End the Lockdown
- Thread starter Walter
- Start date
Words matter .I see your comprehension levels are slipping. I said it makes the exercise pointless. But hey, you go right ahead and pretend I said it's all a hoax if that's what gets you through your day.
Only if you believe in the false dichotomy of perfect/useless.
But you you just demonstrated your belief in the false equivalency of emergency government orders = the Shoah, so there we have it.
Our dimwitted police state
We have handed unprecedented powers to bumbling idiots.
TOM SLATER
DEPUTY EDITOR
21st May 2020
Spiked
The Crown Prosecution Service has revealed that every single person prosecuted under the Coronavirus Act, which gives police powers to detain ‘potentially infectious’ people, was wrongfully charged. What’s more, 12 people charged under the Health Protection (Coronavirus) Regulations, brought in to enforce the lockdown, have also had their cases abandoned. The CPS has now ordered an unprecedented review of all cases brought under the new corona legislation.
Anyone who has paid attention to the absurd and menacing criminalisation of various activities over the past two months won’t be surprised. In fact, the very first person to be prosecuted under the Coronavirus Act had her case overturned within days. Forty-four-year-old Marie Dinou was arrested and convicted at the end of March after she was found ‘loitering between platforms’ at Newcastle rail station and remained silent when police asked her about why she was travelling. She was arrested, convicted and given a £660 fine. But it was quashed after police admitted the wrong law had been used to charge her.
This was one of many cases in which the Coronavirus Act was apparently confused by police, prosecutors and judges with the separate public-health regulations, brought in specifically to enforce the lockdown. Police had no reason to believe Dinou was ‘potentially infectious’, but charged her under the Coronavirus Act anyway, resulting in a far heftier fine than the £60 fine that would have been issued had police found her to be outside without ‘reasonable excuse’ – a violation of the public-health regulations.
Eighteen-year-old Lewis Brown was another of the high-profile cases. He was not only wrongfully charged and convicted under the Coronavirus Act (he was arrested in Oxford when he was trying to take money to his vulnerable mum) — he was also wrongfully charged and convicted under the wrong bit of it, which applied only to Wales. Indeed, according to the CPS, most of the fines relating to the lockdown that have been quashed ‘usually involved Welsh regulations being applied in England or vice versa’.
The incompetence is startling, and doesn’t stop there. In mid April, it was revealed that police in England had wrongly issued 39 fines to children. The fines were withdrawn after it was pointed out that the law does not allow fixed-penalty notices to be issued to those under the age of 18.
After each and every cock-up, police have been quick to stress how difficult this all is for them. A month ago, in response to growing criticism, National Police Chiefs’ Council chairman Martin Hewitt told the press that the new laws had come in at ‘great speed’ and that officers were ‘trying to do their best in very, very difficult and unusual circumstances’.
But that excuse has worn thin as the weeks have gone on and the wrongful arrests have piled up. Plus it was never all that good an excuse to begin with, given you would expect police to know a bit about the laws they have been so gleefully enforcing. Indeed the enthusiasm with which some officers around the country set about over-interpreting the new rules – scrambling drones over the Peak District, patrolling the ‘non-essential’ aisles of supermarkets, or telling people they can’t sit in their own front garden – suggests the new rules went to their heads before they even bothered to read them.
Even after various pieces of guidance were issued, some forces carried on harassing people unnecessarily. Civil-liberties group Big Brother Watch, which has been holding the police’s feet to the fire from the beginning of this crisis, recently confronted police chiefs with legal guidance clarifying that people are allowed to drive a reasonable distance to exercise. Dorset Police responded by saying that allowing people to drive to exercise was ‘not within the spirit of what we are trying to achieve… regardless of whether it is “lawful” or not’.
Part of the problem here is the wide discretion police have in enforcing the Coronavirus Act and the public-health regulations. What constitutes a ‘reasonable excuse’ to be outside, or how a policeman might determine that someone is ‘potentially infectious’, is open to interpretation. What’s more, while a copper might order you home on ridiculous grounds, refusing to comply with that order could still mean you fall foul of the law.
