Sir Robert Buckland, the former Conservative justice secretary who oversaw the courts during lockdown, says there should be a COVID fine amnesty. This would see the 29,383 people fined by the courts for breaking COVID lockdown rules have their “slates wiped clean.”
Those who received fines—for alleged offences, including attending gatherings or not wearing a face mask—were slapped with criminal convictions that could prevent them from working as teachers, social workers or police officers, or from travelling to countries like the United States. Lockdown-critical campaign group UsForThem highlighted that three-quarters of the fines were handed out to people aged under 40, who are most likely to suffer in their employment as a result. “Time,” they said, “for amnesty.”
Just short of 1,000 days after he left his position as justice secretary, Buckland told The Daily Telegraph:
It is not proportionate or necessary [to uphold these convictions] at a time when we want to encourage and support as many people back to work as possible. If it is not being recorded in the usual way as a previous conviction, I would wipe the slate clean.
Will Jones, who is editor of The Daily Sceptic (formerly Lockdown Sceptics), wrote that the Tories “left this a bit late, haven’t they?”
They’ve had years to do this and they bring it up in their last two weeks in power.
Indeed, as far back as January 2020, while Buckland still held power as justice secretary, former Brexit Party MEP and now member of the House of Lords Claire Fox asked the Parliament’s upper chamber whether officials would give those “fined extortionate amounts of money for breaking rules and … accused of breaking the law … amnesty as a consequence of realising that there was wide scale rule breaking,” including, famously, in Boris Johnson’s 10 Downing Street.
Many others put forward similar cases both before and after, including long-time Farage ally Gawain Towler, who argued in April 2022 for “a general and backdated amnesty for all [those] convicted of breaching COVID regulations, with fines repaid, and compensation as an apology?”
The Daily Telegraph reports that Buckland’s call for amnesty has the support of two former cabinet ministers, but it is unclear whether anybody actually still in power shares this view—or, indeed, will do anything about it even if they do.
