Thread by @AdamWagner1

I have been a consistent critic of the way the government has enacted Covid regulations but the analogy to Nazi Germany is (as it often is) wrong, an over-exaggeration and undermines the civil liberties arguments about lockdown regulations.

https://twitter.com/simondolan/status/1337340273597313024

I too am troubled by aspects of the courts' approach - particularly allowing the govt to wriggle away from challenges because they have enacted new regulations. But parliament is now given a vote on all major regulations....

There has been at least one successful challenge to Covid regulations (bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/…). We have a functioning but flawed democratic process including Parliamentary committees and votes.

We should be vigilant against corrosion of democratic norms but Hitler's enabling act (which followed the Reischtag fire) gave him the powers of a dictator to overrule the constitution. He used those powers to bypass the German parliament and enact e.g. the racist Nuremberg Laws

I know why people invoke the Nazis - I have done it enough times to highlight the dangerous path that the erosion of civil liberties leads towards. But to argue that the Covid restrictions, which are a flawed attempt to control a deadly virus, are equivalent to Nazi laws is wrong

And I know this thread will elicit strong responses and probably the "COMING FROM A "HUMAN RIGHTS LAWYER"" ones. But human rights were designed to prevent fascist dictatorships and as much as I criticise our own system we have a democracy with functioning...

... human rights protections. To suggest that we don't and are now living in a fascist dictatorship is in my view wrong and leads people to oversteer away from *any* policy to contain the deadly virus - and thus protect the right to life, perhaps the most fundamental right of all