British citizens made their feelings known after the Policing Minister suggested that people should spy on their friends and neighbours and report them to the authorities if they see them breaking Covid rules.
Minister Kit Malthouse’s idea was compared to the East German Stasi by many, after he encouraged reporting neighbours gathering in more than groups of six, saying it was a viable option.
“There is obviously the non-emergency number that people can ring to report issues, if they wish to,” the minister told the BBC Radio 4’s ‘Today’ show. “If people are concerned, if they do think there’s a contravention, then that option is open to them.”
The beginning of the week saw the so called ‘rule of six’ brought into force overnight and with little fanfare in England. It literally bans social gatherings of more than six people if they’re not from the same household.
Those who are found to be contravening the law face fines of between £100 and £3,200, while anyone found to be hosting a house party faces a £10,000 punishment.
Former British Supreme Court Justice Lord Jonathan Sumption denounced the new regulations as “unenforceable,” noting that the only way the plan would work is if a “Stasi-style” network of “snoopers and informers” is formed.
Authored by Peter Hitchens,
The Government has no legal right to impose the severe and miserable restrictions on our lives with which it has wrecked the economy, brought needless grief to the bereaved and the lonely and destroyed our personal liberty.
This is the verdict of one of the most distinguished lawyers in the country, the retired Supreme Court Judge Lord Sumption.
He said last week in a podcast interview: ‘I don’t myself believe that the Act confers on the Government the powers that it has purported to exercise.’
Lord Sumption’s intervention is, of course, so huge and important that the media of this country have somehow not noticed it. So, as has been the case from the start, you have to get it from me.
He was referring to the Public Health Act of 1984, the basis for almost all the sheaves of increasingly hysterical decrees against normal life which the Health Secretary Matt Hancock has issued since March. I promise you that it is not usual for a retired senior judge to use such language in public.
This 1984 Act was drawn up mainly to give local magistrates the power to quarantine the sick.
Nothing in it remotely justifies these astonishing moves – house arrest, travel restrictions, harsh limits on visiting family members, interference with funerals and weddings, closure of churches, compulsory muzzles, bans on assembly and protest.
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