Why England is going back into lockdown

I’m afraid no responsible Prime Minister can ignore the message of those figures. When I told you two weeks ago that we were pursuing a local and a regional approach to tackling this virus, I believed then – and I still believe passionately – that was the right thing to do. Because we know the cost of these restrictions, the damage they do, the impact on jobs and on livelihoods and on people’s mental health. No one wants to be imposing these kind of measures anywhere. We didn’t want to be shutting businesses, pubs, restaurants in one part of the country where incidence is very low when the vast bulk of the infections were taking place elsewhere. And our hope was that by strong local action, strong local leadership, we could get the rates of infection down where the disease was surging and address the problem thereby across the whole country.