The police aren’t the only people to blame here. The government, after all, passed these laws, with barely a peep from the opposition despite their remarkably draconian content. The Coronavirus Act will expire after two years, which, as many human-rights organisations have said, is excessive and unusual. The lockdown regulations, meanwhile, were brought in and are being updated under emergency powers and without a vote. What’s more, as Kirsty Brimelow QC has rightly pointed out, the CPS also bears a great deal of responsibility for ‘overseeing many wrongful prosecutions and convictions’.
Still, the incompetence, twattishness and, on occasion, thuggery with which some officers have set about enforcing the lockdown has been disgraceful. Greater Manchester Police were forced to apologise last month after an officer was filmed threatening to pepper spray and then arresting a man who was running errands for his mother. The cop even shouted ‘you’ll be next’ at a woman who took him to task for manhandling the innocent man, who was later ‘de-arrested’. A viral clip from the anti-lockdown protest in Hyde Park on Saturday showed three officers wrestling a man to the ground; one cop then knee-dropped him.
The exploits of the corona cops serve as a reminder as to why handing over extraordinary powers to the state in the name of our own protection is such a bad idea – and why, even in extraordinary situations, such powers must be short-lived and kept in check. Many of those who agitated for this police state seem to have been given a brisk education in what many police officers are actually like. Meanwhile, the pro-lockdown left has been remarkably quiet about these excesses of the armed wing of the state.
But they all have to take some responsibility for this mess. The hysteria created by the commentariat in the rush to lockdown, the indifference shown to civil-liberties concerns, and the ludicrous shaming of park sunbathers and ‘non-essential’ shoppers, lent the police a kind of moral authority that some officers readily abused. When a journalist tried to film an altercation between police and a member of the public in London last month, he was threatened with a fine and told he was ‘killing people’ (despite the fact that the journalist was keeping his distance and the cops, spitting their orders, were not).
Those who demanded this police state can’t now wash their hands of it. They helped give unprecedented powers to bumbling idiots.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/05/21/our-dimwitted-police-state/
We have handed unprecedented powers to bumbling idiots.
TOM SLATER
DEPUTY EDITOR
21st May 2020
Spiked
The Crown Prosecution Service has revealed that every single person prosecuted under the Coronavirus Act, which gives police powers to detain ‘potentially infectious’ people, was wrongfully charged. What’s more, 12 people charged under the Health Protection (Coronavirus) Regulations, brought in to enforce the lockdown, have also had their cases abandoned. The CPS has now ordered an unprecedented review of all cases brought under the new corona legislation.
Anyone who has paid attention to the absurd and menacing criminalisation of various activities over the past two months won’t be surprised. In fact, the very first person to be prosecuted under the Coronavirus Act had her case overturned within days. Forty-four-year-old Marie Dinou was arrested and convicted at the end of March after she was found ‘loitering between platforms’ at Newcastle rail station and remained silent when police asked her about why she was travelling. She was arrested, convicted and given a £660 fine. But it was quashed after police admitted the wrong law had been used to charge her.
This was one of many cases in which the Coronavirus Act was apparently confused by police, prosecutors and judges with the separate public-health regulations, brought in specifically to enforce the lockdown. Police had no reason to believe Dinou was ‘potentially infectious’, but charged her under the Coronavirus Act anyway, resulting in a far heftier fine than the £60 fine that would have been issued had police found her to be outside without ‘reasonable excuse’ – a violation of the public-health regulations.
Eighteen-year-old Lewis Brown was another of the high-profile cases. He was not only wrongfully charged and convicted under the Coronavirus Act (he was arrested in Oxford when he was trying to take money to his vulnerable mum) — he was also wrongfully charged and convicted under the wrong bit of it, which applied only to Wales. Indeed, according to the CPS, most of the fines relating to the lockdown that have been quashed ‘usually involved Welsh regulations being applied in England or vice versa’.
The incompetence is startling, and doesn’t stop there. In mid April, it was revealed that police in England had wrongly issued 39 fines to children. The fines were withdrawn after it was pointed out that the law does not allow fixed-penalty notices to be issued to those under the age of 18.
