A happy new year to you, and I hope Christmas was better this year than last; and that this year will be better than last. I heaved a sigh of relief every day over the holidays on which the Government declined to introduce more restrictions. I had voted for the Plan B measures on 14 December (see my agonising here), and perhaps they helped a bit. But what obviously helped the most was the fact that the Omicron variant is mild in its effect on health. We suspected it was so before Christmas, but couldn’t be sure - now we can.
In the light of this I hope now we can speedily dismantle Plan B, resume ordinary social and economic life, and give businesses some confidence that they can now order, and hire, and invest, and trade without fear of being caught short between spending money and earning it. And I fervently hope we can reconsider the compulsory vaccination of health and care workers, which comes into effect in February.
I asked a question in the Commons about this on Thursday (see here). Given we now know that the vaccine doesn’t stop transmission of Omicron after a month or two, we will either need to vaccinate health workers every month - surely unthinkable - or scrap the policy. I hope it’s the latter.
This year we need to let Covid subside into the substratum of recurring, and mostly negligible, threats and concerns that exist in modern society. But we must not forget the lessons of the pandemic, and indeed I hope the public enquiry that is planned will be meaningful. The fact is the UK was shamefully ill-prepared for coronavirus, and our systems did not all cope well with it. We need urgently to review the processes of the state, from pandemic preparation to crisis decision-making and public procurement. We need to think through the capacity needed for the NHS - and also why it never seems to have enough money despite record-breaking increases in recent years.
And we need to consider how to support and mobilise local communities, which provided so much informal help during the pandemic and which plainly have the capacity for a fuller ongoing role in the social model we need (as I wrote in my report in the first summer of the crisis). All in all, as I said in a Sunday Telegraph article written jointly with Miriam Cates MP before Christmas (here, and summarised in my last newsletter), there is a clear, difficult, but Conservative way through our current discontents.
Household finances look very worrying this year, with taxes going up and prices far outstripping wages. Of course we always had inflation in the form of rising house prices, but this is not included in the official measure. Now the things that people pay for every month are getting very expensive, and this will concentrate minds. Much of the problem is outside our control, of course, namely commodity and energy prices which are being driven up by the exuberance of global demand. But we can and must look to the levers we have to relieve the pressure on families - while also bearing down on borrowing and taxation, which is vital for our future prosperity. It’s not an easy circle to square.
Good news on one of my campaigns. This week the Government announced a crackdown on illegal hare coursing. This could not be more welcome; it’s a vile crime, perpetrated by organised thugs who terrorise the countryside. Details here. The local Police and Crime Commissioner, Philip Wilkinson, and I had lunch in the Bear in Devizes on Friday and toasted the news. I was glad to hear him tell me he expects to see more coppers on the rural beat, not just in Swindon and Salisbury.
Like the police, my resolution for 2022 is to get and about again. I was elected four months before the first lockdown, and was only just getting into my stride of visiting schools, businesses and community groups when I was sent home with the rest of the population to a life of zoom meetings. One thing I had promised on my election was to hold regular public meetings, but I only did one before the lockdown. At long last I think they can resume, so I’ll be sending out details on the first one shortly.
I can also resume the habit I started of a weekly pub drop-in, advertised in advance via this newsletter, to which any constituent is welcome to turn up and bend my ear or offer advice and suggestions. This week I’ll be at The Marlborough, in Marlborough (college end, upper side of the high street), from 6-7pm. I hope to see some of you then.
