JUST when one thought this rudderless government could not make any more stupid decisions, it’s surpassed itself.
At past 10pm on Tuesday evening, Matt Hancock, the nation’s chief killjoy, announced his latest arbitrary diktat, that gatherings of more than six people – whether inside or out – would be banned from next Monday, and that failure to comply would carry a fine of £100, doubling on each offence up to a maximum of £3,200.
It is sheer lunacy. Just as businesses had found the courage to re-open, just as employees were boarding trains and returning to offices, just as parents had begun to wave their children off to school again, in other words beginning to find a semblance of normality – all needed to kick-start the economy – the cowardly crew at No 10 have slapped this latest illegal infringement of our liberty on us. It can only be a diversionary tactic to distract us from their incompetence and misguided Covid response.
If the need is so pressing, why not enforce this rule with immediate effect? And spare a thought for the policing of it – how is this Big Brother-like monitoring to happen? By more snitching? Turning us into an ever more horrible and vindictively petty society?
There is an ever-expanding catalogue of knifings and violence on our streets, to which both government and police appear equally indifferent. Yet now the police are meant to look for groups of more than six people?! Of course it is a much easier job to clobber the law-abiding than to go after the criminals and psychotics that our inadequate legal and mental health authorities allow to roam free.
And how dare Health Secretary Hancock try to blackmail young people about ‘killing their grannies’? What a nerve! It is not they who were responsible for the 40 per cent of Covid deaths in care homes – it was the government and the NHS. It could not be more ironic: Hancock’s lockdown sledgehammer is driven by increased testing, the very testing that, where needed, still isn’t on tap – for care home residents and their carers. Why isn’t Gauleiter Hancock focusing on these delays?
Either he is very thick, or very malign. Where are the Cabinet resignations – are they truly all on board with this? You have to wonder whether someone has been slipping something into the water cooler at Number Ten.
As a law-abiding person I never thought I would say this, but the latest edict from the government calls for mass civil disobedience, as I tweeted on Tuesday night:
It seems quite a number on Twitter agree with me. Do you? We have decided to conduct a poll to test it.