After each and every cock-up, police have been quick to stress how difficult this all is for them. A month ago, in response to growing criticism, National Police Chiefs’ Council chairman Martin Hewitt told the press that the new laws had come in at ‘great speed’ and that officers were ‘trying to do their best in very, very difficult and unusual circumstances’.
But that excuse has worn thin as the weeks have gone on and the wrongful arrests have piled up. Plus it was never all that good an excuse to begin with, given you would expect police to know a bit about the laws they have been so gleefully enforcing. Indeed the enthusiasm with which some officers around the country set about over-interpreting the new rules – scrambling drones over the Peak District, patrolling the ‘non-essential’ aisles of supermarkets, or telling people they can’t sit in their own front garden – suggests the new rules went to their heads before they even bothered to read them.
Even after various pieces of guidance were issued, some forces carried on harassing people unnecessarily. Civil-liberties group Big Brother Watch, which has been holding the police’s feet to the fire from the beginning of this crisis, recently confronted police chiefs with legal guidance clarifying that people are allowed to drive a reasonable distance to exercise. Dorset Police responded by saying that allowing people to drive to exercise was ‘not within the spirit of what we are trying to achieve… regardless of whether it is “lawful” or not’.
Part of the problem here is the wide discretion police have in enforcing the Coronavirus Act and the public-health regulations. What constitutes a ‘reasonable excuse’ to be outside, or how a policeman might determine that someone is ‘potentially infectious’, is open to interpretation. What’s more, while a copper might order you home on ridiculous grounds, refusing to comply with that order could still mean you fall foul of the law.
The police aren’t the only people to blame here. The government, after all, passed these laws, with barely a peep from the opposition despite their remarkably draconian content. The Coronavirus Act will expire after two years, which, as many human-rights organisations have said, is excessive and unusual. The lockdown regulations, meanwhile, were brought in and are being updated under emergency powers and without a vote. What’s more, as Kirsty Brimelow QC has rightly pointed out, the CPS also bears a great deal of responsibility for ‘overseeing many wrongful prosecutions and convictions’.
Still, the incompetence, twattishness and, on occasion, thuggery with which some officers have set about enforcing the lockdown has been disgraceful. Greater Manchester Police were forced to apologise last month after an officer was filmed threatening to pepper spray and then arresting a man who was running errands for his mother. The cop even shouted ‘you’ll be next’ at a woman who took him to task for manhandling the innocent man, who was later ‘de-arrested’. A viral clip from the anti-lockdown protest in Hyde Park on Saturday showed three officers wrestling a man to the ground; one cop then knee-dropped him.
The exploits of the corona cops serve as a reminder as to why handing over extraordinary powers to the state in the name of our own protection is such a bad idea – and why, even in extraordinary situations, such powers must be short-lived and kept in check. Many of those who agitated for this police state seem to have been given a brisk education in what many police officers are actually like. Meanwhile, the pro-lockdown left has been remarkably quiet about these excesses of the armed wing of the state.
But they all have to take some responsibility for this mess. The hysteria created by the commentariat in the rush to lockdown, the indifference shown to civil-liberties concerns, and the ludicrous shaming of park sunbathers and ‘non-essential’ shoppers, lent the police a kind of moral authority that some officers readily abused. When a journalist tried to film an altercation between police and a member of the public in London last month, he was threatened with a fine and told he was ‘killing people’ (despite the fact that the journalist was keeping his distance and the cops, spitting their orders, were not).
Those who demanded this police state can’t now wash their hands of it. They helped give unprecedented powers to bumbling idiots.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/05/21/our-dimwitted-police-state/
If some Plod came up to me on Southport beach today just like in that picture I would have told him to take a running jump off the end of the Victorian pier.
Well after that then hopefully you could finally say "End the lockdown" and it be truth.
Would'a been nice to hear how different British jail is from American, cause, of course it'd be different.
Nobody's sending me to jail for going for a day out at the seaside.
This is Great Britain, the oldest democracy on Earth.
If it's nice on Saturday next week, I'm going back to Southport.
