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

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Wagner contrasts the United Kingdom legislation to Scotland, Sweden, Finland, New Zealand and Singapore as providing more scrutiny of measures. This book also echos that, but also exposes the lack of scrutiny and accountability of those in power, the sidelining of Parliament and how the police used made up laws to justify oppression. Good overview of the lockdown years (though as Wagner says, after two "freedom" days, who is to tell if it's really all over? Benjamin Seifert of The Law Society Gazette, said that the book was the definitive guide to the law during the pandemic and would serve an important historical account and notes Wagner's perspective as a human rights lawyer and how his role in the Reclaim These Streets legal cases give him a first hand perspective.

He was a protagonist in the Reclaim These Streets litigation and gives a first-hand account of the challenges he faced. Wagner's point is a different one, that Parliamentary and other scrutiny was deliberately avoided as inconvenient by a Government that was already willing to pirogue Parliament on Brexit when that suited them.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. The author has a lawyer's sense of injustice and he conveys well the sheer scope of these restrictions’ impact on people's lives, and—often—their lack of precedent. But he also concedes too much to Lord Sumption, I think, and ends up too generous to Sumption’s position. Finally, it was the World Health Organization itself, which stated in October 2020 'Stop using lockdown as your primary control method… lockdowns just have one consequence that you must never ever belittle - that is making poor people an awful lot poorer. In a review whose mean spiritedness undermines its arguments, in the magazine The Critic, Yuan Yi Zhu argues that Wagner falls back on ‘liberal proceduralism’, because he considers being opposed to lockdown a ‘low status opinion’.

The idea that the courts interfere with immigration rules and immigration decisions is a laughable myth. OK we are back to normal for now, but the way our freedoms were put on hold during the pandemic is a concern and gives relevance to the fact, that 'democracy' is indeed 'fragile system' which can be extinguished in a moment when the circumstances allow for this to happen. Read more about the condition New: A new, unread, unused book in perfect condition with no missing or damaged pages.people were subject to hotel quarantine, many of whom were traumatised by the experience and harassed by those assigned to guard them; police often had little idea of what rules were in force and carried out their duties without clear guidance, and expensive fines were handed down to people who had little sense of the legality of what they had done; punitive legislation was made public hours before it became law. Bush comments that the situations that resulted in "Covid states" is near certain to happen again and that the book is a vital contribution to a debate about how to ensure the next pandemic does not damage the democratic model. However, the tone and wording of this review seems to indicate that perhaps you were a part of the societal bubble in which these measures had little to no impact. He admits the state has a duty to act in emergencies such as Covid and this will inevitably impinge on individual liberty, but believes emergency laws should be kept under constant review.

Around 120,000 Fixed Penalty Notices were handed out by police forces who themselves had a very shaky grasp of the laws they were supposed to be enforcing and many, many mistakes were made.

It is very engaging and clearly written and has a profoundly telling point to make about the unaccountable way in which law was made and out country run for the last two years. Wagner traces the history of the emergency powers in the Public Health Act to the SARS outbreak of 2002, [8] after which the World Health Organization had encouraged states to create emergency legislation.