Backbench revolt against UK lockdown policy

Conservative lockdown sceptics launch Covid Recovery Group | Financial News - Emily Nicole:

November 12, 2020 - "A throng of Tory MPs have united to form a new steering group to fight future lockdown measures, after opposing the government on a second national lockdown earlier this month. Former chief whip Mark Harper is chairing the initiative, while former Brexit minister Steve Baker has taken on the role of deputy chair. Dozens of MPs have joined the group, including chair of the influential 1922 committee Sir Graham Brady, former trade minister Harriet Baldwin and Chris Green, who resigned his ministerial aide position in October in protest at the renewed lockdown rules.

"In its debut 11 November statement, the Covid Recovery Group argued that any further lockdown 'runs the risk of being worse than the disease'... It claimed new rules would cause missed NHS appointments and undiagnosed cancer treatments, as well as impacting job prospects and education. Baker said the purpose of the group was to avoid government policy being 'driven by panic', looking at the impact of restrictions from other perspectives besides health and the economy....

"The group echoed calls by the Treasury Committee for the government to undertake and publish a full cost-benefit analysis of restrictions on a regional basis, with the highest concern being on the number of non-coronavirus deaths caused by lack of treatment during lockdown periods. It also asked that expert groups be allowed to challenge the views of the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), arguing that it should publish its data modelling so that the public can review the evidence behind its decisions."

Read more: https://www.fnlondon.com/articles/conservative-lockdown-sceptics-launch-covid-recovery-group-20201112

70 Tory MPs from ‘Covid recovery group’ send letter to PM threatening backbench revolt |The London Economic - Joe Mellor: 

November 22, 2020 - "Boris Johnson is facing the threat of a backbench revolt to his plans to move England into a tougher three-tiered system after the lockdown ends. Dozens of Conservative MPs have said they will not back such a move without extensive evidence.... Johnson will detail his 'winter Covid plan' to MPs on Monday, setting out the restrictions to replace the national lockdown on December 2 and how people can spend the festive period. Downing Street said more areas are expected to enter higher tiers next month and those tiers will be strengthened.... 

"On Saturday, the CRG [COVID Recovery Group] warned it 'cannot support' a tiered approach unless the Government produces a cost-benefit analysis showing the plans 'will save more lives than they cost'. The warning against measures inflicting 'huge health and economic costs' came in a letter to the Prime Minister, which sources close to the group said had been signed by 70 Conservative MPs...

"When the Commons voted on the current lockdown earlier this month, 32 Conservatives rebelled to oppose the measures and 17 more, including former prime minister Theresa May, abstained.

"Downing Street will hope an easing at Christmas, potential vaccines on the horizon and new scientific evidence will lessen the scale of a rebellion.... But the CRG letter said: 'We cannot live under such a series of damaging lockdowns and apparently arbitrary restrictions and expect our constituents to be grateful for being let out to enjoy the festive season only to have strict restrictions imposed on them afterwards that cause them health problems and destroy their livelihood.'

"Labour has so far been supportive of the need for restrictions to slow the spread of Covid-19 and a full-scale Commons defeat on the plan is unlikely."

Read more: https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/politics/70-tory-mps-from-covid-recovery-group-send-letter-to-pm-threatening-backbench-revolt/22/11/

British PM gives key cabinet posts to libertarians

Leader: The tyranny of the free-market right | The New Statesman:

July 31, 2019 - "Boris Johnson’s ruthlessly efficient cabinet reshuffle was marked by the ascension of the libertarians in the modern Conservative Party.

"In 2012, a group of five recently elected Tory MPs published Britannia Unchained, a hymn to deregulation, tax cuts and privatisation. Two of its co-authors, Priti Patel and Dominic Raab, now hold two of the great offices of state (the Home Office and the Foreign Office). A further two, International Trade Secretary Liz Truss and business minister Kwasi Kwarteng, are also cabinet members.

