is that it attacks people, particularly the frail and the elderly when they congregate together I am a libertarian to the core. I hate, with an absolute passion, what is happening in our country, but those who want to vote against the Government must have an alternative plan. I put that question to the Leader of the Opposition. He cannot answer it, although I suspect that his alternative plan is a complete and total lock- down, which we had in April, when every school closed. That is the only way in which we are going to defeat this virus entirely, so we have a compromise, and it is not ideal My personal philosophy is human dignity. Every time I vote in this place, it is on the issues of right to life, whether it is abortion, euthanasia or unnecessary wars. How can I vote against this measure tonight when there is no alternative plan—when the result of my vote tonight is that frail and vulnerable people will die? That would be the effect. Although it is with deep reluctance, although I am a libertarian, and although I recognise that West Lindsey has been put in tier 3, having been given that commitment by the Prime Minister, I will vote, reluctantly, with the Government tonight.