adam wagner: blood on his hands

The right wing part time barrister Adam Wagner has blood on his hands.

When I have conversations with people about Wagner, it is often suggested to me that he is stupid, usually in reference to his seeming inability to grasp the simple concept of stay at home, stay safe, save lives and help relieve the pressure on traumatised front line health workers. It does seem that twitter and 112,000 tweets has rotted his brain.

I am not so sure. He is a highly effective self publicist. Further, he is an expert on infectious deseases and assures us we won’t get infected outdoors and that it is another ten years before I need worry about the next pandemic.

It could be less that he is stupid and more that he thinks everyone else is.

Unfortunately a lot of you are.

So 150,000 deaths and rising. A veritable holocaust. A lot of people have much to answer for. Principally this shit show of a government. Who could have even imagined that a virus so deadly and Bojo would arrive at much the same time. But there others that are guilty. Among them the denialists and the ” Englishman’s right to go to the pub” brigade.

Prominent among the latter is Wagner. The poster boy of The Brady Bunch.

There is a simple and direct line between Wagner’s social media activities and bodies on mortuary slabs. His starting point is not the horrendous nightmare that our health workers are living through, a nightmare that has one in five nurses having thoughts of suicide. Nor is it the traumas of 150,000 families. Rather it is what he calls, in the context of the governments admittedly ham fisted attempts to control the situation, ” a massive assault on our civil rights”.

Wagner is commonly referred to as ” the human rights lawyer Adam Wagner “. What exactly is a human rights lawyer and how do I get to be one ? I first have to be a lawyer, I get that. But what next ? It would seem that I just have call myself such. If I call myself a human rights lawyer consistently and often enough then this label will come to acquire the status of a self evident definite description. That is how Wagner got to be one. Certainly Wagner is highly selective about the human rights he champions. He is no fan of the right to freedom of expression . But that is a long story for another day.

His perspectives are way out of sync with those of the overwhelming majority of regular people.

” My 46 year old ex work colleague just died from Covid. He had no pre existing conditions. Protect your families and ignore the Covid Idiots.”

………John Kingsley

“It will not matter a jot to me that my individual liberty has been protected and my economic prospects are brighter if I am dead.“
Simon Morgan (cancer patient), Crayford, London

Some say that if Wagner emerged from his elitist bubble and spent a couple of weeks working on a corvid ward, or working as a hospital porter wheeling out the bodies it might go a long way to sorting out his head and reorganising his priorities. Then again it might not. The reality is that Adam Wagner has only one priority and that is AdamWagner. I guess there is always the option of shipping him off to Indonesia ,where, it is said, they put obstructionists to work digging graves for corvid victims.

Not so long ago Wagner was a deservidly obscure barrister. He was going nowhere. In desperation he turned to twitter in an attempt to boost his profile.

” I was a junior barrister and it gave me a voice” he declared in a recent podcast.

He cheerfully acknowledges that his prolific tweeting was a career move. When he boasted that he charged £300 an hour one wag commented……

” 300 squids an hour! Jesus if you ever got off twitter you could be rich.”

“Although I love doing public commentary I can’t deny there are professional benefits (as long as I don’t make an idiot of myself) through profile raising, a bit of paid media work and related work coming in.“

Much of the ” related work ” that he refers to, of course, is arising out of his wholly improper relationship with the so called Equality and Human Rights Commission. Once again, a story for another day.

The Bar Standards Board is a wholly toothless tiger that functions to protect iffy barristers, not the public. It has , however, in the context of the Hewson case, made it clear that “a barrister’s actions on social media can diminish the trust and confidence which the public places in individual barristers and the profession.“

As we find ourselves in the midst of a terrible winter/spring Wagner doesn’t care. So he just waffles on about ” accountability”. He tells us that while the virus moves fast, ” it doesn’t move so fast that there couldn’t be fourteen days consultation and discussion before any new regulation is brought in.“

He tells us this in conditions in which even a days delay can cost thousands of lives.

The people don’t give a shit about accountability. they just want the powers that be to do something that works.

Way back in early March 2020 when the seriousness of the corvid infections became apparent, I really felt that Wagner would struggle to make it all about him. I needn’t have been concerned.

His campaign against the Labour Party had blown itself out.The stark reality of anti black racism had put firmly into perspective the problem of what he calls “left wing antisemitism ” . Windrush and BLM, to Wagner’s intense irritation, drove it right out of the public consciousness, if it had ever been there.

He had no interest in the public health catastrophe and the unimaginable misery that was about to befall the populace. He saw only opportunity, much in the way that the black market spiv sees war time as such.

He would become the twitter guru on the virus and what he calls the “”human rights” implications of the regulations that emerged in the governments cack handed attempts to deal with the horror. Regular people are as interested in the difference between a law and a regulation as you are in last Sundays results in the 4th division of the Albanian basketball league.

The rights we are concerned with are the right to health and the right to not suffer avoidable disability or premature death. We don’t give a flying fuck about the esoteric twitter notions of Wagner and the other elitist twitter lawyers, who really should find something more helpful to do with their time. It would seem, unfortunately, that Doughty Street Chambers has a disproportionate share of coevid cavaliers.

Wagner tells us that he would not recomend that other lawyers should spend all the hours he has on this batshit but ” at least I have become an expert on the covid regulations”.

There has to be somebody out there that cares. But then there must be somebody out there more boring than Paul McCartney.

As the death toll mounted in the spring, Wagner and his acolytes just prattled on. As the numbers went through the roof this winter , Wagner continued to just prattle on. Not a single solitary word about the public health implications of the actions of our hapless government. The people are well aware that a bit of authoritarianism is necessary in these circumstances. Check it out with the the folks in Wuhan and New Zealand. It is not a bit of playing fast and lose with executive power that troubles regular people , it is the fact that they they are so crap at it.

