Tim Martin, the founder and current Chairman of the pub chain Wetherspoons, has referred to the Government’s ‘Plan B’ measures as “lockdown by stealth”. The company has also responded to recently introduced work from home guidelines by warning investors that “the introduction of radical changes… make predictions for sales and profits hazardous”, and that the firm will likely be operating at a loss for the foreseeable future. The Guardian has the story.
In an update to the stock market, JD Wetherspoon told investors that “uncertainty, and the introduction of radical changes of direction by the Government, make predictions for sales and profits hazardous”.
It had been hoping to rebound from the impact of the pandemic this year but told investors that the Government’s ‘Plan B’ for tackling Omicron, including guidance to work from home where possible, meant it was likely to be “loss-making or marginally profitable” for the first half of its financial year.
Martin has been one of the most high-profile Brexiters in British business, a role that had previously seen him endorse Boris Johnson. But he has since become an outspoken critic of the prime minister over Covid measures affecting the hospitality industry, which he claims is not a significant source of outbreaks of the disease.
“The typical British pub, contrary to received opinion in academia, is usually a bastion of social distancing,” he said on Monday.
“However, the repeated warnings and calls for restrictions, mainly from SAGE members and academics, combined with arbitrary changes of direction from the Government, invariably at short notice, affect customer sentiment and trade.
“In effect, the country appears to be heading towards a lockdown by stealth.”
He cited comments made by Dr. Angelique Coetzee, chair of the South African Medical Association, who has said the Omicron variant does not warrant the “extreme action” taken by the U.K. Government.
Martin added: “For reasons best known to themselves, perhaps in order to encourage more vaccinations, the U.K. Government and its advisers are creating an entirely different and more frightening impression of the variant, which appears to be at odds with the South African experience.
Worth reading in full.
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Yes it was a rude awakening during the Scamdemic years as the reality was rammed home to us that 1) we were not living in a democratic and free society any longer, let alone a civilized one, and 2) Nobody else is going to stick up for our human/civil rights so we need to step up to the plate and do it ourselves. Like, where did all the human rights lawyers go? They just all disappeared into the ether!
”One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.” They’re going to keep coming for us and the net is going to keep tightening, because they know we’re wise to them now. Just don’t participate in the lie and call them out on their bullshit whenever possible. Lawyer Aaron Siri nails it;
”Public health authorities have become obsessed with seizing power to crush civil rights at their whim. They want to have the power to be able, at a moment’s notice, to lock you in your home and otherwise exclude you from society unless you do precisely what they say, including wearing, ingesting, and injecting what they demand. Cruel dictators afforded more freedom.
They seek this power because, as their recommendations have diverged from real world data and reality, they have lost the ability to persuade on the merits. Instead of recognizing the issue is with them – they need to follow the actual data, admit when they were wrong, change course, etc. – they have chosen to do what dictators of the past have done and must do when they can’t persuade on the merits: they resort to mandates, censorship, and force.
Public health “authorities” need to wake up and agree to a line in the sand: persuade on the merits and if they cannot, that is where it ends. People across the globe are keenly aware this line has been crossed and are now seeing the WHO, CDC, etc., for what they are: power hungry organizations that seek to perpetuate and expand their power and control over the bodies of citizens and that will never admit mistakes, will double down on junk data analysis, and gaslight anyone who doesn’t agree with them.
These organizations are potentially the greatest long-term threat to civil rights if their goals of power are left unchecked. Thus, we need to be very weary of WHO’s efforts to expand its power when it meets on May 27, 2024 to seek to finalize an international agreement aimed to “coordinate” its international ability to crush civil and individual rights of those who do not agree to submit to its demands at any time and place WHO believes such submission is required.”
https://twitter.com/AaronSiriSG/status/1790091773890670806
Simon Dolan would agree after two legal challenges that were rejected. We still have inalienable rights, it’s just the British public are ignorant of this.
The problem might not be that there isn’t a bill or rights but rather that it isn’t written well enough.
