MANY people view the British government’s handling of COVID-19 and the Brexit negotiations as incompetent and lacking common sense. GUEST COLUMN: Gina Miller But beneath all the controversies about test and trace, PPE and deal or no deal, what if there is an ideological agenda being cunningly and cynically executed during this time of crisis? Boris Johnson once described COVID-19 as an “invisible mugger”. I am starting to wonder if that is how we will come to see his government’s impact on our country. That is because Johnson has used his parliamentary majority, and the Conservatives’ innumerable business and media friends, to systematically relieve us of our democratic checks and balances, and even our freedoms. Consider Johnson’s actions: he has been willing to resort to emergency legislation to avoid awkward questions or debate in the House of Commons; clauses in the Internal Market Bill would have allowed him to break nternational law; his covert Intelligence Bill (known as the “licence to kill” Bill) implicitly permits undercover agents to break the law if they perceive a threat to national security. Further to this, he has used hundreds of statutory instruments (which allow him to evade parliamentary scrutiny), and introduced a judicial review, aimed at denying access to the courts for those who wish to challenge the government, and giving the prime minister the power to appoint judges. And now he has set up a review of the Human Rights Act. In addition to all these, Johnson has piled powers on himself under the Coronavirus Emergency Act — a power grab on a scale unseen in this country for 400 years. Britain has not only operated for centuries on the basis of checks and balances, but earned a global reputation based on them. It is significant that the supreme court, now in Johnson’s line of fire, found for me and my legal teams in our actions to uphold parliamentary sovereignty, first against the government of Theresa May and then his. We have already witnessed how Johnson’s ministers refuse to publish reports, COVID-19 procurement contracts, Brexit impact studies. They even scorn scrutiny by parliamentary committees: the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, refused to appear before the Treasury select committee, and the business secretary, Alok Sharma, shunned the Business select committee. Johnson’s is emphatically not a “one nation” Conservative government, but is being guided by principles of isolationism, authoritarianism and economic elitism. His ideas can be found in a booklet published in 2012 called Britannia Unchained that was once seen on the floor of his car. Its authors — Kwasi Kwarteng, Priti Patel, Dominic Raab, Chris Skidmore and Liz Truss — spoke scornfully of Britain being a bloated State, with too many taxes and regulations for businesses and employers, and of our workers being “among the worst idlers in the world”. All of its authors have served in Johnson’s government. In 2016 Sunak, then a backbench MP, wrote a report for the rightwing Centre for Policy Studies stating that “free ports” — areas with l