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In the middle of a national crisis, Britain has become a parliamentary democracy without a parliament. The police now have extraordinary powers to fine and arrest those who break the lockdown. Do I hear you say that these are necessary powers for a time of pandemic? Maybe they are. But we have no parliament to raise the alarm if those powers are abused or hysteria and the urge to punish replace the calm implementation of the law.

Meanwhile everyone is asking questions about how ministers, the National Health Service and Public Health England failed to provide enough protective kit for doctors and nurses and wondering why Britain is lagging so far behind Germany in its ability to test the population. Everyone, that is, except the House of Commons and the House of Lords. They voted to give the state the right to restrict freedom of movement, and then exercised their own right to freedom of movement pretty damn decisively by getting the hell out of Westminster on March 26. They will not return until April 21.

The Scottish parliament will be back at work on Wednesday. The Welsh Assembly has replaced full sessions with emergency Senedd meetings. As New Zealand went into lockdown, opposition politicians set up an Epidemic Response Committee to scrutinize the governments responseto the crisis while the full parliament was closed.

Even in my darkest moments, I dont want the entire political class to go down with COVID-19. But businesses and charities, and every branch of central and local government, are finding a way to work around the lockdown. The streets may be silent but WhatsApp and Google Hangout have never been more alive as millions of people reorganize their working lives. We are in a country where primary schools believe it essential to protect their pupils education with online lessons, but our political leaders cannot or will not use new technology to protect the nations democracy. Announcing the extended Commons recess last week, the Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle said work was underway to give Members of Parliament the technology they need to stay connected during the break, including the possibility of a virtual parliament and virtual select committees.

Four days on, and there is no sign of that work coming to fruition, and more disturbingly, no clamor for democracy to be restored.

The contrast with last year could not be more striking. When Boris Johnson tried to prorogue Parliament to force through Brexit, his opponents went wild. Nicola Sturgeon called Johnson a tin potdictator. Jo Swinson, then the Liberal Democrat leader, said Johnson was engaged in a dangerous and unacceptable course of action.Opposition journalists, your correspondent included, said that Johnson was trying to rule as an absolute monarch rather than a democratic leader, and warned that we used to have civil wars to put men like him in his place

Where are those voices now? A national emergency ought to be a moment to strengthen democracy not dispense with it.

The government, to its credit, is holding daily press conferences and trying its best to be open. The days when Dominic Cummings could order ministers not to appear on BBC Radio 4s Todayprogram or any other news outlet he had taken it into his head to dislike, now belong to a lost and trivial age. But press conferences are no substitute for Parliamentary scrutiny. I can go into the technical reasons, if readers are interested. TV political correspondents, in particular, ask two or three questions in one go, because their editors want shots of them covering every angle. The result is the argumentative flow gets lost and politicians can choose which question to answer.

But technicalities are our smallest concern now. This should not be an either/or choice. We used to have a free pressandparliamentary democracy. Now and for the foreseeable future, we just have one when we should have both.

The use of online technology to reopen democratic institutions strikes me as a partial answer to the loss of liberty we are all experiencing. I and I suspect many others face a dilemma. On the one hand, we look at the exhausted staff in the NHS, the suffering of the sick and dying, and think that any measure, however draconian, is justified if it limits the pain. On the other, we worry that emergency powers could become permanent and have an instinctive dislike of a country where people grass up their neighbors for taking more than one jog or bike ride a day.

Or as an officer in the Northamptonshire policeput it to the BBC:We are getting calls from people who say I think my neighbor is going out on a second run I want you to come and arrest them. We have had dozens and dozens of these calls.

The inquisitorial urge to call out, cancel and no-platform was already far too strong in Britain. The last thing we need is for the pandemic to accentuate it.

Its not just that we have no parliament. Local councils have suspended their sittings too. Where are citizens meant to go if their chief constable decides he wants to imitate Vladimir Putin or council bureaucrats close local parks leaving parents with nowhere to take their children? Nationally and locally, the representatives who would have given them a hearing have gone absent without leave.

Readers going half-mad under house arrest may not believe me, but Britains lockdown is liberal by continental standards. As of tomorrow, the French will be required to keep a record of when they leave their home. Going out to take the children for a walk or for physical exercise must be within a distance of one kilometer maximum of your home, for one hour, the French prime minister Edouard Philippe added.

As the body count rises in Britain, we may face similar restrictions, and once again, they should be subject to robust political debate before the government imposes them.

Write like this and there is a danger of sounding as if you believe that police officers are fascists, or that Tory ministers want to introduce a dictatorship. For what it is worth, I have nothing but admiration for and sympathy with everyone in the civil and emergency services wrestling with how to keep society functioning.

There should be no need for me to say that, however. Democratic accountability and parliamentary government are not optional extras. There should be no either/or choice. Free countries do not give the state the power to operate without scrutiny or constraint. And those that do, do not remain free societies for long.

Nick Cohen is a columnist for the Observer and author of Whats Left and You Cant Read This Book. This article was originally published on The Spectators UK website.

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Whatever happened to parliamentary democracy? - The Spectator USA

During the Middle Ages, as the bubonic plague advanced across Europe, cities in Italy closed their ports, isolated plague victims, quarantined their families, and restricted the movements of all residents. These were extraordinary measures meant for extraordinary timesthe Black Death killed more than 25 million Europeans in just four years.

The price of these measures was one that human beings have since willfully given up time and time again in exchange for a sense of security: Their rights. And its happening again now.

In order to fight the spread of the novel coronavirus, governments around the world have enacted similar measures, from quarantines and curfews to moves that have essentially paused the global economy. Public health experts say these are necessary to save millions of lives. But they also come with a significant loss of personal liberties. In France and Italy, people can only go outside once a day, armed with a permission form, and are fined if they dont comply. In South Korea, health officials implemented whats known as contract tracing by tracking Covid-19 patients using GPS data from their cars and cellphonesa significant invasion of privacy by most measures.