If you have a contract that in the end fails to protect you because it didn’t contemplate a particular issue or it wasn’t clearly enough written, you don’t just go, oh well, contracts are pointless. You try to improve your contract for the next time. That’s what you do.
A bill of rights is power ceding contract between the state and the people. If the state acts in a way that is abusive to the population, then you get yourself a better contract.
Vague interpretations can work both ways, for totalitarians and for the hoi polli. That is where the importance of a jury by peers comes in?
I’m not convinced by this at all.
The summary of the author’s argument seems to be that Bills of Rights aren’t worth having because they don’t stop all abuses of rights.
That would be like saying there is no point in having laws against murder or theft, because look, there is still plenty of murder or theft.
The question is do they make things better than they. make them worse? I don’t think he has demonstrated that at all simply because we were all abused during covid.
Let me give one specific example that I think shows that value of laws enshrining fundamental rights.
In Spain there was a lockdown. Eventually the constitutional court got around to evaluating whether it violated the constitution and it found that it was indeed in violation of the constitution. Did it stop the lockdown? No. But is it now clear in Spain that, as long as there is still rule of law in Spain there will not be another lockdown without a very hard to achieve change in the constitution? Yes,
Bills of rights and constitutions cannot be judged on the whether they are perfect, they need to be judged on whether they make things better and I would say they generally do.
They set an expectation, they make rulers be a little circumspect, at the very least they have to come up with arguments for their abuses and they provide an instrument for taking rulers to court.
A crucial first amendment battle is being fought in the US as to whether the government was in violation of the constitution by colluding with big tech firms to censor Americans. That in itself is something which without a bill of rights would not be possible. And if the government loses that will do a lot to stop it in future.
Yes a bill of rights is no guarantee of anything, we always have to be vigilant and fight to defend our rights. But a bills of rights and constitutions are weapons for doing so.
Hi James
This is a rather pathetic and hopeless piece. What’s your alternative remedy then, ah nothing!
So can I presume you are for some status quo ante, which previously depended on a general consensus of values within a society? Well it’s gone, woke-ism is previous political correctness gone puritanical that is authoritarian, and as you say the judiciary are now generally part of that. All the lessons learnt from the reformation and subsequent problems and then rapprochements between religious sectarian divides are now lost through ignorance. Lost because some people believe we have now reached a new enlightenment in woke-ism, and that truth and therefore also righteousness only comes from a notional democratic consensus.
But democratic consensus (if its not representative over and against the executive) is just another form of might is right, which if also puritanical, also believes it is right to force others into its consensus.
The whole point of a bill of rights is that it is an attempt to hold the executive to account, restricting their sovereignty, by protecting individual basic rights from the executive or any other powerful interest group. Yes, and so in that sense these are not democratic they are not meant to be – inalienable rights are not something a parliament can vote on, but neither can the judges.
So a Bill of rights proper is not the preserve of the progressive activist either, the fact that you think they are is due to some other impediment.
Yes no Bill of Rights properly rescued us from the Covid and vaccine shenanigans (although the US one may yet enable a significant rear guard action)
The fact that none of the Bills of rights did so up front in this crisis is not a failure of the idea of a Bill of Rights – what other idea is there? Instead it is because they are all poorly written – so for example none of them make a basic distinction between what might be described as basic equality public rights and the subsequent private diversity rights, which sit on that basic foundation. A Bill of rights sits squarely in the former and cannot stray into the later based on progressive manipulation. Basic public rights always trump private diversity rights because basic rights are in essence a statement of reciprocity and the golden rule upon which private diversity rights depend. In this way you get free speech but also a proper natural limit to it – which isn’t really a limit at all, it’s just a means to identify those people who do not believe in other people’s free speech.
It obviously also needs a free and active court to defend just it, probably as you say, with jurors. But there is no such current court.
You are like some kind of a religious fundamentalist harking back to the good old days when the church was in ‘moral’ power – if only we could get back there doing it the way we used to. But the church was lazy, it never worked out its proper answers to all the looming inconsistences it just said do what we say, (the religious reformation was never complete as it was partly hijacked by princes as just a means to get out from under the Pope) and so the church lost its ‘moral’ power. Likewise so have been the conservatives, lazy and they are now just like the Church of England utterly self- contradicted and lost.
