Lockdown rule-breakers don’t deserve to be treated like criminals

Somewhere in this country is a young man who is still trying to rebuild his life after a celebration that went horribly wrong.

The identity of the university student who was whacked with a crippling fine for breaching Covid regulations during the final year of his studies is not in the public domain – which is a mercy, or he might well find it even harder to put the experience behind him.

What we do know is that he paid an appalling price for throwing a party, which is what undergraduates generally do when they finish their exams. Unfortunately, the get-together took place during the pandemic, when any such merriment was against the law. The result? A terrifying ordeal involving the police, university authorities, solicitors and courts.

A brief act of defiance against strictures that ruined the entire student experience for a generation of young people and overshadowed millions of childhoods cost that young man £10,000. The fine wiped out his life savings and still that wasn’t enough. But the real price was far higher. Threatened with prosecution and expulsion by the university, his last year at Nottingham Trent was dominated by legal meetings and disciplinary processes that left him so stressed he was unable to eat or sleep. Even more sickening, of course, was the subsequent discovery that senior figures in Downing Street were busy having their own parties at the time.

Looking back, the former student regrets paying such a huge fine – and who can blame him? After all, the punishment hardly fit the crime. From the outset, it was apparent that the virus posed very little serious risk to people his age, so it is unlikely the party did much harm.

Nonetheless, he was wise to cough up. It means he avoided a criminal record – which is more than can be said for some 30,000 other individuals who also fell foul of Covid laws.

Earlier this week, the justice secretary who oversaw the courts during the pandemic called for an amnesty for these people, arguing that they should have their “slates wiped clean”. Between March 2020 and June 2021, police handed out over 117,000 fixed penalty notices to people who broke lockdown laws by pressing ahead with everyday activities, such as going for a walk in the countryside; meeting a friend, or visiting relatives. Saddled with criminal convictions, many are now disqualified from applying for jobs in sectors such as teaching and social work, and cannot travel freely overseas. All because of a brief run-in with the law during an extraordinary time.

Now we know what we know – that power-crazed politicians stripped away fundamental freedoms on the flimsiest of bases – the real scandal is how the rest of the population was duped into going along with it all. As more damning evidence emerges of the weak or non-existent scientific rationale for certain restrictions, it is ever more clear that those who did not comply (whether on a point of principle or through sheer desperation) were behaving entirely rationally, and should never have been criminalised.

Take face masks. The mythical powers of these grubby bits of cloth to prevent the spread of disease have now been convincingly debunked, with some expert witnesses telling the Covid Inquiry that they were as good as useless. Privately, Boris Johnson is believed to have thought the guidance was nonsense.

Yet hundreds of people were fined for failing to comply with face mask regulations. In one particularly egregious case, a 40-year-old project manager was ordered to pay £10,000 for failing to wear one on the London underground. In a ludicrously excessive display of force, no fewer than five police officers swooped on the “offender” at Green Park tube station. His ordeal did not end until January 2023, when a magistrate at Southwark Crown Court overturned the conviction, agreeing it was  “manifestly excessive.” Too right.

In a recent TV interview, Sir Keir Starmer paid a cringeworthy tribute to young people for the sacrifice they made during the pandemic – as if they had any choice. Sold a false narrative about “saving granny,” students were among the biggest victims of the mass hysteria whipped up by their elders, and are heavily represented among the 30,000 people convicted of petty covid breach crimes.

Healthy and carefree, they should have been having a ball. Instead, they were confined to their rooms in stuffy, overpriced flats and halls of residence; ripped off by their universities; and denied all the joyful rites of passage that go with student life. Applying the kind of critical thinking normally prized by their lecturers, some with a bit of spirit occasionally took a calculated risk – and tried to have some fun.

Like so many of the rest of us, they must regret not breaking the rules more. If there is to be an amnesty, they should be first in line.