Merseyside Plod can suck my length sideways so it looks like he's grinning like a Cheshire Cat. And then jump off the pier.
International bestselling author Dr Vernon Coleman MBChB DSc FRSA, explains how we are permanently damaging our children by introducing social distancing in schools. We will, he says, produce a generation of mentally disturbed children including loners, weirdos and psychopaths.
Nope, sorry. Bolded part is a lie.
https://www.oldest.org/politics/democracies/
Isle of Man and Iceland have had it longer than the UK
Also interesting...
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/08/countries-are-the-worlds-oldest-democracies
And...
https://www.history.com/news/what-is-the-worlds-oldest-democracy
Which has this little tidbit: Some historians suggest that the Native American Six Nations confederacy (Iroquois), which traces its consensus-based government tradition across eight centuries, is the oldest living participatory democracy.
I'm sure you'll argue that though, eh Blackie?
Just because they've got the oldest parliaments in the world doesn't mean they've been democracies ever since those parliaments were founded. North Korea and China have parliaments but they aren't democracies.
I'm an eighth Manx, by the way.
The world's oldest surviving democracy is Great Britain.
Well that document is the one which gave the English freedoms which most, or all, of the rest of the world didn't get for centuries.
Will social distancing be permanent?
International bestselling author Dr Vernon Coleman MB ChB DSc FRSA, explains how the coronavirus 'crisis' has affected health care and assesses the impact that social distancing has had on the treatment of seriously ill patients. He points out that politicians are using social distancing to control us, describes how social distancing is wrecking our lives, and suggests that unless we stand up and fight against it, social distancing will be with us forever and will ruin our lives in every conceivable way.
Coronavirus: Proof that Social Distancing Doesn’t Work
Dr Vernon Coleman MB ChB DSc FRSA
Vernon Coleman’s Banned YouTube broadcast on Social Distancing (script only)
This video was put up on YouTube on 11th May 2020. On May 13th YouTube informed us that it would be taken down. They did not explain why.
The one thing that is doing more harm than anything else is social distancing. The lunatics who are now running the asylum are insisting that we will have to retain social distancing for ever. Anyone who says this is an ignorant, cryptorchid poltroon who should be locked up for our safety. The type of social distancing being forced on us is, to use that well known medical phrase, total bollocks. I’ll explain why in a minute.
It’s social distancing which is destroying lives and which will destroy businesses and everything which makes our world good.
Social distancing forces friends to shout to one another and prevents grannies hugging their grandkids. Social distancing makes people fearful. It breeds distrust, suspicion and even hatred. Passers by step to one side and walk on the road if they see someone coming towards them. Social distancing will prevent meetings and demonstrations.
It is difficult to think of a business which won’t be adversely affected by social distancing. Restaurants are told they will have to throw out three quarters of their tables. Airlines have to throw out a third of their seats. Sports arenas can only seat people if they have six feet of space all around them. Cinemas and theatres will have to close off most of their seating. Cafes and pubs have no chance. Commercial kitchens will be non viable. Most kitchens will accommodate only one chef. Who is going to tell the bloke in the big white hat that he has to do all the washing up?
Hotels are doomed by social distancing .
Can you imagine trying to get back to your room after breakfast?
`I’m afraid there is a one hour queue for the lift, sir. We’re only allowed to put two people into one lift.’
The theory behind social distancing is that it will protect people from other folk who sneeze or cough.
But I think that whoever thought it up is a cretin. And I think the people who have implemented social distancing are also cretins. Not just because they didn’t think through the social or economic implications but because a sneeze doesn’t stop at six feet. And nor does a cough.
A cough can spread droplets for 18 feet. And a sneeze can travel 24 feet.
So if we are going to have social distancing they’ve got the bloody distance wrong.
It has to be at least 24 feet. Really, it ought to be 30 feet to be safe.
A six feet limit is arbitrary and utterly pointless.
If we are going to do this properly social distancing has to be 30 feet.
Now, I suppose there are probably waiters who can serve food from six feet away. But how many waiters can serve food from thirty feet away?
