In an erudite and forceful lecture last week, the former Supreme Court judge, Lord Sumption, revealed in sad detail what has happened to this country in the name of the Coronabug. 

In his speech, he said quite rightly that Parliament has been elbowed aside by Ministers who rule by decree.

Now let’s face it, Jonathan Sumption is not just a brilliant lawyer. He is also a distinguished historian. Last year he gave the BBC’s Reith Lectures, and they were the best for many years. If he has any political leanings, I have no idea what they are but he uses language with immense care.

If he says this ‘has been the most significant interference with personal freedom in the history of our country. We have never sought to do such a thing before, even in wartime and even when faced with health crises far more serious than this one,’ then we can be sure that he has his facts right.

When he says ‘Ministers are accountable to no one, except once in five years at General Elections,’ he hits the nail squarely on the head. What we are currently witnessing from this sadly inept government is a complete breach with centuries of law and tradition, and who can say where it might end?

When Lord Sumption points out that laws, backed by ruinous fines are now made at televised press conferences and enforced by police forces operating far beyond their authority, then that is what is happening. 

He accuses the Government of showing ‘a cavalier disregard for the limits of their legal powers.’ This, he says, is how freedom dies and by golly he is correct. I watched the same thing happen in my own country, Zimbabwe and now I fear for Britain.

And behind it lies an astonishing, previously unnoticed seizure of economic power, which has made the entire Coronabug panic possible. By long tradition, Parliament has had ultimate control over the Government’s purse strings. It must permit major spending specifically. Without this power it is not part of the governing process at all and MPs might just as well stay at home.

 Yet back in March, unnoticed by almost everyone, Parliament vastly increased the Government’s freedom to spend what it liked. The old limit, for emergency spending, was increased from eleven billion to almost two hundred and seventy billion a year.

So where on earth is this likely to end? I really do not think Bunter J or the asinine Health Secretary have the faintest understanding of what they are doing to this nation. Their decision to strangle the teetering economy yet again in an alarmist shutdown is one of panic piled on panic and is visibly destroying the NHS they claim to be saving, as well as laying waste to those jobs and businesses they have not yet ruined or obliterated.

At the moment, they remind me of a couple of schoolboys who have pinched a car without knowing how to drive it. As they hurtle along the road, they are too scared to call for help and too damned vain to admit their mistake. They started the car largely by accident but now they cannot find the brake.

Faster and faster, the car hurtles along a darkening motorway while the rest of us are trapped in the back seat, unable to reach or influence them, let alone bring them to a halt.

The strangest part of this entire Coronabug farce is that nobody would know a pandemic even existed if the Government and its servile mouthpiece the BBC did not constantly seek to terrify us into a state of quivering fear.

In many years, comparable numbers of people die from respiratory ailments, particularly during the Autumn months. In normal years around sixteen hundred people a day turn their toes up for all kinds of reasons. Most of them do not die from Covid ruddy 19.

Many die from other diseases whose treatment has been halted or reduced by the pandemic. All such deaths are rightly mourned by their loved ones, except that, thanks to the Panicdemic (nice word) they can no longer give them proper funerals. Where is the logic in that?

And if one thinks about it, any government that is really concerned about public health would surely encourage the growth and spread of gyms, which probably do more than any drug to save us from avoidable disease. Fit men and women are far more likely than the unfit to fight off and survive diseases such as the Coronabug. Yet gyms are often the main victims of shutdown fanatics.

Lawrence Gainey of the Welsh Gym Owner Collective has told reporters that ‘we strongly believe gyms are an essential service.

‘It is a scientific fact that active participation in exercise actually relieves the strain on the precious NHS through the promotion of physical and mental well being. In forcing the closure of gyms, the Welsh Government is performing an incredible act of self-harm to a large proportion of its population and we cannot stand by and allow that to happen.’

He is right of course and I hope the English equivalent of his organisation will back up his plea. I have no intention of visiting a gym myself – those days are long past – but my Grandson Dale has recently opened his own such establishment and was doing reasonably well until the latest setback, so I do have a vested interest.

But Mr Gainey is absolutely right and I hope he succeeds in getting gyms open again, although I don’t think he has a chance against that rabid little Taffy who is the First Minister. Meanwhile Dale and his fellow gym owners are to be closed down yet again against all semblance of common sense.

And let’s face it, this new lockdown will make no difference whatsoever. All it will do is delay the transmission of the virus at an advanced economic cost. The new – well not really; they have been tried before – measures will serve as an incinerator to the already wrecked British economy. The hospitality sector has barely picked itself up from the horrific effects of the last lockdown and these new restrictions will act as the final nail in the coffin for so many ordinary people.

The human price for this Government’s obsession is already evident, with Macmillan reporting earlier this week that up to fifty thousand cancers are going undiagnosed due to Coronabug and projecting those numbers to double in a year.

If we ever do get a public inquiry about the way the UK have monumentally mishandled this crisis, we will doubtless find that more people were killed by Government policy than by the Coronabug.

I am sorry but I do not see any logic at all in the latest measures. They have been tried before without success so imposing them again seem like a panicked act of self-harm from a floundering Government.

Come on Bunter J. Your hero Churchill displayed real courage when Britain was foundering. Try and show a little bit of that same courage now when the country needs you to lead rather than bluster.