This advice is not a request it is an instruction

Well its not really advice then either is it? 

Is this endless ambiguity and linguistic butchery deliberate?

They are not really going to turn round and say to the public ‘nothing to do with us guv - look at these people who didn’t realise that our ‘advice’ was in fact an order and carried on as normal’. Are they?

To be honest, I doubt they are. But I am speculating  for the record, just in case.

CW, yes it is deliberate, if it all goes tits up rest assured they will blame it on us not complying and the expert medical advice, surely you get a sense of that from these press conferences?

Their use of language is just really bad or at least really strange. U don’t need to be a lawyer to see that their comms is at times just weird.

I mean: “this advice is not a request it is an instruction“.

WTF?

You are lawyers so you can see why this phrase is bollox no? Advice is advice - neither a request nor an instruction. So why the fook are they using such contortions? It’s not the first time either. See the confusion and debates over what “essential” means.

I have the following possible explanations:

1   They are making up things on the fly so quickly they just keep screwing it up. Fast moving internal discussions/negotiations at govt level and with experts keeps resulting in garbled comms to keep everyone at the decision table happy.

2  They are deliberately trying to issue instructions that go beyond the law but have the appearance of law - as they want to get the most ‘suppressive impact’ (so to speak), from their announcements without actually making more things illegal than need to be. And this keeps leading to these ambiguous statements and strange communications. This is sort of fair enough, although I think as lawyers we should be a bit suspect about it. TBF I think this is what they are doing, and I ’ think it is entirely unreasonable, although I think they could be clearer about what is an isn’t a legal requirement. It feels a bit underhand to me.

3   Either deliberately (or as a convenient by product of 1 or 2) - they are setting the scene so that if things are seen to have gone wrong or been handled badly they can point to another culprit besides themselves - non compliant citizens not being part of the team.

I don’t think 3 is their (primary) game. But if they do try and do that, they should not be allowed to get away with it. That’s the only point I’m making. Surprised everyone else is so unbothered about this. I’d have thought Clergs would have been fooking telling them on this tbh.

EBITDA - that’s exactly the sense I get m8. But everyone keeps telling me I’m nuts. Or disappearing up my fundament. Or whatevs.

May well be that I am. But just in case I turn out not to be, I am making a note of how odd some of the communication looks.

Hope I’m paranoid and the govt just have a bloody useless grasp of English.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52155430

 

I’m speculating out loud publicly and on the record so that if things do go wrong and the govt (or their media allies) do start to accuse certain groups of people of ‘letting the team down’ over social distancing - that this possible strategy has been flagged as a risk early on.

I can see that they might do this in order to distract from other possible narratives - such as, for example, that the govt fooked it all up. Which would be most inconvenient if you are in the government. At the end of the day the truth wont matter, when people look back it will be whoever controls the media message that will write the history. That certainly wont be me or any of us. But for what its worth I wanted to flag up what might happen.

I still think its a low risk possibility, hence it can only be speculation. But I certainly wouldn’t put it past them.

It’s overstating it on the basis of just this one statement. But throughout some of the messaging has seemed odd. The way the lockdown was announced - which still allowed people to go to work, whilst being worded ambiguously to give the impression that only essential workers should be going to work. And then letting the media do its thing and spend days shouting about how construction sites should be shut down or publicly shaming companies that had (perfectly reasonably given the status of the law/guidance) decided to stay open.

 

CW m88

Now that you have explained what you mean, few people are going to agree with you that it was a strange turn of expression .

The issue was not that people disagreed with you, it was that we had no idea what your OP was on about.