For the past two years, my husband Michael and I have been fighting an exhausting and financially devastating legal battle after we kept our small coffee shop open for a time during the 2020 lockdown.
We were subjected to a prolonged campaign of harassment and defamation after an anonymous complaint to Plymouth’s Environmental Health Department about staff in our café not wearing facemasks. We were also accused of not enforcing lockdown rules on customers entering our shop.
We thought the matter was resolved when we pointed out to visiting Environmental Health Officers that legitimate exemptions applied, and that if we had challenged staff or customers about not wearing masks we could have faced fines under the Equality Act 2010.
Michael and I thought that was the end of the matter until our local paper, PlymouthLive, became involved, and news reporters gathered on the pavement outside our café and began to interrogate passers-by.
When in November 2020 the Government announced that food and drink outlets would be restricted to takeaway service only, the police started to make threatening appearances in our coffee shop.
After a great deal of thought, we made the decision not to withdraw table service to our customers, some of whom were vulnerable and elderly.
PlymouthLive’s comments’ section condemned the stance we had taken, stating that we should have followed the rules “like everyone else”. But we also received support from people who felt we were standing up for common sense.
We sought legal help throughout this ordeal, including a lawyer who came over from Ireland to speak on our behalf. We were consistently advised that we hadn’t broken any laws – that staff exemptions for facemasks were legitimate, and there was no requirement in law for us to remove tables and chairs from our coffee shop in November 2020.
Indeed, as we now know, former Health Secretary Matt Hancock revealed in autumn 2022 (on I’m a Celebrity…) that there was never any enforceable coronavirus ‘law’, only ‘guidelines’.
We are also now aware that other business owners who were issued fines under the same ‘legislation’ have had them overturned on appeal.
Despite all this, Michael and I are being threatened with prison if we don’t pay the fines that remain outstanding. I believe that the local authorities decided to make some kind of example of us, encouraged by the local press.
To us, the message seemed clear: “We are the authority and you must abide by our rules and regulations (even though we don’t always abide by them ourselves…)”
Because we followed our consciences, we have endured two years of legal wrangling, court appearances, threats, and negative articles in the local press – including insults from angry members of the public urging others to smash our shop windows.
So how did it all start?
Early in 2020 we read Freedom of Information requests to Public Health England and other information in the public domain that we found deeply disturbing and which led us to question what the Government was saying.
Ultimately, at Magistrates’ Court, our limited company (Finla), my husband, Michael, and I were collectively fined £30,000 plus £12,000 costs. Sadly for us, in April 2022 we were forced to close our business of six years.
On appeal, after we’d already paid the lion’s share of the costs, our personal fines were reduced to £10,000 plus costs, totalling just over £14,000.
We now only have a few months to pay the outstanding fines before we face the judiciary again in March 2023 to hear whether we will be taken into custody for “non-payment of fines”.
It certainly feels as if the odds have been stacked against us from the start.
I know ours is just one of many tales of hardship in the last couple of years.
I feel many – hopefully most – people are beginning to understand the toll on people’s health caused by the lockdowns. But we feel people would be equally shocked to learn of the treatment meted out to us by the authorities, and the way in which we have lost our small family business.
If you feel able to help, we would be most grateful for any financial contribution, however small. We have set up a crowdfunder here.
At this stage, we are losing hope…. We would love to get back on track with our lives with our two young children.
Please help if you can – and thank you for taking the time to read our story.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
A short one from Dr McCullough but this is his conclusion regarding the measles vaccine, citing a paper from 2016 in JAMA;
“Given the neuropsychiatric concerns over the MMR vaccine and the stochastic risk of allergic/immunologic reactions to any injection including components of (DTaP, Tdap) or MMR, the parental movement for vaccine choice is well justified. For measles and pertussis, the vaccines convey imperfect protection and breakthrough infection (vaccine failure) should receive considerable “blame” by public health researchers.”
https://petermcculloughmd.substack.com/p/vaccine-failure-a-major-determinant
Measles vaccine presumably has the same issue as the COVID shots, in that it’s given as an injection so it won’t generate IgA (mucosal) antibodies, which are what is really needed to prevent infection for a disease that’s spread through the air?
Evidently it’s not a Covid ”pandemic” we have to worry about now but a VAIDS pandemic. These data, when presented in this graph format, are really shocking. I wonder what various other countries’ data look like. The increases in several illnesses in 2021 when compared to previous years is just off the charts!
“The average number of myo/pericarditis cases being reported as adverse reactions to any vaccine between the years 2000 and 2020 equates to 46.
