No masking erosion of freedoms
PFROM the outset, the Government’s Covid-19 rules have restricted our freedoms and it is clear that the majority of them – such as the rule of six and the 10pm curfew – have been (despite what was claimed) entirely arbitrary and without any scientific basis.
One of the worst examples of the suffocation of our basic freedoms – without any good reason – is the mandatory wearing of masks, something that was reintroduced this week in shops and on public transport.
For the Government to make something compulsory – enforceable by law – there must be an overwhelming case for doing so. Even by the Government’s own admission, they haven’t come close to meeting that test.They now do it willy-nilly, on a whim, as a precaution on the off-chance it might help, even if there is no decisive evidence to support it.
Some people seem to equate the public wearing of face masks with NHS staff wearing PPE. Nothing could be further from the truth. Masks tend to be stuffed into pockets and handbags and dragged out for the 63rd time for use when needed. In effect people are putting a dirty rag on their face. Some are discarded in public toilets or on pavements, where they also become an environmental hazard.
We have repeatedly been told
that the Government is being “led by the science” during the pandemic, as if all scientists share one perspective.That is certainly not the case, and Prof Robert Dingwall this week said the effectiveness of the public wearing of face coverings ranged from “minimal to nil”.
One only has to look at those parts of the UK –Wales and Scotland – along with other countries in Europe that have continued with mandatory face coverings to see that they don’t make a blind bit of difference to the transmission of the virus and the number of cases.
If people want to wear a mask then they should be free to do so. However, if people don’t want to wear a mask, they should be free
to decide that for themselves too.
In the early days of Covid-19, all interventions, from social distancing to isolation and maskwearing, went unchallenged by most because those measures were perceived to be temporary, and people probably thought there was more evidence to support wearing face masks, for example, than turns out to be the case.
I have found it chilling how easily the public have been (deliberately) frightened into giving up their freedoms.We cannot allow ourselves to sleepwalk time and again into the kind of authoritarianism we would usually associate with Communist China.
Richard and Judy are away