Tiers are not enough

Passing a law forbidding something to happen, does not, in fact, stop it from happening.

In other words, passing a law does not make you Harry Potter of the legal world, it just means you published something, whether the law can or will be obeyed depends on many things.

There is a certain legitimacy in passing and enforcing laws, if people see that the Government themselves, and/or their advisors ar Ministers also do not obey the self same laws, or the is no police to enforce them, of the rules are so complicated to be enforceable or understood, then no matter how magic you think you law will stop something, it just won’t.

Yesterday, the Government presented three Statutory Instruments to the Commons, for debate today (Tuesday) and for a vote tomorrow.

There are three, one for each traffic light colour, and on average, each runs to about 12,000 words, most on exceptions and clarifications. So much for a simple set of laws and rules that anyone can understand.

In Liverpool you can’t meet any more than one other person in your back garden, unless your garden is part of a castle’s estate. A bonus there for being a castle owner, something Dom would appreciate, I’m sure.

But a simplified traffic light system with Sis running to 36,000 pages, and in some cases, areas with same infection rates per 100k population are put into different tiers of lockdown, but no real explanation why, two, Walsall and Oxford which do have almost identical rates, sees Oxford in tier 1 and Walsall in tier two. There might bbe a reason, a good one, but its not been explained. Or it could be that Oxford is in the south?

Your guess is as good as mine.

Passing repeated laws on the same subject does not make it any more illegal. There have been close to a dozen pieces of anti-terrorism laws passed in the last decade, but it is still illegal as it ever was, and it seems harsher and harsher penalties make little difference.

Either the threat of on the spot fines of up to £10,000 pounds or being snitched on by your neighbours is the main stick in this case.

And there is Johnson relying on the other magic: Great British common sense. Or did through the late spring and summer, suggesting that people would know what was right and wrong, whilst urging people to go back to the beack, be our patriotic duty to drink in pubs and literally bribe us into eating out through August.

But yes, it was the people’s lack of common sense that caused the surge.

And not Johnson ignoring the science, as we now know from notes released, SAGE, urged the Government to an earlier, harder lockdown in the 3rd week of September. Instead, did nothing, and now has to balance every action in trying to keep both the sane and insane wings of his party on side, whilst not bothering with actual science and facts. That the people would quite happily follow science and fact-based decision making, the Brexit headbangers of the ERG and Common Sense Group, apparently won’t.

So another three week delay in lockdown, not stopping students travelling to University because people who deny actual facts and science wouldn’t like it. Meanwhile the virus rampages through the country, hospitals fill up and people look forward to furlough being axed at the end of the month with little or no income to pay bills.

A lesson learned during the Spanish Flu of 1919 was that cities and areas that locked down quicker, harder emerged quicker with less of an economic hit. So delaying lockdown will end up costing more in the long run anyway, but will be done to placate the covidiots and good editorials in the Daily Hate Mail.

So it goes, so it goes.