Day: 17 May 2020

As week eight of the lockdown comes to a close, there are some rumblings of dissent – although it's coming from people unhappy from the Prime Minister's easing of the lockdown rather than the fact that we've been confined to our homes for two months. Opinium polling for the Observer over the past week has seen a significant drop in public confidence in – and approval of – the Government. Approval ratings have been dropping steadily since a highpoint in late March – and those who disapprove now form the majority for the first time since the lockdown began: Anti-Lockdown Protests A Protestor in Hyde Park yesterday holding up a sign What little genuine dissent there is was confined to a handful of anti-lockdown protestors yesterday. One such demonstration was in Hyde Park where, according to the Mail, 19 people were arrested, including Jeremy Corbyn's brother. My friend James Delingpole attended and was threatened with a £30 fine merely for trying to report on the demo for Breitbart. You can read his piece about that here (includes video footage of him being confronted by a police officer). I've received several reports from readers who attended the Hyde Park rally, including this one: I went to Speakers' Corner today. Britain's traditional fee speech locale in London. I counted 255 people, but ...

by John William O’Sullivan John Waters addresses supporters outside the Court On May 13th 2020, Mr Justice Charles Francis Meenan refused permission for John Waters and Gemma O’Doherty to challenge the emergency laws brought into effect by the Irish government in response to the COVID-19 outbreak. This judgement is enormously important for two reasons: first, it shows that some members of the Irish judiciary do not understand the gravity of what they are dealing with; and second, it shows that the Irish courts are placing the authority of a caretaker government over the citizens’ ability to assert their constitutionally-protected rights. We should carefully analyse these two trends, as they seem almost certain to arise in court-rooms across the Western world in the coming weeks and months. The separation of powers in constitutional republics is meant to ensure that one branch does not overstep its bounds and encroach on the freedom of a people. This much, everyone is taught in civics class. Yet the ruling by Justice Meenan does not read like he has taken it seriously. Justice Meenan’s argument against Waters’ and O’Doherty’s case is rather simple: he claims they must prove that the Irish government’s actions have been “disproportionate” in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. He claims, citing previous cases, that constitutional rights are not absolute and that if ...

By Kathrine Jebsen Moore Reading through the daily Lockdown Sceptics newsletter the other day, I was dismayed to see that a petition to allow parents not to send their children back to school had received around 65,000 signatures (now over half a million). I wasn’t overly surprised, having noticed the comments on social media and the reports of worried parents and teachers, but I thought: Surely it’s not just I who, having looked at the available evidence, thinks it’s high time our children got back to their regular routine of school and nursery – not via screens, but the real, physical thing? In Scotland, schools probably won’t open until the autumn, and plans to get children back to school next month in England are being contested by the teaching unions, so I started my own petition claiming the opposite: that children need to get back to school. The arguments in favour of reopening are many, and have been well made by education experts like Joanna Williams and the Children’s Commissioner for England. It’s disappointing to see the teaching unions, supported by the British Medical Association, opposing the plans and in effect telling their pupils that schools and education don’t matter. For if they don’t matter now – after months where many children have been cut off from their network of ...

by Freddie Attenborough There’s a photograph doing the rounds in the mainstream press (May 13th, above) which depicts a group of nursery children in a playground somewhere in France. What are they doing? Perhaps a little surprisingly, that’s not an easy question to answer. True, they’re in a playground, but what they're definitely not doing is playing. (For those of you who may, quite understandably, have forgotten those now irrelevant sections of our pre-lockdown vocabulary, “to play” once meant "to do something enjoyable, spontaneous and entertaining".) Most of them are sitting down, although two of them - breaking free from this majoritarian tyranny - have had the temerity to stand up: an act of such brazen individualism and character in today’s France that one suspects Emmanuel Macron is, as we speak, preparing yet another emergency Presidential decree to ban all “Fifth-Republic-endangering leg-flexing amongst minors”. But whether standing or sitting, they’re all caught in the same trap - or rather, “traps”. A teacher, interpreting French social distancing rules in what we might most politely describe as an “exuberant” way, has positioned each of the children in what the Daily Mail - less politely but very accurately - refers to as “isolation zones”. Chalked on the ground, each child has a box. Different colours have been used in their creation, like some ...