Faced with confused and confusing
statements from government ministers, many of which seem to be at variance
with the detail of the laws that they have rushed through, it is no surprise
that the enforcement action taken by police over the coronavirus pandemic has
itself been patchy and inconsistent. Why should they be expected to understand
the detail of what those responsible for designing the rules are unable to
agree with each other about?
It is clear that most people are accepting
of the need for exceptional rules in exceptional circumstances, and understand
that the goal of protecting us all is both valid and important; a short-term
interference with civil liberties is a small price to pay for the protection of
the vulnerable. I’ll admit that I do have a concern that governments which take
powers to themselves in a crisis tend to find it difficult to relinquish those
powers later, identifying excuse after excuse for keeping legislation
active. And it doesn’t help that, in
Priti Patel, we have a Home Secretary who gives a good impression of someone
who’d like to lock up as many as possible of those citizens who she has not
either had deported or hanged.
More worrying has been the way in which
events have brought out an authoritarian streak in people. It isn’t just an
occasional bit of heavy-handed policing where a quiet word might have been a
better approach, it’s the way in which some people have been
urging
the police to come and arrest their neighbours for various perceived infringements
of the unclear and inconsistent advice. I don’t want to understate the
importance of us all following the guidelines as closely as we can, but there’s
something very ‘un-British’, dare I say it, about some of what we’re seeing.
The ‘British values’ that the government is always banging on about turn out to
be rather more ‘flexible’ than even I had thought. A crisis like the current one can provoke
either a growth in social solidarity – and there have been many good examples
of that – or else an outbreak of authoritarianism. Both cases require rules
under which we operate and both require that those rules be enforced, but the
way in which we collectively choose to enforce those rules tells us a lot about
which approach we prefer and our own core values. Not all of it is turning out to be entirely comfortable.
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4 comments:
Has Priti Patel actually had anyone hanged yet?
[It could say something about where we are that one can ask such a question, even today of all days.]
Ah! Perhaps my use of tenses has let me down a little here - it should perhaps have read something like 'who she won't already have had...'
My front runner that Little Priti Awful-Patel might introduce after the little bother were are going through ,is a NHS card which will identify us as qualifying for free treatment and in the event of a future pandemic ,will be able to trace our movements – all in the interests of public health ,you understand .
It appears that South Korea was able to kill off this early, as they knew where everybody lived and where they had been.
South Korea may be a nice place .... compared to North Korea ! Its regime has many characteristics which we( or most of us) would not choose to adopt in this country although Ms Patel would adapt nicely to their style of doing things. Words like traceability and transparency develop strange interpretations when uttered by people with ulterior motives.
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