We have had two comparable pandemics in the last 100 years: in 1957 and 1968/69. Both HK & Asian Flu killed more British ppl per million.
GDP grew by 2% in 1957, 5% in 1968 and over 2% in 1969. As opposed to the greatest depression in the history of the United Kingdom in 2020.
An economic collapse affects not just livelihoods but lives and communities. It is one of many considerations that should have informed every decision about restrictions to have been imposed, on economic activity (directly) and otherwise.
Hermer betrays a lack of understanding about the constitution & how it ensures democratic accountability: of Ministers to Parliament & of Parliament to the people.
Compliance with international obligations is a matter for Ministers alone. The AG advises them-directly. No more. 🧵
(Link below: )
International *obligations* are obligations on states. It is for a state - here, the Crown acting through Ministers - to decide how it complies with its international obligations, accepting the *international* consequences if it does not.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/…
And that can and may often include *whether* to comply with those obligations.
International obligations have no impact on domestic law for good reason. Only Parliament in its fullest sense - as a legislator - can make domestic law directly.
Not quite. The key problems are the Terms of Reference, the failure to grant core participant status to any group challenging lockdowns and of the chair and counsel to scrutinise the evidence.
Lawyers aren’t purporting to be experts. They just aren’t asking the right questions.
And that they aren’t is in large part (although not only) because of the Terms of Reference and the lack of an adversarial process through cross-examination of experts by participants with different perspectives.
With vanishingly few exceptions, the only difference in perspective allowed has been between ‘lockdown’ and ‘lockdown earlier and harder’.
This is not only reasonable but contemplated by the H. Rts Act, where legsl’n interferes with Conv’n rights in the opinion of domestic cts or Strasbourg. The courts can only make a declaration of incompatibility where the law cannot be constructed compatibly with Conv’n rights.
And, while there is a duty to construct legislation compatibly with Convention rights (as considered to apply by domestic courts or Strasbourg jurisprudence) where it is possible to do so, Parliament can then legislate so that it is impossible for the courts to do anything but follow their direction, even if incompatible with the courts’ jurisprudence on Convention rights.
This was the formulation Derry Irvine and others created in the HRA 1998, preserving Parliamentary sovereignty and allowing a creative tension between Parliament, Strasbourg and the domestic courts. The idea of human rights ‘coming home’ was not to cut Parliament out but to entrench it as part of the process.
The government’s tobacco Bill is not just stunningly impractical and unjustified by the harm that smoking causes to society, rather than the individual. It is sinister. To require adults to prove their age (not that they have reached adulthood) to buy a legal product is a gross intrusion in to individual privacy and autonomy.
It has preposterous results, such as the two 25 year-olds (then 35, 45…), a day apart in age, one of whom will commit a *criminal offence* by buying a product available to the other. (Again, not comparable to an age limit based on an assessment of maturity that is reached, only once, by all.)
It would create a thoroughly dangerous precedent that the state may ban a product not because of its capacity to do immediate grave harm (eg poisons) or to cause disorder or other societal mischief (eg alcohol, if we were being honest) but because of long-term health risks.
I acted in a judicial review of this decsn in 2021. Regardless of whether the court rightly rejected the challenge to the decision of the Sec of State, as a matter of record the JCVI did not recommend vaccination for 11-15s as there was insufficient evidence about their safety.
The reason why the Chief Medical Officers of the UK and devolved nations (‘the CMOs’) recommended overruling them was astonishingly flimsy - that they might save a (proportionately) tiny number of school days in absences by reducing the number of children getting Covid.
In making that decision, the CMOs *expressly* decides not to measure that against the accepted certainty of absences due to side-effects of the vaccine. Even only taking into account minor side effects (cold like symptoms) these were likely to be greater than absences from Covid.
An improvement on indications of Lady Hallett’s thinking,but it misses central points.
Lockdowns weren’t considered in pandemic plans not just b’cs they were unthinkable but bc’s measures *less* draconian were found to be ineffective & disproportionate.
It *is* positive that the Inquiry is finally addressing the lack of any adequate prior consideration of the exceptional harm that wld be the inevitable consequence of lockdown; let alone to weigh whether that harm was justified by the supposed efficacy of lockdown.
(I say finally because of the consummate lack of any such consideration in the terms of reference and earlier openings.)