Snip:
I thought Wales had made everything law whereas England left it more as guidelines (I could be wrong of course). Police in Wales seem to have taken a harder stance like setting up checkpoints on roads leading to places like Pembrokeshire. Police in England don't seem to have done the same, probably after seeing the bad press Derbyshire Police got for the Curbar Edge drone video.
As far as I'm aware the 'guidelines' themselves were made into law in Wales, and fair play to them for that too. I think the England 'bad press' climax was probably when a certain regional police chief apparently implied that he might possibly instruct his officers to start searching through people's shopping trollies to determine which purchases were essential and which were not.
I'm a law abiding citizen but even I found myself asking who's going to just stand there and let a police constable root through their weekly shop and arbitrarily (in the absence of any specific legal definition) decide what's essential?! Quite rightly, Her Majesty's Government spoke out to clarify the situation and inform the relevant police chief that was not going to happen!
Then we come to the other extreme, people totally (or selectively) ignoring the guidelines/law. The party goers, the family barbecues, the visiting of friends, etc. etc., which seems to have become more and more prevalent lately. Now, in my opinion, that's where the police, the law, and appropriate fines should apply.
Going to do your weekly food shop and buying some booze, or a bar of chocolate, or a tub of ice cream, or a magazine at the same time while you are in the same shop is not a crime, but going specifically to a DIY superstore for nothing more than a look round, some paint for the house or some plants for the garden should be! Why? It's non-essential, that's why! If the garden fence blew down or the toilet cistern sprang a leak then fair enough, go and get the stuff to fix it... but going out purely to buy some bedding plants or some paint brushes to decorate the kitchen is
not an essential repair.. or an essential journey!
Let's face it, some people have been taking the p**s, ignoring advice and not applying common sense. I was annoyed today in the supermarket while doing my weekly shop.. there was a woman rummaging extensively through the packets of fresh-baked bread rolls, seemingly trying to find the ones that were baked the way she liked them! There she was, handling goodness knows how many of them in the process. Yes, they're wrapped in thin plastic sheet, but that plastic sheet is probably now coated in whatever she'd picked up on her gloved fingers during the rest of her shop there. Yes, she was wearing plastic gloves, what an irony... I'm all right Jack! Stuff the rest of you!
Then there was the woman who thought it a good idea to put her child
inside the shopping trolley. No, not on the little fold down seat, actually inside the trolley itself like an item of shopping, where it was free to touch, cough, sneeze and dribble all over the inside of the shopping trolley to its heart's content! God help the person who got that trolley next if that child was infected, anything touching the inside of that trolley might have had the virus on it afterwards.
So there we go, just a brief snapshot of what's actually happening, and that's before Wednesday's relaxation of the guidelines.