Adam Wagner: How a State of Emergency Became the Emergency State

Adam Wagner details the rolling out of the British totalitarian state. From Wagner at theburningplatform.com:

For two years, freedoms we thought untouchable were torn away, and immense, intrusive power over the smallest details of our lives was handed over to a small group of people in government. It is essential we understand how this happened and why.

‘From this evening I must give the British people a very simple instruction – you must stay at home.’

On Monday 23 March 2020, shortly after 8:30 p.m., Boris Johnson broadcast these eighteen startling words to the nation. For the first time in the country’s history, a twenty-four-hour curfew was imposed upon the population. All ‘non-essential’ businesses would be shut. Schools closed. Families divided. Group worship banned. Life as we knew it replaced by a new reality, where our singular focus would be to slow the spread of a deadly new coronavirus.

For the millions watching, the new reality the Prime Minister was imposing was hard enough to digest. The lockdown, which had seemed so far away, which the government had suggested just days before would not happen here, was suddenly a reality. But the shock of the new reality was accompanied by another huge shift for our society. Not only was the lockdown rearranging the basic reality of our social lives, it would also create a new legal universe. For the next two years, the tiniest details of our lives – from whether we could leave the house, where we could work, even whom we could hug – would be decreed by ministers, controlled by strange new laws the likes of which had no precedent in living memory and enforced by what often resembled a police state.

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