Emergency State: How We Lost Our Freedoms in the Pandemic and Why it Matters

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It is too political, with its diatribes against Boris Johnson, for its lack of political reflection on the broader questions of which trade-offs we should be making not to seem like an oversight or an evasion. Biography: Adam Wagner is one of the UK's leading human rights barristers and the country's preeminent expert on Covid-19 laws. Adam was the Specialist Advisor to the Joint Committee on Human Rights year-long Inquiry into the human rights implications of Covid-19 and is currently a Visiting Professor of Law at Goldsmiths University. Please understand, in no way am I suggesting that the Covid-19 pandemic was anything short of a medical emergency. I was struck by the extensive similarities in the ‘chat’ Wagner reports among legal professionals and the ‘chat’ I participated in as a public health professional.

Emergency State demonstrates why Adam Wagner rapidly became the indispensable authority on the unprecedented restrictions on liberty that accompanied the Covid-19 pandemic. I read this book at the same time that figures from No 10 have evidence to the covid inquiry which exposed the sheer chaos going on. For a politician, science is one the relevant factors — perhaps the single most important in this context — but other considerations also have to be weighed. In a review whose mean spiritedness undermines its arguments, in the magazine The Critic, Yuan Yi Zhu argues that Wagner falls back on ‘liberal proceduralism’, because he considers being opposed to lockdown a ‘low status opinion’.Piercing and profoundly troubling, this is a journey to the heart of the pandemic and the great British struggle to balance the well-being of the individual and the group. Had ministers needed to explain their laws in parliament, for example, they might have been clearer and more accurate in their public pronouncements. She is solely responsible for issuing immigration rules, she signs into law all of the regulations and it is her opinion that counts when it comes to deciding what is or is not conducive to the public good when a person is to be deported or even deprived of their British citizenship. Wagner contrasts the United Kingdom legislation to Scotland, Sweden, Finland, New Zealand and Singapore as providing more scrutiny of measures. Imagine the public outcry if Parliament had taken several months to examine the Bill properly while the bodies piled up around the country.

My conclusion: the vast, invasive powers taken on by the emergency state during the pandemic apply day in and day out to the lives of immigrants in this country. When it came to our wedding, we had to consider whether to follow the government’s guidance as well as the law. Emergency State begins by offering a quick theory of the nature of government and its laws in a time of crisis, highlighting the way power is concentrated and freedoms curtailed to tackle them.

Wagner discusses the history of the European Court of Human Rights, ECHR, as a means to stop the slide into authoritarianism. The emergency was supposed to be short but lasted for 763 days, allowing ministers to bring in, by decree over 100 new laws restricting freedoms more than any in history - laws that were almost never debated, changed at a whim and increasingly confused the public. Wagner has the added perspective of a human rights practitioner, balancing the freedoms that we all generally accept with the need to stop a deadly disease. That a joker was PM was bad enough but those he surrounded himself with (like Mike Hancock, Minister for Health (!

We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. He was a protagonist in the Reclaim These Streets litigation and gives a first-hand account of the challenges he faced.Stephen Bush, of the Financial Times, felt that the book should justify lockdowns for fear that readers might view the loss of human rights as justifying the absence of restrictions in future pandemics. This amount includes seller specified domestic postage charges as well as applicable international postage, dispatch, and other fees. There were times the book made me laugh (Adam's lockdown hobby), rage (the grouse shooting exemption) and cry (the family with the severely disabled child who were forced to stay apart from him in a quarantine hotel). At times, the legal arguments are a little dull (to me at least - that’s why I don’t work in law) but the author does a great job of explaining the relevance and importance of what the government got wrong, and why it matters. As the book goes through a linear narrative, Wagner peppers examples of overreach and corruption, while giving as much benefit of doubt as possible.

Legislation was subject to an up or down vote in the House of Commons, without the possibility for amendment; creating the possibility to amend emergency legislation is one of the book's key suggestions for improving state emergency response. An emergency state is ignorant, Adam suggests, in the sense that decision-makers become isolated and have to rely on limited and potentially unreliable information. Finally, most devastatingly, one of the features of the emergency state is that we want it to happen. I hd feared that such information would be written in legalese but you have the talent to communicate with the interested-but-non-specialist section of the pulblic. Wagner discusses rules to quarantine in hotels, [1] : 132–137 and legal challenges to emergency legislation brought by Simon Dolan.Bush comments that the situations that resulted in "Covid states" is near certain to happen again and that the book is a vital contribution to a debate about how to ensure the next pandemic does not damage the democratic model. The point he misses is that nothing short of lockdown was at the relevant moment sufficient to be confident of contain the pandemic and saving lives, and therefore only lockdown was proportionate to the threat. He cites the case of Liversidge v Anderson where the House of Lords Judges ruled that the Home Secretary need not provide any reason for their decision to indefinitely detain someone for that decision to be reasonable. It provides an infographic showing how covid cases and deaths progressed during the pandemic and which restrictrictions were in place at these times and a timeline of restrictions. As a lawyer, Adam is primarily concerned about the law-making process, the lack of parliamentary scrutiny, the use of summary justice and the lack of clarity in the law at that time.