How many people can you get in a bus or a railway carriage if everyone has to be 30 feet from everyone else? If there’s a driver on a bus the passenger will have to run behind.
It’s stupid. And that’s why they didn’t introduce social distancing that was of any value.
They introduced enough social distancing to bugger up life but not enough to do any good.
The sensible solution is to push our so called leaders into forgetting about social distancing completely.
There would be no need at all for it if people covered their mouths and noses if they sneezed or coughed – and washed their hands frequently.
There used to be a slogan that ran `coughs and sneezes spread diseases’.
Maybe they should forget about social distancing and bring that back.
Copyright Vernon Coleman 14th May 2020
Vernon Coleman’s book Coming Apocalypse describes how we got in this mess – and what sort of future we can look forward to. `Coming Apocalypse’ is available as a paperback and an eBook.
http://www.vernoncoleman.com/main.htm
Dr Vernon Coleman MB ChB DSc FRSA
Vernon Coleman’s Banned YouTube broadcast on Social Distancing (script only)
This video was put up on YouTube on 11th May 2020. On May 13th YouTube informed us that it would be taken down. They did not explain why.
The one thing that is doing more harm than anything else is social distancing. The lunatics who are now running the asylum are insisting that we will have to retain social distancing for ever. Anyone who says this is an ignorant, cryptorchid poltroon who should be locked up for our safety. The type of social distancing being forced on us is, to use that well known medical phrase, total bollocks. I’ll explain why in a minute.
It’s social distancing which is destroying lives and which will destroy businesses and everything which makes our world good.
Social distancing forces friends to shout to one another and prevents grannies hugging their grandkids. Social distancing makes people fearful. It breeds distrust, suspicion and even hatred. Passers by step to one side and walk on the road if they see someone coming towards them. Social distancing will prevent meetings and demonstrations.
It is difficult to think of a business which won’t be adversely affected by social distancing. Restaurants are told they will have to throw out three quarters of their tables. Airlines have to throw out a third of their seats. Sports arenas can only seat people if they have six feet of space all around them. Cinemas and theatres will have to close off most of their seating. Cafes and pubs have no chance. Commercial kitchens will be non viable. Most kitchens will accommodate only one chef. Who is going to tell the bloke in the big white hat that he has to do all the washing up?
Hotels are doomed by social distancing .
Can you imagine trying to get back to your room after breakfast?
`I’m afraid there is a one hour queue for the lift, sir. We’re only allowed to put two people into one lift.’
The theory behind social distancing is that it will protect people from other folk who sneeze or cough.
But I think that whoever thought it up is a cretin. And I think the people who have implemented social distancing are also cretins. Not just because they didn’t think through the social or economic implications but because a sneeze doesn’t stop at six feet. And nor does a cough.
A cough can spread droplets for 18 feet. And a sneeze can travel 24 feet.
So if we are going to have social distancing they’ve got the bloody distance wrong.
It has to be at least 24 feet. Really, it ought to be 30 feet to be safe.
A six feet limit is arbitrary and utterly pointless.
If we are going to do this properly social distancing has to be 30 feet.
Now, I suppose there are probably waiters who can serve food from six feet away. But how many waiters can serve food from thirty feet away?
How many people can you get in a bus or a railway carriage if everyone has to be 30 feet from everyone else? If there’s a driver on a bus the passenger will have to run behind.
It’s stupid. And that’s why they didn’t introduce social distancing that was of any value.
They introduced enough social distancing to bugger up life but not enough to do any good.
The sensible solution is to push our so called leaders into forgetting about social distancing completely.
There would be no need at all for it if people covered their mouths and noses if they sneezed or coughed – and washed their hands frequently.
There used to be a slogan that ran `coughs and sneezes spread diseases’.
Maybe they should forget about social distancing and bring that back.
Copyright Vernon Coleman 14th May 2020
Vernon Coleman’s book Coming Apocalypse describes how we got in this mess – and what sort of future we can look forward to. `Coming Apocalypse’ is available as a paperback and an eBook.
http://www.vernoncoleman.com/main.htm
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