Glory Glory

Yesterday I wrote that the Metropolitan Police and Durham Police had hardly covered themselves in glory in pursuing lockdown-deniers. But to be fair the police forces of this country were given a poisoned chalice by Parliament [And by Parliament I mean not only the Government but also the far-too-compliant OINO (Opposition In Name Only)], which gave the police new laws to enforce without any new resources with which to do so. I think we can assume that police officers up and down the land were not just sitting around with nothing to do, just waiting for some new laws to enforce. We can probably assume that they were quite busy doing proper policing - catching criminals, for instance. So it was entirely reasonable for them to be circumspect in how enthusiastically to chase people who were meeting 'illegally' in groups of six or more people. My impression is that they mostly focussed on particularly large gatherings of people egregiously breaking the rules.

I was always against criminalising lockdown rules, not only on the resource issue, nor the likelihood or otherwise of people being willing to follow man-made laws as opposed to what we might call guidance on civilised norms, e.g. respecting our fellow citizens, but also as a simple matter of personal liberty. If you are thinking this makes me a libertarian, right-wing lunatic then I readily confess to two of those. Free speech and free action, within unarguably fundamental law, are to me values of a democratic society which we should not be too ready to dilute. In this I am pretty much a fundamentalist: I cannot condone social media companies imposing their own judgments on what should be published on their sites - within the law, obviously. Twitter should not have banned Trump from tweeting, for instance. Are our democracies so fragile that we are frightened of the power of contrary views? Perhaps we have to work harder to build civilised consensus.

The UK Government's Online Safety Bill, currently progressing through Parliament, includes a proposal for online providers to remove “legal but harmful” content. Who says what's "harmful"? If it's harmful, pass a law against the specifics. If not, keep your nose out of my business.

I'm not by any means diminishing the importance of holding politicians to account for their actions but my guess is that public outrage would have been just as great against government (or opposition) lockdown gatherings if those were against the spirit of guidelines rather than specifically breaking (clearly ill-defined) laws. Because of those laws, we (inflamed by the media) are spending months debating whether obviously arrogant behaviour was illegal, the extent to which a Fixed Penalty Notice is a criminal offence and police forces are having to divert resources from crime busting to pseudo political decision making. Are we collectively insane?

That's it for now. Very few people read this any more. Sometimes I just have to let off steam, though. Is it the end? Who knows?