“THERE are no no-go areas for the Labour party now”.

That was the message from Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting MP when he visited Bournemouth last week (January 28).

The Labour MP for Ilford North said we could see a change in voting base in the traditionally Conservative area of Dorset, as the government is questioned over its handling of the pandemic.

Speaking about why he decided to come to Bournemouth, he said: “My message to people across Dorset is it’s not just the Labour party that has changed for the better, the Conservative party that they have known and voted for many years has changed for the worse.

“I can’t imagine Theresa May, or David Cameron or John Major behaving in the way that Boris Johnson has behaved, and this isn’t just about Johnson, this is about the cabinet and the Conservative MPs that are willing to leap to his defence.

“It’s easy to dismiss these things but it’s the fact that while so many people were making really painful sacrifices in their lives, Boris Johnson didn’t play by the same rules.

“It can’t be a case of one rule for them and one rule for the rest of us and I think that people who maybe traditionally voted Conservative, should now give the Labour Party a fresh look.”

Locally the NHS recently declared a critical incident and this week it was announced University Hospitals Dorset patients who are medically fit would be moved to a hotel to ease bed blocking pressures.

Mr Streeting said: “I’ve got a lot of sympathy for the local NHS trust leadership because they're trying to grapple with this crisis and the government has left them woefully ill equipped.

“As much as the government will want to blame pandemic pressures we went into the pandemic with NHS waiting lists already at a record 4.5 million nationally and 100,000 NHS staff vacancies and also 112,000 vacancies in social care, which is one of the reasons why you end up in the awful situation, where trusts are having to book hotel rooms to discharge patients into because there isn't the support there in the community.”

Talking about the future of Covid policy nationally, Mr Streeting hopes we can learn to "live well with Covid, without the hokey cokey of being in and out of restrictions all the time."

He said: “We’ve got a 10-point plan for living well with Covid including retaining an army of volunteers to help roll out vaccines, keeping schools open with ventilation and helping to vaccinate the world, where is the governments?”