My grandfather told me that his father was arrested during the blitz on suspicion of being an enemy spy because his house was the only one on their East Ham street with a phone and people thought he was getting advance warnings of raids from the enemy
Just reading the important @CommonsHealth report - lots of interest in there, but one thing hit me immediately... they write "covid-19"
In my writing/pleadings I have shifted from "COVID-19" to "Covid-19", even sometimes "Covid"... but this seems new
Cheeky Rawls reference
This is a profoundly important paragraph - and I wonder if the public inquiry will reach the same conclusion: that the only ways to restrict spread were isolation for the infectious and enforced restrictions on social contacts (i.e. lockdown and sub-lockdown measures)
For those interested in civil injunctions against protesters, we were just granted permission to appeal the costs order in this case to Court of Appeal; important point about whether legal aid costs protection should apply in protester injunction cases bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/…
Currently even if you are granted legal aid in a civil contempt case involving a persons unknown injunction you don't get the usual "football pools" protection order under s.26 of LASPO because of a weird quirk whereby this is criminal legal aid granted in a civil court.
So an impecunious protester can get a £50k costs bill, on top of a prison sentence, and have no protection from costs at all as any other legally aided party in the civil courts would get (no enforcement without further order of the court).
Dominic Raab had to reach back over 10 years and find a case which would be dealt with differently today because of the multiple changes to the law since then to make the deportation of people with criminal convictions easier
The thing with statutory inquiries is they are generally deeper and more effective than non-statutory inquiries - because the chair has power to force people to give evidence. A non-stat inquiry relies on the good will and open cooperation of the institution being investigated.
I have acted in 6 statutory inquiries (I think) and two non-statutory inquiries. The latter can work but it really depends on whether the institution you are investigating has any incentive at all to stonewall or hide things. But you don't know what you don't know so it can fail
A statutory inquiry can take longer because it's more thorough but even that is not clear - e.g. a non-statutory inquiry can have far less resource, back end and also may have to spend lots of time making up its own procedures which in a 2005 Act inquiry are off the shelf
This is a highly illiberal measure. Preventing people exercising their free-speech rights in advance because they are ‘disruptive’ is fraught with risk for a democratic society. bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politi…
It is understandable that in the heat of the moment people want to “crackdown” on disruptive protests, but protests are by definition disruptive. This law would, I assume, authorise the detention of a protester to prevent them attending a protest. That is illiberal.
This government is already attempting to pass laws which criminalise “noisy” protests. Our law is already finally balanced to protect free-speech and ensure police have powers to prevent illegal conduct arising from protest. These new laws tip the balance in the wrong direction.