Comment by cbeach
16 days ago
I’m so ashamed to be a U.K. citizen and to have both legacy parties (Tories and Labour) staunchly supporting these horrendous breaches of privacy.
We have had a number of bad laws over the last ten years that have entrenched state surveillance and presumption of guilt.
The only party I can see taking a principled stance on civil liberties is Reform UK, whose policy document states:
> A British Bill of Rights
> Our freedoms must be codified and guaranteed. Never again can our entire country be locked down on shoddy evidence and lies. Our data and privacy must be protected. Surveillance of the public must be limited and those monitoring us held to account.
https://assets.nationbuilder.com/reformuk/pages/253/attachme...
Recent polls show Reform is currently the most popular party. So there is hope.
In the past the Lib Dems were quite good at standing up for privacy and liberties when Lab and Con were both agreeing on more intrusion, but I'm not sure if that's still the case
Lib Dems did vote against the Investigatory Powers Bill (2016), and Nick Clegg blocked the original Snoopers Charter (Draft Communications Data Bill). So they have good form on this.
However, since 2016 the party almost exclusively shifted focus to opposing Brexit... which is ironic for a party that describes itself as "Liberal Democrats," trying to overthrow a public referendum (the strongest form of democracy)
The party seems to have lost its way, sadly.
> Never again can our entire country be locked down on shoddy evidence and lies
What’s this about? Is it some mad “covid was a hoax” thing?
Reform UK don't believe Covid was a hoax.
Reform UK believe that the purported efficacy of the mRNA vaccines at preventing transmission was massively exaggerated (we now know it was).
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
Reform UK believe that the detrimental side effects of lockdown policy outweighed the benefits of lockdown policy (again, there's evidence to support this view)
https://sites.krieger.jhu.edu/iae/files/2022/01/A-Literature...
"While this meta-analysis concludes that lockdowns have had little to no public health effects, they have imposed enormous economic and social costs where they have been adopted. In consequence, lockdown policies are ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument."
We need more voices that are willing to state these truths in Parliament IMO.
In this other comment I read a rather different story about what ReformUK wants https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42971836
Your comment makes it sound like they're all about research, but they also want to ditch human rights and the world health organisation? This conflict of logic makes me think there's probably more to it than just research and doing good in the world. Can it be that they speak of e.g. lockdowns having been bad based on that ReformUK voters were particularly badly affected by that policy and that this study after the fact found that, indeed, they did more harm than good? Ignoring that this wasn't necessarily knowable at the time, but it reflects badly on the government to have made a mistake with hindsight and so they can gain votes since they weren't in power back then and thus the fallacy is to think they'd have known better?
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> Reform UK believe that the purported efficacy of the mRNA vaccines at preventing transmission was massively exaggerated (we now know it was).
Okay, let's check the paper.
> Thus, the current evidence suggests that current mandatory vaccination policies might need to be reconsidered, and that vaccination status should not replace mitigation practices such as mask wearing, physical distancing, and contact-tracing investigations, even within highly vaccinated populations.
I must conclude, as a party dedicated to the science, that Reform UK therefore would be on board with the above mitigations, if they are genuinely interested in pursuing at least the simplest / cheapest effective mitigations for Covid.
Was that the case?
Yes - Reform UK is a far right populist party. They currently have 5 out of 650 MPs and are steadily gaining popularity - similar to the rise of other parties like AfD across Europe.
"Far right" suggests extremism.
Could you name an extremist policy that Reform have proposed?
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