Former Supreme Court Judge Lord Sumption believes the UK Government are acting way-beyond their democratic powers.
The Government has no legal right to impose the severe and miserable restrictions on our lives. This is the verdict of one of the most distinguished lawyers in the country, the retired Supreme Court Judge Lord Sumption.
The draconian laws the Government have imposed have directly resulted in a wrecked economy, brought needless grief to the bereaved and the lonely and destroyed our personal liberty which many have argued has been disproportionate to the threat from a mild virus, and that the laws were unconstitutional. Now, one of the most distinguished lawyers in the country, the retired Supreme Court Judge Lord Sumption, has gone public with his legal analysis of the rules, confirming what many have suspected all along; that the UK Government have no powers to restrict the publics freedoms in the way it has.
Speaking to the Telegraph this week Lord Sumption said: ‘I don’t myself believe that the Act confers on the Government the powers that it has purported to exercise.’ Lord Sumption was referring to the Public Health Act of 1984, the basis for almost all the sheaves of increasingly hysterical decrees against normal life which the Health Secretary Matt Hancock has issued since March. The 1984 Act was drawn up mainly to give local magistrates the power to quarantine the sick. Note, it is the sick that the judges have power to quarantine, not the Government and not the Healthy. In much the same way you wouldn't imprison everyone to ensure no crime was committed, no government should be quarantining everyone to ensure the sick are.
Nothing in the act remotely justifies any of the astonishing rules the government have forced upon us – house arrest, travel restrictions, limits on visiting family, interference with funerals and weddings, closure of churches, compulsory muzzles, bans on assembly and protest are all beyond their powers and yet are being foist upon us with increasing pressure on an almost daily basis.
'English law just does not allow an Act of Parliament to be stretched so far'. 'Magistrates are never given such powers. It is a principle of our law that fundamental freedoms cannot be invaded or overruled unless the law specifically allows it.'
So far, however, the Courts of England have been content to let the Government do what it likes, imposing diktats and increasingly complex rules that have less and less to do with 'flattening the curve' and 'saving the NHS' when the death rate from the virus is in single figures and the hospital wards lie empty.
Lord Sumption in his interview with the Telegraph goes on to point out that powers do exist – in the shape of the Civil Contingencies Act – under which the Prime Minister could do all the things he has done. But the CCA requires regular parliamentary scrutiny and renewal. Effectively the normal checks and balances laws should take in a parliamentary democracy. In contrast, the Government have bypassed the normal functions of parliament by issuing these diktats. The Government’s team of lawyers must know this. So why wasn’t the CCA used? We can only guess that the Prime Minister and his Health Secretary feared that if they had to keep going back to Parliament, even the most dim, slow and gullible MPs would eventually have spotted, and halted, the immense power grab now underway.
We should not underestimate the importance of Lord Sumption’s intervention. It's not hard to see its importance as the mainstream media have entirely ignored it, as they continue the doomsday narrative, anything 'missed' by them these days is because it challenges their views.
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