When the ” rule of six ” arrived Wagner squealed like a poor girl’s Rees Mogg ( sit down Jess Phillips), that ” bang goes my game of five a side”. Poor baby.

Last spring he spent much of his time patrolling his local park and harrassing hapless police officers that were trying to get people to desist from behaviour that was obviously putting all our lives at risk. There are times when the police deserve harrassing. When they are trying to help contain a deadly virus is not one of them.

When the Welsh devolved authority tried to prevent people travelling to Wales from England where infection rates were much higher, he gleefully informed us that we should not worry about this since ” the police have no power to enforce it.” This prompted one startled twitterat to bitterly suggest to him that he should tell this to the desperate and overrun health care staff who surely ” will be pleased to here this”.

With an unbelievable lack of self awareness he cheerfully tells us….

“ I am balancing the need (as I see it) to continue this discussion from a human rights perspective and not be seen as endorsing a lax approach to following government guidance. Have had enough emails already saying I’m killing people”

That is, Wagner feels that his insatiable appetite for self promotion is an adequate balance of 100,000 deaths. He feels compelled balance the tsunami of deaths and disabilities with his need for self promotion.

With similar lack of self awareness he recently announced. , ” 100,000 deaths. This is a very dangerous virus.”

He didn’t think to ask himself how many of these deaths were down to him.

Other members of the profession are becoming increasingly uneasy about his activities. One barrister advised him, in the context of the 400 nut jobs at an Haredi wedding in Stamford Hill to “ be more thoughtful about the impact of your statements”. Wagner had advised them that they should ” do whatever is necessary to protect your mental health” . They took this to mean that if not having a 400 guest wedding would make them a bit depressed they had clearqance from a leading authority on the regulations to go ahead and have one.

Wagner has had several twitter convos with the barrister Becky Agate. Notably…….

BA ” The number of people dying is doubling every three days Adam. Enough is enough, please stop. These rules are designed to save lives Now enough is enough”

AW ” I think it is important to consider whether the extreme restrictions on on our lives are necessary and proportionate. I can’t think of a more important time to engage from a human rights perspective.”

A couple of regular people jumped in.

” Welsh girl abroad ” Adam these are two of a friends triplets( picture) Both premature and therefore vulnerable. An old school friend died yesterday. I am finding the idea of further restrictions perfectly proportionate at the moment.

Geoffrey Healy … Human rights are not much use if you are dead

BA…”The difficulty Adam is that your analysis translates into excuses to ignore the science based restrictions designed to keep the most vulnerable in society alive . Your speculation about what may or may not be lawful is forgetting them. You are on the wrong side of this right now. I absolutely believe in your right to free speech but implore you to use it more responsibly“.

Ultimately the problem with Wagner is that he is a narcissistic elitist and racist. And he is addressing a situation that is largely a class and race issue.

He sits safely in his ivory tower in Zoomerabia cheerleading for the ” libertarian ” right. Meanwhile the epidemic rages wildly disproportionatley through ethic minority communities and the downtrodden disadvantaged sections of society.

Wagner doesn’t care. He is particularly dismissive of the experiences of black people.

The interesting thing about this abomonable tweet is to compare and contrast the attitude of Doughty Street Chambers to the response of Cornerstone Chambers to the faux pas of Jon Holbrook. They declared that Holbrook’s social media activities were ” irreconcilable with membership of the chambers”.

Holbrook departed.

Doughty Street are perfectly comfortable with Wagner’s racism and find it perfectly compatible with Wagner’s membership of the Chambers.

Wagner’s tweet provoked a considerable critical response not lest from black people. Wagner huffed and puffed and blustered. These tweets he has deleted. Gambling, successfully, that nobody would have taken screen shots. The original tweet was left up because he knew screen shots had been taken and deleting it would not have been a good look.

It is not just black folks that Wagner is disdainful of. He is not a fan of Muslims either. But this racist stuff is to be the subject of an upcoming complaint to the Bar Standards Board so there is no need to expand here.

You may be familiar with the great work recently done by Good Law Project in securing a judgment by the High Court to the effect that the government have acted unlawfully in failing to publish details of corvid related contracts.

I can see that you are wondering what Wagner was doing at this time.

Well he was busy taking his obstructionism to a new low. He excitedly announced that he was acting for the bunch of ambulance chasers PGMBM in respect of their seeking a judicial reveiw of the governments quarantine regulations. PGMBM are crowd funding for ” barristers fees”. Wagner is obviously looking forward to a slurp at this particular trough.

This at at a time when border control is the single most important element of the current ” strategy “.

Not for Wagner, or certain other Doughty Street denizens of Zoomerabia, is there any concern for how many possibly vaccine resistant mutants are flown in from Manaus and elsewhere. Or for the untold number of consequent deaths among our most vulnerable.

He is delighted, he tells to be working on this case with that other notorious right wing head banger, Francis Hoar. Hoar of Field Court chambers, is a more expicit corvid denier than Wagner. He professes himself a big fan of Charles Moore for fuck sake. They are, however, very much birds of a feather.

Hoar is of they view that the the restrictions are just a big con that the people will wake up to, and that there ” will be anger and vengeance when they do.”

Lockdowns, Hoare declares, “should be prohibited in any circumstances.“

And the shameless chancer has the nerve to retweet this from April last year…

Adam Wagner@AdamWagner1 · Apr 8, 2020The freedom we are now fighting for is to live our lives free of this virus. Our personal freedoms have been suspended to achieve that ultimate aim. Viewed in one way, it is an extraordinary collective effort to save life and determine our collective fate https://youtube.com/watch?v=qIp_8RNNX4k…

Wagner is a very dangerous man. He has to be stopped.

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