Join us for a record and a warning – an account of a turbulent period when our laws were remade more radically than ever before, and a wake-up call to why we must value our rights and liberties.

On 26 March 2020, a new law appeared. In just 11 pages, it locked down tens of millions of people, confined us to our homes, banned socialising, closed shops, gyms, pubs, places of worship. It restricted our freedoms more than any other law in history, justified by the rapid spread of a deadly new virus.

You may have expected such a law to be fiercely debated in Parliament. But it wasn’t debated at all. A state of emergency was declared, meaning laws came into force with the stroke of a minister’s pen. The emergency was supposed to be short but lasted 763 days, allowing the government to bring in, by decree, over 100 new laws restricting freedoms more than any in history – laws that were almost never debated, with only 9 approved in advance by Parliament, changed at a whim and increasingly confused the public.  Meanwhile, behind the doors of Downing Street, officials and even the Prime Minister broke the very laws they had created.

Human rights barrister Adam Wagner was described in the House of Lords as ‘the only person in the country who can make sense of this variety of regulations’. In conversation with peer and Times columnist Daniel Finkelstein, he will tell the startling story of the state of emergency which became an emergency state, how extreme measures caused constitutional chaos, and why it is only by understanding these unprecedented events that we can learn lessons for the future.