One of the events that captures the attention of politicians like no other, whilst leaving most people bemused, is the periodic Parliamentary boundary review. Political careers can be brought to a premature end, not because of a swing in national or local mood, but because a Member of Parliament has seen a chunk of his constituency disappear into another and a chunk of someone else’s moved in.
Often, changes will be relatively small, but they always really matter especially when an MP has worked with constituents over many years on a range of important issues. The current proposals suggest that the Atherton Ward may move from my constituency to the Leigh constituency. This is not set in stone as there is now a period of public consultation and people can persuade the Commission to change its plans.
It is not just the Boundary Commission who can change their plans, just as the Government has been doing, in shifting the Covid-19 lockdown guidance that applies to Greater Manchester. The country uniformly moved to reduced lockdown restrictions on 17th May, but the Government has since tightened up the guidance.
As it is only guidance, and pretty much everyone has a good understanding of the disease, I have not noticed anyone paying any attention to the tweaking of the rules. This does, however, make me a little worried about how much the country will unwind the current restrictions on 21st June.
We, as a country, need to drop much if not all of the remaining restrictions and the announcement on this will have been made on 14th June. Many businesses are struggling with the social distancing rules and people still cannot have the family celebrations for weddings, christenings, and birthdays as they would like, nor to mark someone’s death in a funeral.
There is a well-founded fear that another excuse will be found to extend the current lockdown provisions due to the India Variant. The evidence is that this variant is no worse than the usual Covid-19 virus, but some scientists want to take a few weeks to confirm this one way or the other. The problem with this is that we will always be finding new “variants of concern” and we may never leave which is exactly what some of the Government’s scientific advisors want.
In fact, if we follow the logic of some politicians when they say “no one is safe until we are all safe” we may have to wait until all adults and most children are vaccinated. You could even extend it to mean that everyone around the Globe needs to be vaccinated to enable us to return to normal.
My judgment is that we have accepted the restrictions for long enough and we need to return to normal on 21st June and not a day later.
