2023-02-12
77th Brigade - Oh what a tangled web the government has woven.
"Countering Covid misinformation" was evidently a pastime endemic across media, social media, and government, none of which seems to have had a robust lawful basis in the traditional British sense of supporting our freedom of speech; nevertheless the government seems to have deemed that none of that was enough to suppress contrary opinions so they would have to utilise the army - despite that being explicitly a forbidden tactic absent the consent of Parliament.
Nevertheless questions were it seems asked in Parliament - so if Parliament was aware and yet did nothing, does that constitute implied consent?
Perhaps nobody knew what the appropriate constitutional provisions were and how a correct challenge should be made? Or were they all too busy working from home?
Nor was this solely an exercise in support of the pandemic in any case - "77th Brigade was stood up in 2015 and was provided with permanent funding by then-Prime Minister Theresa May in 2019".
Obviously the pandemic excuse does not hold any water, if the government had no prior knowledge.
And what were the army doing complying with prima facie illegal requests completely outside all prior convention? It's hard to explain such a fundamentally extraordinary departure from our previously accepted norms of governance.
As so often, UK Column has the story.
