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

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Wagner's book, attempting an assessment of political choices through a legal frame, was perhaps destined to fall into this trap. The ‘extremely powerful but entirely opaque’ Covid-19 Cabinet committees released no minutes and made decisions behind closed doors; a ‘democratic black box’, as Wagner puts it. Whether you are looking for legal expert witnesses, legal training/CPD providers, international law firms, administration of estates, legal software suppliers, barristers chambers or any other general legal service, the Legal Services Directory will provide a suitable option.

His other big recommendation is a codified constitution, although having one didn’t help the US and France combat Covid any better than us. Bush comments that the situations that resulted in "Covid states" is near certain to happen again and that the book is a vital contribution to a debate about how to ensure the next pandemic does not damage the democratic model. Wagner often approaches such, but ultimately shies away from them, to reassert that he is simply offering a legal walkthrough.Wagner notes vagueness surrounding lockdown laws and the difference between governmental guidance the law. In this book, Wagner argues that COVID-19 restrictions in the United Kingdom brought the country as close to a police state as in living memory. This book is the definitive legal guide to the law of the pandemic and will serve as an important historical account of this dark and challenging period in our history.

The book comprises a preface and nine chapters: States of Emergency, Very Strong Measures, Take It on the Chin, You Must Stay at Home, The Lockdown Bites, Patchwork Summer, The Darkest Winter, Step by Step, and Freedom Regained? Had ministers needed to explain their laws in parliament, for example, they might have been clearer and more accurate in their public pronouncements. It swiftly became clear that none of them knew what they were doing but it didn’t stop them doing it. And it must be judged on the basis of what was known at the time the decision is made, or else no lesson can ever be applied at any future moment of crisis, by a minister or a court who will again have to act on uncertainty.That power is highly concentrated, whereas in a democratic state it is diffused and subject to scrutiny.