Labour MP Graham Stringer: Lockdowns “probably worse” than Covid itself

Labour MP Graham Stringer has said there was “a huge overreaction” to the pandemic, and that “the policy applied to Covid was probably worse in the long run than Covid itself”.

The Blackley and Broughton MP was speaking at the recent Battle of Ideas festival in central London, at a panel event titled “From Covid to climate change: Have we lost faith in (the) science?”

Stringer said that while any children dying was a “tragedy”, only a small number with “very serious co-morbidities” had passed away from Covid. He argued: “Basically, Covid did not touch children at all, which is why schools shouldn’t have been closed during Covid.”

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) published provisional data in December 2022, suggesting that between March 2020 and November 2022, 88 children who had died in the UK had Covid listed as their main cause of death. The official overall death toll stands at more than 230,000.

With the coronavirus back in the headlines as the inquiry gets underway, Stringer’s comments are likely to prove controversial. Most widespread criticism has been directed at the government for not using lockdowns faster or more strictly to save more lives, rather than for going too far.

Stringer, a chemistry graduate and long-time member of parliament’s science and technology select committee, argued that scientific literacy amongst politicians is low.

He commented: “If you go back to the CP Snow question, when he was science minister in the 60s, you can’t be educated if you don’t know the second law of thermodynamics or the difference between mass and weight… then a lot of my parliamentary colleagues are not educated by that definition”.

Discussing climate change, Stringer said that politicians “don’t have the tools to understand it properly, so the fact that the real impact of the policies this government, and my government previously, were pursuing was to make China stronger, make us vulnerable to supply chains that we have no control over, and cost large amounts of money”.

Susie Flintham of the campaign group Covid Bereaved Families for Justice responded to Stringer’s comments, saying: “231,332 people have lost those they love the most to Covid 19.

“For those most vulnerable to Covid 19, for those who would otherwise have been forced to go to work, or because of their roles in society relied on the public taking collective responsibility to stop the spread of covid, lockdown was a lifeline.

“As the UK Covid 19 Inquiry has heard in the last week, an earlier lockdown could have saved thousands of lives, and also reduced the length and severity of lockdowns. Our only regret is that the UK didn’t act sooner to save the lives of our loved ones.”

Having previously been a councillor and leader of Manchester City Council, Stringer was first elected to parliament to represent Manchester Blackley in 1997, which he held until 2010, when, following boundary changes he was elected to represent its successor seat Blackley and Broughton since 2010. He had a majority of 14,402 votes at the last general election.

In March 2022, Stringer also attracted attention after it was announced that he would speak at an anti-Net Zero event alongside Nigel Farage. He pulled out of the event before it went ahead.