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

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Adam is a passionate advocate, educator and writer on human rights. He founded and chairs the muti-award winning human rights education charity EachOther, set up the widely-read UK Human Rights Blog and hosts the UK’s leading human rights podcast, the Better Human Podcast. He regularly speaks on human rights law to charities, parliamentary committees and government departments and is a Visiting Professor of Law at Goldsmiths University where he teaches undergraduate students. He is the Consultant Editor of the 2020 Prison Law edition of Halsbury’s Laws of England and regularly writes for the New Statesman, Prospect and appears on TV and radio. Who is John Galt? If you want to understand different ideas of freedom, and particularly “muscular individualism”, you can do a lot worse than read Rand’s bombastic and messy opus. There is no danger of Rand concealing her political philosophy – it is woven into the fabric of the book and in the brash symbolism of its characters: socialism and collectivism bad; individualism and free expression of talent good. You may not agree with the destination, but the ride is worth taking.

This book tells the startling story of the state of emergency that brought about an Emergency State. A wake-up call from one of the UK's leading human rights barristers, Emergency State shows us why we must never take our rights for granted.It is beyond the scope of this book to reach a scientific conclusion as to which methods should have been used and which not. I don’t especially delight in destroying this book because I like you as a person, but it is a bad book and I would be lying to my readers if I wrote anything else. A brilliant analysis of law and politics over the two years in which Britain became a virtual police state' - Geoffrey Robertson QC This was a vast piece of legislation which demanded full scrutiny and debate, not a perfunctory few hours,” he writes.

Dixon, R (on the application of) v The Secretary of State for Justice [2017] EWCA Civ 961). Acted (unled) for Francis Dixon in a 2017 Court of Appeal challenge to delay in releasing him from prison But actually the “sex ban” complaint was a typically British sniggering reflex, thinking about the consequences of extreme legislation in the same way teenagers might look up the rude words in a dictionary. Wagner’s point would be more persuasive if he plainly argued that some lesser restriction on home visits would have been sufficiently effective: but of course that’s the sort of judgement he doesn’t want to make. Zhu also claims “barristers tend to make awful writers”, and goes on to accuse Wagner of getting “bogged down in petty proceduralism”.

Book review: Emergency State: How We Lost Our Freedoms in the Pandemic and Why it Matters - When Covid ruled us

barrister, rather likes the European Convention on Human Rights ( ECHR); it is a codified bill of rights , after

Wagner does not believe, any more than I do, that liberty can never be curtailed in the wider public interest. So the validity of his complaints about the draconian nature of the restrictions depends on their justification. ­Otherwise, what is the problem? All that remains is pettifogging complaints about procedure. The absurdities and injustices that resulted were legion. For instance, Wagner explains that sex indoors with anyone but your regular partner could be interpreted as being illegal for long periods between 2020 and 2022. Unfortunately, this does not appear to have been tested in court. More serious is the statistic that nearly 120,000 fixed penalty notices (FPNs) for Covid regulation breaches were issued in two years in England and Wales; Wagner recommends that all of them should now be reviewed. There is one part of Wagner’s argument that I think he blows up out of proportion—when he discusses the so-called “sex ban”. It’s true that when it was illegal to visit someone else’s home, you couldn’t go round to your girlfriend’s or boyfriend’s and have sex with them there (or eat a meal with them or share a bottle of wine, to mention other possible activities). This was of course a huge limitation on many people’s lives, for as long as it lasted. But sex was not being targeted any more than meals or wine were—there was no criminal offence of having sex, or criminal law penalisation of sex, as he implies even if he doesn’t seriously mean to. And if a ban on social visits was necessary, as I think it was, then a “sex exemption” would have blown a huge hole in it, since anyone could have claimed they were having sex at any private residence they wanted to visit. To call this a “sex ban” is I think tabloid-like, and no more accurate than to suggest Boris Johnson was fined “for eating cake”. It’s the point of the discussion at which I think Wagner’s human rights-mindedness comes close to resembling the dodgy “libertarian instincts” that led Boris Johnson into (for other people) fatal errors. Wagner tweeted again: “As I say have been saying to my son when he watches the YouTubers who delight in ‘destroying’ old films or video games, it is much easier to destroy than create. The former is of course better for the lolz and attention.” Inquest into the death of Tyrone Givans (2019) – Acted in this inquest in which the jury concluded there had been multiple failings in caring for a profoundly deaf prisoner who hanged himself ( Press coverage)The UK was not alone, of course: other European countries imposed far more fines, and many of us will have experienced Israel’s tough police enforcement of their rules, particularly with travellers from abroad. Bucpapa v Secretary of State for Justice [2017] EWHC 1895 (Admin). Acted successfully for a participant in the “Securitor Heist” in a Judicial Review of a refusal to repatriate him to Albania