"As prime minister, Theresa May wanted to rehabilitate the state as an economic actor and denounced the 'libertarian right' as well as the 'socialist left'. But for Britannia Unchained’s authors, Brexit is a means further to roll back the frontiers of government. In May 2016, Ms Patel, the then employment minister, declared: 'If we could just halve the burdens of the EU social and employment legislation we could deliver a £4.3bn boost to our economy and 60,000 new jobs.'

"The appeal of leaving the EU without an agreement, as Mr Johnson has threatened, is precisely that it could create the conditions to impose policies unachievable in normal times. Libertarians are fond of recalling the words of Milton Friedman, who wrote in Capitalism and Freedom (1962), 'Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around'....

"Mr Johnson’s government is more ideologically heterogeneous than it may first appear. The Prime Minister is a political magpie who embraces or discards policies based on his own advancement....  As Mr Johnson is pragmatic enough to recognise, public support for higher government spending (funded by increased taxes) is at a 15-year high of 60 per cent, according to the most recent British Social Attitudes survey.

"Yet Mr Johnson, a career opportunist, does not represent a coherent alternative to his party’s libertarian wing. The predominance of the free-market right among his cabinet is another symptom of the closing of the conservative mind. Should the Prime Minister falter, Conservative MPs and their outriders will clamour for a 'true believer'. Mr Johnson’s premiership, then, may not mark the end of the great moving right show but yet another staging post along the route ... to becoming a fully Americanised market society."

Read more: https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2019/07/leader-tyranny-free-market-right

New British PM assails "libertarian right"

Je suis right-wing libertarian | Coffee House - Paul Nizinskyj, The Spectator:

October 7, 2016 - "On Tuesday night, Conservatives for Liberty, which I co-founded in 2013, hosted our annual Freedom Fizz reception.  Jacob Rees-Mogg and Toby Young joined us, along with 400 party delegates, most of whom identify as right-wing libertarians....

"Twelve hours after we packed up, the Prime Minister effectively declared the lot of us enemies of the party – and the people. The Prime Minister used her keynote speech to attack the ‘ideological templates of the socialist left and the libertarian right’ as enemies of a government which would ‘act on behalf of the people’. Mrs May seemed to be suggesting that people should be just as concerned about entryism from the libertarian right as from the far left.

"It’s not a particularly nice feeling to be told you are unwelcome in a party which you’ve called your home for ten years, but we ought to have seen this coming. My colleagues and I have spent the last three years attacking in the strongest terms Mrs May’s appalling record on civil liberties as Home Secretary, as well as her enthusiasm for state intervention on the economy, but we were willing to give her the benefit of the doubt.... How naive we were.

"What the Prime Minister was attempting to do was cast libertarianism as an ideology alien to traditional ‘pragmatic’ Conservatism. But unlike far-left groups ... what we now call ‘libertarianism’ is woven into the fabric of this nation and of the Conservative party. It is a philosophy whose core principles revolve around the liberties enshrined in the Magna Carta of 1215. It was men who believed those liberties to be sacrosanct who took up arms against the King in 1642, and who bound his successors by the Bill of Rights in 1689.

"It was the free-market Liberals of the nineteenth century whose prudent stewardship of the economy made Britain the richest and most powerful country on Earth. It was right-wing libertarians who provided the intellectual foundations for Margaret Thatcher’s transformation of Britain from ‘the sick man of Europe’ to the fifth largest economy in the world (even if the great lady herself would never be known as anything other than a Conservative). And it was in large part right-wing libertarians like our President, Daniel Hannan, who were behind the Brexit Mrs May so wants to make a success of.

"But more importantly for the PM, research shows most young people are right-wing libertarians without even knowing it. Decades of polling by Ipsos MORI has shown ‘Generation Y’ – those born between 1980 and 2000 – are far more likely than their parents or grandparents to be critical of high taxation and the welfare state, as well as to be more liberal on social issues such as gay marriage and gender equality. A growing number of young people within the Conservative Party do know it, however, and will be a key part of any election campaign."

Read more: http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/10/je-suis-right-wing-libertarian/
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