Please note that the post below was published more than ten year ago on 21st November 2009 Nick Herbert MP, shadow cabinet member for the Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs, was in Cumbria this morning to see the areas affected by the flooding. He writes on Conservative Home about his visit. Here is an extract. I’ve been in Cumbria today to see the areas affected by the floods. I arrived early in Keswick where I met officials from the Environment Agency. Although the river levels had fallen considerably and homes were no longer flooded, the damage to homes had been done. And the water which had got into houses wasn’t just from the river – it was foul water which had risen from the drains. I talked to fire crews who were pumping flood water back into the river, and discovered that they were from Tyne & Wear and Lancashire. They had been called in at an hours’ notice and had been working on the scene ever since, staying at a local hotel. You cannot fail to be impressed by the
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Yes its against the human rights of a terrorist to be held under forced house arrest, but it seems not for everyone else. Advise is one thing, using legal force is quite another
And I wouldn't have dared (or been allowed) to leave them up.
Does the message need to be even clearer and better explained?
Yes, the details do it probably need more clarification, though I think the overall message is pretty clear.
Under normal circumstances, or if there were no good reason, directing people to stay in their homes in this manner would indeed be an outrageous breach of their rights.
These circumstances are not normal and the good reason is that if we do not do it the cost of that failure to act is likely to be measured in hundreds of thousands of lives.
Advising people is great, updating advise as and where needed is also fine . But enforcing it using the police and threats of fines makes it a house arrest and a misuse of power.
Advise me to stay at home, shop as few times as I absolutely need to and only go out for some exercise, I would have done it. Enforce that using police and fines makes it house arrest.
I can see the need for the advise, but lock ups and cheering on forced lock ups. George Lucas pretty much nailed it. "This is how liberty dies, to thunderous applause"
Jim is right to draw attention to the Human Rights Act but I would stress a different clause in this regard. The Rule of Law (no punishment without legislation) was disregarded and diminished when Boris invoked the immediacy of his edict on Friday and again on Monday. Of course, one may believe that the SARS 2 virus and the COVID disease is such a great threat that the PM is right to deceive the resident population of UK (not synonymous with the British people by the way)into altering their behaviour. It's just that I don't, not least because the most important step on the road to totalitarianism is the first.
There are no right answers in this situation.
I personally think these measures are reasonable and proportionate given the scale of the threat.
In this situation - and I would certainly not apply this rule without limits - the ultimate test of whether the PM had the power to do what he has done is whether the majority of the British people accept that he had that power.
In terms of the quote above: I selected it for this blog because I thought it encapsulated the message of the previous night's speech.
If you don't agree with that, or think the line above is a selective quote, you are entitled to your opinion, but I don't think I am open to the charge of deliberately misrepresenting the speech since I published both a Youtube clip of the whole thing and a full transcript of the speech less than an hour and a half after it finished.
Don't think there was any deception in the speech either, because I think the police will do their best to enforce what was in it and enough people will accept both the authority of the government to make these orders and that of the police to enforce them, to make it workable.
Has the rule of law been damaged?
Too early to say.
There is actually a lot of precedent for British governments taking exceptional measures in exceptional times. I would always ask two questions,
"Is this disproportionate?"
"Is it setting a precedent which is likely to be abused?"
My answer to the first is, definitely not:
My answer to the second is "I don't think so, but it's right to ask the question."
At the end of the day, to the extent that we still have free speech, a free press and free elections, the public can and will hold Boris Johnson to account on how he handles this crisis.
I don't see anything in the measures which have been taken which interferes with the ability of the electorate to throw Boris out on his ear in 2024 if he abuses the extraordinary powers which, in these extraordinary times, most of us seem willing to grant him.
I imagine and hope we will indeed learn plenty of lessons from this and implement them before, as sadly may well happen, there is another pandemic. One of them might well be to start an enabling bill through the system before you expect to need the powers in it, but one of those lessons will not, in my humble opinion, be to wait until you have the necessary legislation through before announcing measures when the evidence suggests they have become essential to save lives.
Neither of us has any idea how many more people might have caught the disease in the intervening period if the UK government had waited another couple of days for the legislation to become law before announcing the lockdown or how many of those people would have died.
I am not an expert in these matters and may or may not be anywhere near the mark in my wild guess that the answers may well be "thousands" and "dozens" respectively, but I am absolutely convinced that if we did know the answer to the second question it would be a number which the majority of the British people would describe as "too many."
BTW, I was pleased to see that police officers at the highest level have publically shared my initial opinion (not about Boris's bluffs but about legalities), not least because it was putting some of their junior officers in an invidious position vis a vis issuing unlawful fines and making arrests. I suspect that at the end of this episode there will be many things that will need to be done better next time and this should be one of them.
I will now read the legislation in the original...
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2020/7/pdfs/ukpga_20200007_en.pdf