SINEAD Quinn, owner of Quinn Blakey Hairdressing in Oakenshaw, has started a crowdfunding campaign to pay her legal fees after illegally staying open during lockdown.

The Go Fund Me campaign is asking for donations to cover her legal bills as she plans to fight fines of £17,000 from Kirklees Council, and was today issued with a closure order to shut until Wednesday.

When national lockdown was brought in at the start of November, regulations passed by Parliament forced a wide range of non-essential businesses to close, including hairdressers, with fines for non-compliance.

However Ms Quinn's salon in Bradford Road has remained open throughout the lockdown, with customers regularly seen having haircuts and treatments, and many members of the public complaining to the council about it.

After being repeatedly fined and warned if she did not close a closure order would be brought, Ms Quinn stayed open, and was today issued with a closure order until the end of lockdown - midnight on Tuesday.

On the GoFundMe page, she claims Kirklees Council is "trying to extort money" from her, and has set up the page "so that people don’t take it upon themselves to create a gofundme on my behalf and possibly run off with the money".

She is so confident that she will get away with her unlawful actions, she said that if that is the outcome she will donate the money to her brother, a 36-year-old father of two who was recently diagnosed with Stage 4 bowel cancer.

Ms Quinn stuck a notice in her shop window saying she "did not consent" to the Covid regulations and "her business stands under common law", and she is "exercising her right to earn a living" before quoting the Magna Carta.

Practicing barrister and best-selling writer The Secret Barrister has debunked these claims, labelling them "pure nonsense".

In a blog post, they said the "pseudo-legal rubbish" is regularly seen in courts by people "who believe that by misquoting Magna Carta and basic tenets of contract law, they can somehow place themselves outside the jurisdiction of the law of England & Wales".

On the "I do not consent" line, they said: "There is no principle of English & Welsh law that you are required to consent before being bound by the laws made by Parliament. The principle underpinning our constitution is that Parliament is sovereign, and can make or unmake any law it wishes."

On the "common law" claim, they said: "Parliament is sovereign, meaning that legislation enacted by Parliament takes precedence over previous court decisions (common law), and courts are required to interpret existing common law principles consistently with legislation. "

They added that a person cannot chose to just be bound by one source of law and to do so would be "nonsense".

On the "right to earn a living" statement, they said: "There is no absolute legal right to earn a living that overrides your obligation to obey the criminal law."

And on the Magna Carta, after correcting the document from "Article 61" to "Chapter 61", they said it was voided within a year and no longer exists, and even when it did it only applied to 25 barons and their followers.