The number of eligible people upholding their right to self-determination and bodily autonomy by refusing the vaccination makes me hopeful for libertarian values. As with the flu jab, you should only take a vaccine without coercion and only with your expressed consent. I genuinely hope for those who have already received the vaccine that it is effective in immunising against the virus and does not lead to any negative side effects yet to be discovered. I’ve said countless times how lockdowns and social distancing have no historical precedent and actual science (as opposed to scientism) has since cast doubt on the efficacy of such policies. That is all true, but it’s now clear to me that I may have been slightly mistaken in my examination of the situation – there is something more to this ordeal which certainly does have an historical precedent but is not immediately obvious.
I’ve concluded that the experience of the past ten months has been a version of mercantilist trade operating under maritime law (hence we see our country being ostensibly captained through a crisis by a Chief Medical Officer, a naval rank onboard a ship at sea). The government has imposed fines (or taxes) for noncompliance with their rules in the same way duties were first levied at ports but have not issued any arrests for those breaching lockdown rules. Why might this be? Such arrests would be subject to statute law which would not hold up in a courtroom since the illegal and unconstitutional Coronavirus Act 2020 was passed through our parliament last year without a vote. Since the Supreme Court declared during the 2019 prorogation crisis that parliament is sovereign, an act passed without parliamentary approval is not sovereign.
How can compliance be enforced so easily? The government has done relatively little to enforce its own rules; it has been left to private businesses to do the government’s bidding. Money can silence people as much as it can get them speaking. It is for this reason so many businesses, particularly large corporations and monopolies themselves created by the ideological biases of governments and not by traditional free markets, have been so willing to support the government’s measures as we’ve seen from companies as diverse as Qantas through to Pimlico Plumbers. They are under the false illusion that the government is trading them a good (a maritime currency) by way of the furlough payments, a form of plunder at the taxpayers’ expense designed to cut the costs of them doing business, while encouraging consumption of their vaccine which is the government’s chosen traded product.
I predict that the state’s propaganda campaign will be further intensified if compliance is found to be low, and the tactics of coercion will be unleashed by the new COVID marshals (a term pertaining to a court martial, another naval rank empowered to determine the guilt of crewmates subject to, yet again, maritime law) designed to bully people into consenting. If you do not wish to be part of the vaccination programme and therefore opt out from the maritime operation being carried through, all you are required to do is withdraw your consent for receiving a vaccine. This is best done by writing to your local authority and Public Health England so that the withdrawal of your consent signed by yourself and received and witnessed by the authority becomes a legally enforceable contract recognised under statute law (as under maritime law a nil response from another party will still count as implied consent).
Christopher J. Wilkinson 