Emergency State: How We Lost Our Freedoms in the Pandemic and Why it Matters

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Emergency State: How We Lost Our Freedoms in the Pandemic and Why it Matters

Emergency State: How We Lost Our Freedoms in the Pandemic and Why it Matters

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Quentin Letts, reviewing the book in The Times, said that it did not "quite sing" but made valid points. He was a fierce critic from the first, starting a Twitter thread detailing abuses of the new rules and becoming a go-to figure for media inquiries.

An emergency state is ignorant, Adam suggests, in the sense that decision-makers become isolated and have to rely on limited and potentially unreliable information. Wagner believes human rights should be “at the heart of government decision-making during a state of emergency”, which is what you’d expect from a human rights lawyer. Wagner notes vagueness surrounding lockdown laws and the difference between governmental guidance the law. You can’t be against both rough simple rules that apply equally, and precisely targeted, calibrated measures—unless you’re against both.Wagner contrasts the United Kingdom legislation to Scotland, Sweden, Finland, New Zealand and Singapore as providing more scrutiny of measures. Had ministers needed to explain their laws in parliament, for example, they might have been clearer and more accurate in their public pronouncements. The power to regulate almost every aspect of the life of an immigrant is vested almost entirely in the Home Secretary. Stephen Bush, of the Financial Times, felt that the book should justify lockdowns for fear that readers might view the loss of human rights as justifying the absence of restrictions in future pandemics. However, just because Emergency State is imperfect, does not mean it is not important; more developed books on the civil liberties implications of lockdown will be written, but for the time being Wagner's is a first draft I hope every politician in the UK reads.

Wagner notes his lack of scientific qualifications but argues that some form of social distancing is still unavoidable during the initial stages of pandemics. Adam was the Specialist Advisor to the Joint Committee on Human Rights year-long Inquiry into the human rights implications of Covid-19 and is currently a Visiting Professor of Law at Goldsmiths University. Exercise of these powers is mainly reserved for those who infringe the reams and reams of confusing, complex, sometimes contradictory rules and regulations governing everything from their intimate relations to their hours of study, their pay, their place of work, their residence and more. It is impossible to know exactly what difference it would have made had there been greater scrutiny but it is not that hard to imagine.One of the odd aspects of the government’s covid-19 strategy was that, from a proportionality perspective, it seemed to be happening back to front. It’s sloppy thinking, apart from anything else; even in principle it doesn’t follow that if Very Limited Measure X fails, the next recourse is Slightly Less Limited Measure Y.



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