The only way to get it back is to answer those inconsistencies and when the people see that they are answered they will be happy to coalesce around it, you will once again get a general consensus of basic public values which might bind a society together .
So stop bloody complaining with no answers and get on with solving the problem! If it’s no Bill of Right’s what is it, and if it is one, what needs to change because all the current ones haven’t worked properly when put to the test.
The bill of rights concept gives the leftist lawyer class even more ability to overrule the will of the people. It is not possible to draft constitutional protections which leftist lawyers won’t simply reinterpret as meaning the opposite of the plain meaning of the text. Decentralisation and making the judiciary accountable to the people are the best protections against an over-powerful state. The US bill of rights might have failed during the COVID tyranny but some states did stand firm against authoritarianism with South Dakota a notable example.
I don’t see how cutting the problem into smaller pieces, protects inalienable rights from progressives of all types, whether politicians, lawyers or people. Inalienable basic rights are not a matter of democracy or self identity, they are more like a law of gravity, just true anyway. The problem is to work out what they are properly.
Scotland and Wales were examples of decentralisation, and they worked really well…. for the progressives.
I don’t think anything works perfectly.
I agree decentralisation – on the whole – is better, simply because it diffuses power.
Power will eventually be abused. Always. The best one can hope for is that one can escape it to better alternatives. As many have done in the US fleeing democrat states for less intrusive republican ones.
Didn’t Portugal also rule against the Lockdowns or Mandates retrospectively.
https://youtu.be/kSNO2BIwFy8?si=WHP__rS-XvIqsYta
Have a watch of this young man. Bloody hero!
If he wanted to be even more provocative he could’ve put Saxon Crusader over a loud speaker. Then again he could’ve had some Sword wielding maniac from the religion of peace chasing him.
Commenters criticising the argument put forward in this article all seem to miss the point: if you want to rely on any law to protect your freedom, you have to get past the judges first.
A Bill of Rights is utterly useless when your rights under it are assessed by the judiciary – they are political human beings enmeshed in a network of goupthink and patronage.
As I’m always banging on in these pages – it’s no good complaining to the referee if he’s been bunged to make sure the other team win.
As Dr Allan points out, juries are the best protection – Magna Carta got that much right.
You seem to be over stating the problem of the judiciary. They work in tandem with the law, so it is also significantly a problem of poorly written laws. But I agree there should be more use of jurors. There is no point complaining about the judiciary if the laws they a refereeing are full of holes.
So for example current ‘rights ‘ laws set up all sorts of conflicts, because they are so badly thought through and written, leaving the judiciary to ponticate over them. But if basic rights are inalienable they will have the same characteristics as for example the laws of physics. They will not self contradict and so they will not leave gaps for progressive shenanigans. The judiciary would advise on the applicable law, and then the juror would decide.
The problem is that this issue implies a fundamental question about what we believe about mankind. The post modern progressives believe in nothing apart from the current consensus . Modernists must believe in some object inalienable aspects, the question now is can they be bothered to work them out.
We don’t want the government to decide what our ‘rights’ are in any Bill, that is not how it should work. The US with it’s Second Amendment is the last outpost to freedom in the West. A point George Galloway made. Broken clock twice per day analogy again.
The American system has not worked well either, its a very expensive time consuming rear guard action.
But what is the alternative? Mob rule?
A well written Bill of Rights, which clearly distinguishes between common basic public rights and diverse private ones. And a free dedicated court which can actively defend just those rights, including the use of jurors.
In the UK this would mean coming out of the European convention on Human Rights and also cancelling the equality act. Not because we don’t believe in such things generally, but because those forms are inadequate and self contradictory expressions of it.
Do we have rights UK Column:https://www.ukcolumn.org/article/interview-with-a-stormtrooper-revisited-do-we-have-rights