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Will democracy be the next victim of coronavirus? - Quartz

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EDITORS NOTE: Each week we cross-post an excerpt from Katrina vanden Heuvels column at the WashingtonPost.com. Read the full text of Katrinas column here.The Nation believes that helping readers stay informed about the impact of the coronavirus crisis is a form of public service. For that reason, this article, and all of our coronavirus coverage, is now free. Please subscribe to support our writers and staff, and stay healthy

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The coronavirus pandemic poses a terrifying threat to life and a staggering test to our leaders. The unseemly spectacle of lawmakers scrambling to craft a response in the midst of a corporate lobbying feeding frenzy reveals that neither the president nor the legislators yet comprehend the scope of the action needed. The focus, naturally, has been on how to mobilize to meet health-care needs, help Americans survive an economic calamity that is no fault of their own, and revive the economy without letting Wall Street and corporate lobbies steal us blind. But we must not forget this viruss threat to democracy itself: Any reform package must include dramatic steps to guarantee that Americans can vote this fall. It is time for Congress to pass universal vote-at-home (better known as vote-by-mail) legislation.Ad Policy

The viruss toll on our election system is already plain to see. Several states have postponed their primaries. In states that went ahead, voters increasingly were wary of going to the polls. Many states shut down polling places, moving them out of nursing homes and other places at risk. Many scrambled to find polling workers, as elderly volunteers chose not to risk their lives.

Read the full text of Katrinas column here.

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The Coronavirus's Threat to Democracy Itself - The Nation

Like the rest of the world, much of South Asias 1.89 billion population is now under lockdown to prevent the spread of the deadly coronavirus.

While Western citizens can, for the most part, temporarily afford to follow preventive measures such as mandatory lockdown, social distancing, and self-isolation, these are tough options for millions of South Asias poor. Their tales of everyday struggle for food are well-documented.

By imposing lockdowns, the strongman and populist leaders of South Asia such as Narendra Modi of India, Sheikh Hasina of Bangladesh, Imran Khan of Pakistan, Mahinda Rajapaksa of Sri Lanka, and KP Sharma Oli of Nepal seem to be genuinely adamant in their efforts to flatten the coronavirus curve.

However, no real plans are yet visible from South Asian governments for aggressive tracing, testing, and containment of the virus techniques that have reportedly worked well in Taiwan, China, and Singapore, for now.

With the projected number of deaths, loss of income, and increasingly authoritarian governments, it is likely that chaos and protest will break out in South Asian cities.

Army and security forces are being deployed to keep the streets of bustling South Asian cities empty and to enforce lockdowns. Against this backdrop, how the crisis may change the South Asian political outlook is a pertinent question.

Three plausible scenarios present themselves: governments could turn more authoritarian, economies could well plunge, and grievances may generate unrest, anarchy, and radicalism.

Up until recently, democracy in South Asia has been as strong as it ever was with some exception for India. Modis controversial move of framing a National Register of Citizens (NRC) and Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and his abrogation of the autonomous status of Jammu and Kashmir have placed Indias secular democratic character into serious question.

In recent times, civil liberty activists in India have been arrested, minorities have been violently abused, universities have been under attack, and state surveillance of activists has been amplified.

It is no surprise, then, that the 2020 Freedom in the World Report has ranked India among the least free democracies, and the World Press Freedom Index 2019 ranked India (140) behind Afghanistan (121).

Political and civil liberties in other South Asian states Bangladesh, Pakistan, Maldives, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, and Afghanistan are also being suppressed, with the Freedom of the World Report ranking these countries in the category of partly-free to not free.

Except for Bhutan, enforced disappearances, unlawful detention and assassination of critics and opposition activists, media censorship through tough laws, intimidation, and political inequalities are rampant in these countries.

As democracy is going backwards, military and security establishments are gaining stronger footholds in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan, following behind powerful political actors. With the lockdowns imposed to limit the spread of Covid-19, the authoritarian grip on South Asia is likely to get stronger.

Videos from Bangladesh, Pakistan and India have surfaced on social media demonstrating physical abuse of citizens by security forces. In the early days of the lockdown, Indian police reportedly beat a man to death when he went to buy milk.

Rights activists and journalists are already pointing out that governments are suppressing the number of deaths related to Covid-19 to prevent mass panic. Some observers believe that South Asia is taking the approach to develop so-called herd immunity, without naming it publicly.

That means millions will need to be infected to become immune, and the virus will eventually wither away. But in such a process, it is inevitable that many would die.

To resist mass protests, it is conceivable that in the future, even lockdowns and surveillance of citizens could increase, and freedom of the press decrease shrinking the space for political pluralism in the name of protecting national interests.

On the economic front, the outlook is equally grim. From 2017, the South Asian economy was slowing down. Moodys Global Macro Outlook 202021 recently downgraded the economic robustness of India with a projected growth rate of 2.5%, whereas Pakistan is in debt and textile-export oriented Bangladesh is set to take a blow as markets in the West are now closed.

Although governments are injecting their economies with billions of dollars to bail out industries and support the vulnerable and the poor, it is not a sustainable option in this region. There are also chances that institutional corruption may get in the way of government bailout money actually reaching recipients, which would further contribute to public outrage.

With the projected number of deaths, loss of income, and increasingly authoritarian governments, it is likely that chaos and protest will break out in South Asian cities. Pre-existing grievances and an increased sense of existential insecurity may also feed growing radicalism

By all accounts, the news for democracy in South Asia is not good.

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Coronavirus and the threat to South Asian democracy - The Interpreter

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On protecting democracy in a pandemic, in the courts, in the legislatures, and in our lives. - Slate