 As we prepare to drop a new load of restrictions on the 19th of July, the Tory government has been giving out a lot of mixed messages. This is no more the case than on the question of masks. This was community secretary Robert Jenrik on Sky News on the 4th of July when he was asked if he would be dumping his mask on the 19th of July. Well, like many people, I want to get away from these restrictions as quickly as I possibly can and we don't want them to stay in place for a day longer than is necessary. We are going to, I think, now move into a period where there won't be legal restrictions, the state won't be telling you what to do, but you will want to exercise a degree of personal responsibility and judgment. So different people will come to different conclusions on things like masks, for example, and the Prime Minister will set out more detail on their national policy on some of those restrictions in the coming days. So that was just a week ago. The following day Boris Johnson laid out plans for July the 19th. They scrapped mask mandates in any and all settings. Now, during that week, I think probably most shockingly actually, government spokespeople were asked, so what if businesses want to introduce a mask mandate if they say you can't come into the supermarket without a mask at Tesco or the London Underground decided that. And they said, oh, well, they'll have to check if that's consistent with Equalities Law to suggest that actually the government is not going to protect any institutions from introducing their own mask mandates unless it discriminates against people who don't want to wear masks. So it was really an incredibly irresponsible policy, also completely nonsensical to say, oh, you should make your own judgment about the personal risk you are willing to take. That's ridiculous because as we've been told throughout this pandemic, you wear a mask not to protect yourself, but to protect other people around you. So the idea that you'd make a personal risk assessment doesn't make any sense whatsoever. It was a stupid policy. Thankfully, then, it seems there has been a bit of a U-turn on this front. Seven days after Generic said masks are just a personal choice, the Vaccines Minister Nadim Zahar, we went on Sky News to say this. The guidelines that we'll set out tomorrow will demonstrate that, including guidelines that people are expected to wear masks in indoor enclosed spaces and, of course, to remain vigilant with hands and face and to just remember that if we all act responsibly, as we did with the vaccination program, the nation came together to vaccinate, 80,000 vaccinated volunteers came forward out of retirement and to vaccinate, we can come together and deal with this pandemic in a way that is responsible by thinking about our own actions and how they impact other people, including, of course, people who may be immunocompromised. Now, that message from Nadim Zaharwe is much better than the one from Robert Generic. It happens to be the complete opposite of what he said, but the government have clearly got to a slightly better position. They're saying you should wear a mask for other people that are completely abandoned and decided that it's based on individual risk and the risks you are willing to take as an individual. He's also brought up immunosuppressed people, people whose vaccines might not have been that effective because their immune systems don't function as well as one would hope, right? That's sensible what's being said there. So what prompted this change? It's an interesting question. It could be scientific advice. Often when the government have changed policy throughout this pandemic, they've said, oh, the science has changed. The science has changed. The problem there, the science hasn't changed here. They've been saying the same thing the whole time, which is that you need to wear a mask to protect people around you. And also the idea of getting rid of mandatory masks on the 19th of July is ridiculous. This was never a policy which was endorsed by scientists as you saw actually in press conferences last week where Chris Whitty and Patrick Valant stood next to Boris Johnson and said they'll still be wearing masks in public places, in indoor public places. What then does explain the shift? Now, it might not come as a surprise to you that it seems to be that the Tories got cold feet when they found that the public weren't particularly keen on the policies they'd just put forward. Essentially, they were worried it was going to damage them electorally. I want to show you some interesting polling, which I think essentially explains this change of tune. It's from YouGov. They asked members of the public whether they thought face masks should continue to be mandatory on public transport after the 19th of July. 71% said yes. They agreed it should be mandatory. Only 21% thought it should no longer continue to be mandatory. So the Tories, by saying that all of these mask mandates will end, they found themselves radically out of step with the public. We can also see here in shops, so when it comes to shops, 66% of the public thought that masks should continue to be mandatory in shops, only 27% thought that should be dropped, that masks should not be mandatory in shops. Worth saying, actually, the government is still out of step with the majority of the public here because they're still saying it's voluntary. They're now encouraging it instead of saying, oh, it's up to you. But what the public want and what the scientists essentially want as well is to say, look, let's just keep masks in places such as the Tube and in places such as shops. There's literally no reason to get rid of them whatsoever. I think personally it's going to reduce freedoms if you have people not wearing masks in shops because they'll say, no, we can't have the government putting down these laying down these dictats because people need to be able to make their own choices. I think what's obviously the case here is that forcing people to wear masks on the Tube really, really, you know, it's not a meaningful freedom to be able to not wear a mask on the Tube. I mean, it's slight. I don't want to downplay it. It's a slightly meaningful freedom to be able to go on the Tube and not wear a mask. But more important is to be able to go on the Tube and not worry about getting COVID-19 because someone is not wearing a mask. Right. So I think net freedoms definitely increased by people wearing masks on Tube. The government didn't think so. They seem to be coming round to that, but only because the public disagreed. For me, this has real echoes of, you know, the whole, I mean, the shit show essentially, which was the government's herd immunity policy. They said, look, the sensible thing to do here is to let everyone get the disease, to let it run riot. It turned out the public didn't like that. Exactly the same things happened here. What Sajid Javed wanted to do is say, I'm now the health secretary for Tory backbenchers. That means I'm going to get the public used to COVID-19. We're going to have a policy where we let it run riot so that we can move on. The public have spoken. They, unsurprisingly, don't want that.