A “whiteout” is meteorological condition in which snow falling from the sky and snow whipped up from the ground is whirled by a gale into a disorientating blanket of whiteness in which there are no visual bearings and it is all but impossible to navigate. It is an apt metaphor for the blizzard of coronavirus regulations which have cascaded out of Whitehall (and of course Cardiff and Holyrood too) since March. A search of the www.legislation.gov.uk website reveals a mind-boggling 133 (albeit each Welsh regulation is counted twice in English and Welsh versions) separate pieces of UK legislation, nearly all of them statutory instruments. Thus we have such delights as the Health Protection (Coronavirus, International Travel) (Amendment No. 7) Regulations, The Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (Leicester) (Amendment) (No. 2) Regulations 2020, The Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (Blackburn with Darwen and Bradford) Regulations 2020 and so on. And on and on. It is enormously difficult to find ones bearings amidst all these constantly changing rules and regulations. As David Allen Green put it on August 14th:
“There is not a lawyer or police officer in the land who any longer knows what is legal and not legal under coronavirus regulations. An absolute mess of a legal regime.”
Since August 14th matters have only got worse.
Piers Corbyn
It is not often that I have much sympathy with Jeremy Corbyn’s weather-forecaster brother Piers (or to give him his own rather baffling description “LongRange WorldLeading weather+climate forecaster BIEuUsa. SolarLunar Method NotCO2! AmericanThinker Climate Predictor2010. Bro #JC4PM”), or with any of the anti-vaxx, Qanon, and 5G conspiracists who participated in a rally against masks and coronavirus restrictions in Trafalgar Square on Saturday 29th August. As well as Mr Corbyn, they included the antisemitic conspiracy theorist David Icke and a small group who deployed a flag remarkably similar if not identical to that of the British Union of Fascists. These are not easy people to like, although no doubt there were some more reasonable folk amongst them as well.
Nevertheless the £10,000 Fixed Penalty Notice issued to Piers Corbyn as someone “involved in” the demonstration is disturbing. Mr Corbyn’s “FPN” requires him – strictly speaking one could argue it “invites him” but it is an invitation backed by a threat – to pay £10,000 for breaching Regulation 5B of The Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (No. 2) (England) Regulations 2020, as amended. Continue reading “Piers Corbyn may be a crank but his treatment should worry us all”