Nobody loves a bossy, busy-body. A curtain-twitching nosey-parker or that most despised creature of the popular imagination and the playground: the snitch. Once such people were the comic baddies found in Ealing Comedies and sitcoms like Dad’s Army. But the spread of Covid-19 and the accompanying lockdown rules that began in March gave them a new visibility and voice. In April this year, police claimed that they received 194,000 calls from ‘lockdown snitches’. We’re living, one paper declared back then, in ‘The Golden Age Of The Snitch’. And now to help the government enforce its controversial ‘Rule of Six’, a new army of nationwide snitches will be coming to a street near you: the Covid marshals. At least that’s what all liberty loving paranoids from the left and right would have you believe.
As soon as Boris Johnson announced the creation of his Covid marshals, the reaction was swift and ranged from comic ridicule to apoplectic rage.
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