MPs have voted in the House of Commons on Wednesday and approved the regulations for a second lockdown in England from 5 November until 2 December.
MPs voted by 516 votes to 38, with a majority of 478.
Earlier the Conservative former minister Andrew Selous told MPs, “There are no good choices before any of us. We are being asked to do a horrendous thing today.
“The impact on jobs, the impact on businesses, the loss of our freedoms, which every one of us who will support the Government tonight cherishes just as much as those who will not, are awful things for us to have to do.
“Against that, we must set lives lost, hospitals turning people away, the lack of treatment for people who are ill or who have had terrible accidents, and I cannot in all conscience vote for anything, or not support a measure, that would allow that situation to happen.”
Prime Minister Boris Johnson addressed Parliament ahead of the ahead of the lockdown vote, and said, “This is not something that any of us wanted to do,” Mr Johnson starts.
“No one came into politics to tell people to shutter their shops and furlough their staff or stay away from their friends and family and I feel the pain and anxiety that we’re all going to share in the month ahead.
“When I’m confronted with data that projects our NHS could even collapse, with deaths in the second wave potentially exceeding those of the first, and when I look at what is happening now, among some of our continental friends, and I see doctors who have tested positive after being ordered to work on Covid wards, and patients airlifted to hospitals in some other countries, simply to make space, I can reach only one conclusion.
“I’m not prepared to take the risk with the lives of the British people.”
H added, “If we all play our part in this system, it could be a hugely valuable weapon in our fight against Covid in the short, medium and long term and an alternative to the blanket restrictions that have been imposed in so many parts of the world.”