Prime Minister Boris Johnson has announced a set of draconian coronavirus restrictions, including fines of up to £10,000 for breaching self-isolation, as the Mayor of London floated the idea of a second lockdown and curfews in the British capital.

Starting from September 28th, people in England will face quarantine fines of £1,000, which can rise to £10,000 for repeated breaches of the self-isolation mandates. Those found to have tested positive for the Chinese virus, as well as those who are deemed to be a close contact of someone else who tested positive, will be required to self-isolate.

The move to introduce fines, which will be enforced by police and local authorities, represents a drastic increase in restrictions on the British public.

“So nobody underestimates just how important this is, new regulations will mean you are legally obliged to do so if you have the virus or have been asked to do so by NHS Test and Trace. People who choose to ignore the rules will face significant fines,” Prime Minister Boris Johnson said when announcing the new measures.

“We need to do all we can to control the spread of this virus, to prevent the most vulnerable people from becoming infected, and to protect the NHS and save lives”, Johnson added.

Continuing the trend of government ministers encouraging the public to snitch on their neighbours for supposed breaches of the virus regulations, Health Secretary Matt Hancock told the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show that he would call the police to inform on his neighbours for breaking the self-isolation rules.

So far, there have been over 19,000 fines handed out by police in England and Wales for alleged violations of the coronavirus rules, but over half of the fines have not been paid, according to the BBC.

It comes as the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has called on the government to introduce another lockdown in London and introduce a 10 pm curfew for pubs.

“I am of the firm view that we should not wait, as happened six months ago, for this virus to again spiral out of control before taking action,” the Labour politician said per the Huffington Post.

“The best thing for both public health and the economy is new restrictions imposed early, rather than a full lockdown when it’s too late – but the government must ensure there is a fully functioning testing system,” Khan went on.

Khan was joined by disgraced Professor Neil Ferguson, who was dubbed ‘Professor Lockdown’ after his doomsday predictions of hundreds of over 1 million British deaths spurred the initial lockdown in the United Kingdom and across the world.

Ferguson, who resigned from his advisory role in the government’s SAGE committee after it was revealed he broke his own lockdown rules in order to receive visits from his married lover, said that more lockdown measures will be “needed sooner rather than later.”

“If we leave it another two to four weeks we will be back at levels we were seeing more like mid-March. That’s clearly going to cause deaths because people will be hospitalised. I think some additional measures are likely to be needed sooner rather than later,” he said.

“We have in some sense a perfect storm right now of people, as they have been told to, getting back to normal – schools reopening, a surge in cases, so, therefore, the testing system is under strain,” Ferguson continued.

Despite large-scale anti-lockdown protests in London, and opposition from MPs such as Steve Baker, a leading Conservative Brexiteer who called for an end to the draconian coronavirus laws, the British public largely support the curtails on their freedoms, with recent surveys from YouGov finding that 69 per cent back curfews for pubs and 77 percent support the so-called “rule of six” which prohibits the gathering of more than six people.

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