One of the things this crisis has brought home to me is how illiberal outcomes are inevitable when hugely important decisions are made by a small group in secret and without parliamentary scrutiny. Biases and personal preferences of those in the room are inevitably amplified...
https://twitter.com/RidgeOnSunday/status/1315220863906656256
I am not a conspiracist and I believe those in government and the civil servants around them are doing their best in a terrible situation, but it's inevitable when a small group are given almost unlimited power over our private lives that they their decisions will be distorted...
... by personal preferences. Do they go to football? Are their friends keen on grouse shooting? Do they enjoy garden centres? Etc. The Soviet leaders might have sympathised - if we can only take more control over people's private lives, society will move in X direction.
But what else is a lockdown down than taking control over millions of people's private lives? And how else to do it than by a mixture of persuasion and enforcement? Wouldn't giving parliament oversight slow everything down or make it impossible?
These are classic anti-democratic arguments - basically these decisions are *too important and urgent* to trust to Parliament. Sad that after all the heat and bluster over 'taking back control' the parliamentary revolt fizzled out after vague promises to involve them.
We are about to hit another phase of urgent law making by executive fiat - through the 'traffic light' system, but presumably that will be fiddled with incessantly by the Executive just as the last 6 months of lockdown laws, making them simultaneously more onerous and complex.
When we look back on this period I imagine that a public inquiry or whatever forum will say one of the key mistakes was allowing the executive to use vaguely defined powers to rule by decree through lockdown laws. It’s anti-democratic and makes for bad policy and worse laws
Another thing I have been thinking about. At the beginning of the crisis I complained that the govt guidance was constantly more onerous than the law. More recently (since Rule of 6), the guidance and the law have more or less coincided. But I am not sure that is a good thing...
... because I think it represents a shift by the government to focussing on persuasion and trust with the law as a backstop for extremities to focussing increasingly on controlling everything by law. So the law is more and more onerous - huge fines (£10,000) - and complex...
... because a lot of what was being done with guidance, the detailed instances allowing for the almost infinite vicissitudes of human life, is being regulated by ever complex and difficult to enforce laws. I don't know if that is sustainable...
... I can't see the police bothering to enforce and a lot of people are just throwing their hands up in the air and not bothering. Was that inevitable after 6 months of this? Perhaps, but I worry it is degrading trust not just in the government but in the law itself. Anyway...
The answer from the government appears to be "more law" so we will see if that works!
I think this (and Cummings of course) shows how dangerous the coming period will be. The government simply can’t rely on law, they need trust and personal responsibility. And the signal the public are getting is that there will only be consequences from police enforcement...
https://twitter.com/ChrisMusson/status/1315035365942669320
... but the police will be unable and unwilling to enforce incredibly complex laws which apply to tens of millions of people. There a hard limits to the effectiveness of laws - unless you impose a police state which nobody wants.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
