A government assault on our rights and freedoms

Written by Andy Rowlands on September 16, 2020. Posted in Current News

On September 9^th, The Telegraph published an article on its website with the title Under cover of Covid, the Government has launched an all-out assault on British civil liberties which criticizes the government’s response to the Covid ‘crisis’ and its restrictions placed on the British public. All articles on the Telegraph website are behind a paywall, but I have obtained a copy of the text, and I reproduce it here in its entirety.

Social gatherings of more than six people will be banned from Monday. Government pronouncements like this raise little more than an eyebrow these days, but they should raise a ruckus.

The need to limit social contacts is arguable – positive test numbers have risen and winter is coming. But if it is a winning argument, why isn’t the case being made democratically? Why isn’t Parliament voting on this major incursion into our lives? Why is there such an absence of democratic debate? (Emphasis added)

Britain seems a little too comfortable being ruled by diktat. It remains the case that a lockdown has never been in place in England with full and explicit parliamentary approval. The greatest loss of liberty in British history has been imposed largely by ministerial pen. In fact, there have been more than 350 minister-made laws relating to coronavirus across the UK. “Urgency” is often cited, but rarely evidenced, with policies announced days or weeks in advance of their “urgent” imposition. I fear parliamentary democracy is an overlooked casualty of this crisis. (Emphasis added)

The public is enduring a shock-and-awe campaign of contradictory ministerial commands endowed with the weight of legal sanctions. We have been told to go back to the office, eat out to help out and send our children to school – but now, this arbitrary limit on gatherings of more than six people looms over our social and private lives.

The absence of logic is characteristic of the Government’s rule-making during the pandemic. A team of 50 people can go to work in an office but if 10 go to the pub together afterwards, they’ll be committing an offence. A class of 30 children can sit in a school classroom and, at break time, hundreds gather in the playground. But if seven meet for a birthday party, the parents will face financial penalties. A family of five will not even be able to visit two grandparents at the same time. (Emphasis added)

Complex and contradictory decrees like these damage the rule of law, not only because they are undemocratic but because they are difficult to comply with. We have been turned into a nation of lawbreakers without even realising it. How many people knew the previous legal limit on social gatherings? And while the legal change on Monday is supposed to make the rules “super simple”, in Matt Hancock’s words, it will clearly do anything but. (Emphasis added)

Mr Hancock has warned his restrictions “will now be rigorously enforced by the police”. But what good is rigour without rationale? And what will the police enforce? We have been closely monitoring the policing of ever-changing ministerial commands since the onset of the pandemic and have found a chaotic postcode lottery of arbitrary policing. We should hardly be surprised – with Government guidance that contradicts laws, and laws that change every week, it would take a legal scholar to keep up with all the restrictions, exemptions and penalties. The courts have been involved in a stack of unlawful Covid prosecutions too – every one of the charges issued under the Coronavirus Act has been found unlawful on review. (Emphasis added)

An important opportunity for a course correction will arrive in Parliament in coming weeks, when MPs will have the chance to vote to repeal or renew the Coronavirus Act. The Act represents the biggest expansion of executive power in a generation, and contains some of the most extreme powers in modern British history. Most have been proven unnecessary, but the draconian ability for authorities to detain “potentially infectious” people under Schedule 21 has been used – though, astoundingly, the CPS found only unlawfully, to lock up and prosecute healthy people. (Emphasis added)

The Act was rushed through Parliament breathlessly, as the first lockdown was being imposed by a televised statement. Six months after it was passed, the vote to renew or repeal the Coronavirus Act is now about more than just these powers – it is about parliamentary democracy versus ministerial rule. And if MPs reassert themselves and restore the democratic balance in this vote, we ought to see fewer decrees bursting out of No 10 onto the statute books. (Emphasis added)

Few among us will doubt ministers’ good intentions – but you know what they say about the road to hell. If Parliament is serious about taking back control of our laws, the time is now.

It can be seen here: www.telegraph.co.uk

With various people like Hancock and Valance decrying the severity of rising cases, while appearing to ignore the low death rate, which is the only meaningful statistic, I rather suspect the upcoming vote will be to extend the government’s powers for another two years.

The damage to the economy this will produce, and the increased deaths arising from continued use of the NHS solely for virus patients to the exclusion of all else (which is seeing most hospitals almost empty), will be far greater than the number of deaths caused by the virus itself.

The BBC virus webpage carried this illustration a few weeks ago. When cases had dropped to a low level in July, the government reduced us from level 4 to level 3, but with cases rising again, I suspect we will soon be put back to level 4.

Level 1 is ‘Covid-19 no longer present in UK’. I am not alone in thinking we will never reach this level, so some form of restrictions will remain in place indefinitely.

As many have already said, quarantining an entire population has never been done before in any country, and there is scant justification for it now.

Governments will have noted how easy it was to get populations to willingly accept draconian limitations on their rights and freedoms ‘for the greater good’, and I rather suspect many of the current restrictions will never be lifted, so the UK will remain under some form of constraints and curbs for the foreseeable future, which effectively means permanently.

There are some who would argue this is part of a larger agenda to place the populace under increased regulations which will become immutable. As many have noted, this isn’t about protecting people from a virus less lethal than seasonal flu, it is about population control.

Thanks to Sarah Lyndsay for the article text.

About the author: Andy Rowlands is a British Principia Scientific International researcher, writer and editor who co-edited the new climate science book, ‘The Sky Dragon Slayers: Victory Lap‘

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