Emergency State: How We Lost Our Freedoms in the Pandemic and Why it Matters

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One of the odd aspects of the government’s covid-19 strategy was that, from a proportionality perspective, it seemed to be happening back to front. All these questions became even more confusing in the difficult summer of 2020 and for most of 2021. Piercing and profoundly troubling, this is a journey to the heart of the pandemic and the great British struggle to balance the well-being of the individual and the group.

Wagner admits that restrictions were more, not less, rigorously enforced in some other European countries with written constitutions. It is as gripping as a Michael Crichton novel; but more disturbing because we collectively survived the events discussed with only some of our core human rights left intact. In his book, Adam takes us through the pandemic and the rules/regulations/guidance subsequently imposed on the population and is, in my opinion, an important document. The slapdash way in which law and guidance started to be produced then became a tsunami of contradictory statements that even the authors couldn't understand, let alone the people required to enforce them, especially the police. The initial wave of laws were genuinely made on an emergency basis and effective scrutiny was impossible in those early days.

This concise read frequently balances the need for the government to sometimes focus on one right (right to life) more than others with the attraction of unchecked power. For instance, Wagner explains that sex indoors with anyone but your regular partner could be interpreted as being illegal for long periods between 2020 and 2022.

He concludes that human rights thinking needs to be at the heart of emergency response; but really what this all shows is that human rights can’t tell you what you need to do. Just reading it brings back memories of times when we regularly needed to Google what precisely we were permitted to do. As during the pandemic, the courts give the government huge leeway to make and interpret rules and regulations as it wishes. I’m going to start this blog post with a short fairly conventional review of the thrust of the book.Meanwhile, behind the doors of Downing Street officials and even the Prime Minister broke the very laws they had created. In a review whose mean spiritedness undermines its arguments, in the magazine The Critic, Yuan Yi Zhu argues that Wagner falls back on ‘liberal proceduralism’, because he considers being opposed to lockdown a ‘low status opinion’.