The total number of acquired immune disorders reported as adverse reactions in 2021 was 15,555. This represents a 33,715% increase. Shocking, isn’t it?”
https://www.2ndsmartestguyintheworld.com/p/vaids-rising-cdc-confirms-usa-suffered
Good info
I don’t know if you saw my response to your post the other day, as it was late, but I was saying you must be chuffed to bits about your son’s success!
Are you still his roadie? 
In support of the above:
https://expose-news.com/2022/12/27/fatal-link-covid-vaccine-aids/
Non-binary. What this does it tell us what someone is NOT.
Who cares what someone is NOT?
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/12/27/anti-car-sadiq-khan-destroying-london/
The Labour mayor of Greater Manchester isn’t far behind Khan with his money-making schemes, penalising vehicle users. His scheme has temporarily been put on hold – only after all the surveillance cameras etc watching our every moves were already installed at great cost.
His scheme has temporarily been put on hold – only after all the surveillance cameras etc watching our every moves were already installed at great cost.
July this year the scheme comes in to force. Bunter Burnham can’t wait. £10 per day to drive a diesel vehicle in his Clean Air Zone. This will wreck Greater Manchester but Attenborough will be pleased.
As I have pointed out many times much of the £37 billion was spent on traffic measures and a surfeit of cameras across the region was part of that.
https://www.dw.com/en/top-german-virologist-says-covid-19-pandemic-is-over/a-64214994
What a grim fairy tale – The pandemic that never was…
Should that not be Grimm? They were from Germany, weren’t they?
And some folk are still saying that none of what is coming down the line is planned….
https://www.globalresearch.ca/war-global-agriculture-unsustainable-sustainable-un-agenda-2030/5800922
Thanks BB. I hope everyone on here reads this. The future looks grim. Those not dying from health problems caused by the injections are to die from starvation.
I work with a few farmers. I wish I knew how to talk to them about this. But what would I achieve?
By now I’m sure many of you have seen this infamous video and example of propaganda/misinformation bilge churned out by the WHO and featuring the hugely irrational, science-denying vax zealot Dr Hotez. Well Ivor Cummins focuses on debunking the offending piece of shameful rubbish ( not exactly difficult ) in his latest video using his usual data-centric method.
https://odysee.com/@IvorCummins:f/insane-vaggzine-propaganda-omg-shocking:9
Speaking of vax zealot Hotez, watch him here in March 2020 speaking of his concerns with these jabs. What happened in that interim period that he did such a U-turn? The 2min vid also gives a bonus clip of Fauci demonstrating what a lying, hypocritical git he is and always was.
https://metatron.substack.com/p/the-worst-possible-thing-you-could
Our politicians just don’t think things through. In Fraser Myers’s article in Spiked, he says that they are pursuing energy policies that rely on the weather – which at times produce insufficient power when it is cloudy and/or there is no wind. If there is insufficient sunshine and wind, why don’t they just burn more fossil fuels which will result in hotter (and sunnier) weather and more chaotic climatic conditions with increased wind speeds? Oh wait….
Hopefully this means that our posting facilities are back to normal.
Many thanks to the team for getting this sorted.
Thanks also to Mogs for alerting the membership. Bloody hell I felt like I had been in solitary for two days.
Thanks very much Mogs
https://expose-news.com/2022/12/28/30by30-is-the-biggest-land-grab-in-history/
Iain Davis at UK Column News has done a lot of work on this. Truly frightening.
https://expose-news.com/2022/12/28/top-secret-covid-vaccination-deadier-than-disease/
The maths people here will enjoy this.
“The findings of AFL ( American First Legal) indicate how centres of power can and do act in unison when they need to. The fact that it involved a worldwide campaign shows something huge was at stake.”
A cracking short essay from Colin Todd unter over at Off-G outlining the nefarious webs of government, pharma and Blackrock, all deeply inter-linked and working flat out to murder and then enslave humanity.
Apologies – Todhunter.
Agreed – well worth a read
Of Economic Crises and Pandemics: Facebook as Fact, Government as Truth, Big Pharma as God – OffGuardian (off-guardian.org)
Thanks Michael. Apologies all. Two days away and I have forgotten how to post. Crikey.
From the ” why the news block on Dutch farmers?” above which contains this gem:
“Controlling food production is something that political ruffians always want to achieve.”
Possibly something was lost in translation but I don’t think those planning to murder millions through starvation are worthy of the nomenclature of “ruffians.”
John Campbell calls for a halt to the injections.
https://rumble.com/v22ugd2-time-to-pause-covid-mass-vaccination.html