Conservative backbencher Steve Baker has written in the Sun that it would be morally wrong for anti-Covid measures such as social distancing to stay in place past June 21st. Mr Baker also says that Britain should give start giving vaccines to poorer countries since most vulnerable people in Britain are already fully vaccinated.
As all Conservatives know, we won’t be able to level up, contain our debts, grow our way to recovery or support our public services if we continue to ask people and businesses to operate under restrictions.
In early April 2020, Her Majesty invited us to look forward to “better days” when “we will meet again”. So it’s great news the Government is set to declare that we can and should once again hug our nearest and dearest from next week. Now we must look ahead to June 21st as the date by which freedom truly means freedom.
Mr Baker should ask here why the Government has been able to tell us not to cuddle our “nearest and dearest” at any point over the past year anyway.
The data is so good, and the doomsayers so wrong, that it cannot possibly be rational or morally right for us to have to socially distance from each other in any context or setting in the U.K. beyond June 21st. Being social is key to being well so by June 21st at the latest, Britain must meet again, must be reunited in every sense, and we must start healing the broken bonds of the last year with social contact and normal human interaction.
The Queen, in her enduring wisdom, also said that we must “join with all nations across the globe in a common endeavour, using the great advances of science and our instinctive compassion to heal”. There can be no doubt that once we have vaccinated those vulnerable to Covid in the U.K., the right thing is for Britain proudly to lead the world in delivering surplus vaccines to developing countries.
Brexit gives us the freedom to determine our own future, but it also gives us a chance to lead in the world as we always have done, to ensure that admirable British values are exported across the globe.
Just as we should not lock ourselves down needlessly at home once we have vaccinated the vulnerable, nor should we be hoarding vaccines when they can be doing so much more good overseas in fighting a virus that is most harmful to older people and those with underlying health conditions. There can be no greater service to the world’s citizens in 2021 than protecting those vulnerable to Covid, wherever they may be.
As we start this new chapter in our history – outside the EU and having vaccinated the vulnerable against Covid – it’s time to unleash this country’s true potential by making the most of the benefits of the brilliant NHS vaccination rollout, to lift these appalling restrictions safely and proportionately in line with the harm Covid is capable of causing, and by finally – as the Prime Minister said in February – reclaiming our lives once and for all.
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