‘Banish dystopian threats to our freedom forever’
AFTER two long years, last week we finally said good riddance to the Coronavirus Act, a piece of legislation passed in just a few hours with minimal parliamentary scrutiny, that took Britain down the road of becoming an authoritarian state.
Over the past two years, we have seen pensioners penalised for drinking tea too close to each other in their gardens and women fined for walking around a reservoir slightly too far from their homes.
We’ve also seen more than 300 people charged by the police for being “potentially infectious”.
Children could not visit grandparents in care homes to share their last moments. Families could not spend festive and religious periods together. I could go on.
While the Government used the Public Health Act 1984 to implement many lockdown restrictions, the Coronavirus Act gave it similar extreme authoritarian powers.
From the start of the pandemic, a health emergency has been used to push through laws that bite at the very liberties we are so proud of in the UK. I consistently warned against the risk to our civil liberties.
I was glad to see the Government belatedly expire some of the Act’s most oppressive aspects in October 2021, including the ability to indefinitely detain “potentially infectious” people. Civil liberty groups were vital in ensuring this power, among others, expired early. Many MPS will still not know that the Act gave a broad range of figures this extreme power.
In March 2020, I said the Act would lead to the creation of a “dystopian society”. Now it is gone, we cannot let its legacy and the vision of an authoritarian state that it embodied live on.
We are just days away from the intended date when NHS workers – who we rightly clapped on our doorsteps – would have been required to be jabbed just to keep their jobs.thankfully that has been reversed, but it should never have been considered in the first place.
It is also too late for care workers who lost their livelihoods under mandatory vaccine rules. This policy likely led to the disproportionate sacking of black, minority and ethnic workers, with potentially long-lasting implications for our health and social care services.
In June 2021, a parliamentary committee found there was no
‘Infringements on our rights could come back at any moment’
justification for vaccine passports, but instead we have flown dangerously close to becoming a two-tier society with their introduction for a short period under “Plan B”.
It is shocking “Plan B” was to turn our country – with its long history of being a bastion for freedom – into a “papers please” society.
These measures only entrench inequality and drive a bigger wedge between us all. Civil liberties are not a stick for the Government to beat us with. But overreach into our civil liberties became the norm during Covid.
One look at the actions of Canada’s PM, who granted his government untrammelled power to quash protest, should serve as a stark warning of where oppressive powers can lead.
This is why I recently opposed measures in the Policing Bill, which threatens to shut down protests that are too “noisy” on the basis of vague criteria. In the UK, the right to protest is one of our great traditions.
THE police have said these measures will be impossible to enforce, and exacerbate distrust in public institutions. Crucially, protests are by definition noisy. Unfortunately, despite leaving the Coronavirus Act behind, some of these far-reaching and frankly ridiculous powers will remain.
The Public Health Act, for example, still gives the Government the ability to make regulations to impose further lockdowns, shut schools and businesses, and stop public gatherings at the stroke of a ministerial pen. We are not out of this dystopian world just yet, and these infringements on our rights could come back at any moment.
What we need is not a continuation of heavy-handed measures that strip away freedoms and liberties, but an approach to law-making and policing that champions and safeguards rights. Two years on from the Coronavirus Act, we cannot allow Covid’s legacy to linger any longer.