Hundreds of restaurants and gyms hit with lockdown fines could see their fixed penalties revoked in the courts, a leading lawyer has suggested. MailOnline has more.
Twenty-three such cases have already collapsed so far, with more than 800 more having “strong cases” for potential appeals, solicitor advocate Lucinda Nicholls, of Nicholls & Nicholls explained.
Ms. Nicholls said gyms were particularly susceptible to fines due to confusing official guidelines – including regulations that said those with a BMI higher than 40 were “entitled to go to a gym for exercise”.
“Therefore gyms were allowed to be open for that category of customer,” she told the Times.
Now legal experts across the country have accused official bodies of showing ignorance for the exceptions to lockdown restrictions that saw businesses wrongly hit with financial penalties.
The developments come after a gym owner who faced a £10,000 fine for keeping his gym open during the second lockdown saw the “flimsy” and “inept” case against him dropped.
Alex Lowndes, who owns Gainz Fitness and Strength in Bedford and St Neots in Cambridgeshire, refused to close his gym in November 2020 after COVID-19 restrictions were imposed. Mr Lowndes’ establishment was subsequently raided by police and he was charged with a breach of lockdown regulations, which he denied.
The businessman failed to pay the fixed penalty notice and was due to stand trial last March, however his case, defended by Ms. Nicholls, collapsed after the authority failed to gather sufficient evidence to prosecute.
Bedford Borough Council said the case was in the “public interest”, they enforced the rules at the time and that there was “ample evidence for a successful prosecution”.
The CPS has said each lockdown fine would be considered on its individual merits.
Mr Lowndes told the BBC: “They [the council] should have looked at it even six months in and gone ‘this is a waste of time’. But they kept going and they kept going, they brought in an external barrister, they kept spending money, and it just got out of control.”
He added: “[Contesting the case] was based on principle. We should never have shut in the first place and we stand by what we did at the time.”
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Is it enough to call out the intimidation tactics of the woke mob? Or is it time to push them back.
I’ve always found that bullies don’t stop until you hit them back. Hard.
Lefties really are sad, hate-filled, self-loathing individuals.
No that’s far too nice about them, they are bigoted, controlling, human hating ppl.
Who have developed their thought processes, for what they are, from the state education system that this school is showing up as total garbage.
Who wants to bet that the people making the complaint have never heard or read a word Jordan Peterson has ever said? That is the worst part of this. They’ve just been told he’s a bad person, and off they go like a pack of brainwashed zombies to rip him to shreds.
I’d consider it an honour to meet him, a brave man who appears to care a lot more for children and their future than some parents do.
And the least said about that breast-fetish man in Canada who is taking the proverbial the better. I can’t wait to see a woman claim to be a transgender man and show up in a school with a similar appendage the size of a baseball bat in her trousers, standing to attention. Inclusivity, right?
Indeed. I think some in the “woke army” are eager to show their loyalty and happy to seize upon a hate figure but have no idea what he actually says or does or stands for. Others who are more thoughtful possibly have an inkling that he’s not Literally Hitler but are too afraid to say this or think this for fear of being denounced for heresy. The puppet masters know Peterson isn’t Literally Hitler but are happy to perpetuate this image of him because he’s articulate, smart, has relevant qualifications, big balls and a huge following. They fear him.
The same is true in a less vehement, English, fashion, for Peter Hitchens. People think he’s some extreme right winger whereas in fact his views are very moderate. The number of times I’ve read posts like “I usually disagree with Hitchens but this time he’s spot on” is amazing – especially when the post regards Hitchens putting forward his core beliefs.
In my experience, ethnic minority people (such as this headmistress) are keen followers of Jordan Peterson and quote him approvingly. “Left-wing” people who want to keep ethnic minorities down oppose Jordan Peterson. His life planning tool has been shown to be particularly effective for ethnic minorities.
I would be fairly certain that one of the teachers at the school, with an axe to grind against this clearly successful headmistress, did the reporting.
Where is the hate in this? I do not recognise anything as “hate crime,” it is just an empty basket in to which any perceived ‘hurt’ can be dumped.
Anyway, whatever hate there is clearly lies with those doing the reporting. Wherever they are employed they should be dismissed immediately.
FFS!
Maybe an “activist” parent who, in typical hypocritical style, wants the benefit of a good education for their offspring but complains from the anonymity of their keyboard?
Absolutely, HP. The real hate crime – if hate can be a crime – is the action of the one reporting on the headmistress. There’s the hate right there.
They want her sacked? From the school she founded? How could that work?
But..
Kayla Lemiuex, the Canadian teacher, is brave, whereas Peterson is a coward. Kayla has found the confidence to express their authentic self and share their inner beauty with the world, despite the bullying and belittling they face from those who fear it more than anything else.
On the other hand, Jordan Peterson seeks to maintain and bolster the system that would crush people like Lemiuex in order to maintain the patriarchal white power structure that has kept us all scared, oppressed and complicit for centuries, and made him rich and influential. His ‘freedom of speech’ is a freedom to drip poison into the ears of impressionable children; to further the conditioning already imposed on them from systemically racist and cis-bigoted institutions (including their parents, often unknowingly), and impose his fascism. He needs to be stopped, at any cost, along with people like him.
#bekind. #dobetter.
In order to counter this mindset, it’s important to understand what it’s built on, and why it sees someone like Jordan Peterson as such a threat.
Its appeal is emotional, and works like any ideological indoctrination. It seeks to leverage and amplify any existing, reasonable feelings of unfairness in the societal status quo, and allow potential adherents to ascribe any failings, feelings of dissatisfaction and unhappiness to it.
It then nurtures a mindset of helplessness by defining victimhood as a desirable state, offering social approval, affirmation and kudos for displays of victimhood (or failing this, displays of sympathy with the victimhood of others in a way that would nurture this status). It helps that the cost of this sort of virtue signalling is very low.
It then cleans up by presenting membership of the ideologically united group as the solution, both replacing the loss of connection to the social system that has been rejected with a sense of belonging to a new group, and restoring a sense of agency and potency by offering status in the group as payment for advocating this mindset to others.
Peterson represents a threat, because he knows how to play the game on a similar emotional level. He understands that it would be useless to just point out to lay members that they’ve succumbed to a cult mentality when from their point of view, his is the cult. He knows it would be hopeless to point to the loss of a sense of proportion, when this sense is the first thing to be lost in a deliberately induced emotionally heightened state. He knows that cults will most enthusiastically court true victims of unfairness to use as beacons and totems for lay members, imbuing them with an impenetrable layer of sanctity, so they can have some grain of justification for their wider mission.
Instead he uses a different sort of affirmation whose locus isn’t in the group, but in the self, in terms of focus on self-determination, agency and resilience; pointing to self esteem as the solution to unfairness and unhappiness. This is why he’s so despised – he’s right over the target.
Perhaps if we can understand, like Peterson, that this isn’t a war of values, but a war on self-esteem, we might understand better how to deal with it.