{"id":204826,"date":"2020-03-31T08:02:09","date_gmt":"2020-03-31T08:02:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=204826"},"modified":"2020-04-04T07:19:42","modified_gmt":"2020-04-04T07:19:42","slug":"lord-sumption-speaks-against-hysteria-driven-government-coronavirus-policy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=204826","title":{"rendered":"Lord Sumption Speaks against Hysteria-Driven Government Coronavirus Policy."},"content":{"rendered":"

From Ian Fantom \u2013 March 30, 2020<\/h1>\n

Here is a recording of the astonishing interview of Lord Sumption, a former member of the Supreme Court and last year’s Reith Lecturer,\u00a0on BBC Radio 4’s World at One today, Monday 30th March 2020. It is\u00a0by far the most high-powered criticism, made in public by a senior figure of considerable reputation and merit, of government policy on the corona virus. I shall be providing a transcript as soon as I can, but in the meanwhile I ask you to disseminate it as widely as possible, as I fear that other media may not do so in these strange times.<\/h5>\n
Lord Sumption interview begins at 17 minutes into BBC R4’s World At One 30th March 2020<\/h5>\n
https:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/sounds\/play\/m000gt59<\/a><\/h5>\n
Here is a transcript of the whole interview.<\/h5>\n
\"\"<\/a>

Lord Sumption. click to enlarge<\/p><\/div>\n

The real problem is that when human societies lose their freedom, it’s not usually because tyrants have taken it away.\u00a0It’s usually because people willingly surrender their freedom in return for protection\u00a0 against some\u00a0external\u00a0threat.\u00a0And the threat is usually a real threat but usually exaggerated.\u00a0That’s what I fear we are seeing now.\u00a0 \u00a0The pressure on politicians has come from the public.\u00a0They want action.\u00a0They don’t pause to ask whether the action will work. They don’t ask themselves whether the cost will be worth paying.\u00a0They want action anyway.\u00a0And anyone who has studied history will recognise here the classic symptoms of collective hysteria.<\/h5>\n
Hysteria is infectious.\u00a0We are working ourselves up into a lather in which we exaggerate the threat and stop asking ourselves whether the cure may be worse than the disease.<\/h5>\n
Q\u00a0 \u00a0 At a time like this as you acknowledge, citizens do look to the state for protection, for assistance, we shouldn’t be surprised then if the state takes on new powers, that is what it has been asked to do, almost demanded of it.<\/h5>\n
A\u00a0 \u00a0 Yes that is absolutely true.\u00a0We should not be surprised.\u00a0But we have to recognise that this is how societies become despotisms.\u00a0And we also have to recognise this is a process which leads naturally to exaggeration.\u00a0The symptoms of coronavirus are clearly serious for those with other significant medical conditions especially if they’re old.\u00a0There are exceptional\u00a0cases in which young people have been struck down, which have had a lot of publicity, but the numbers are pretty small.\u00a0The Italian evidence for instance suggests that only 12% of deaths is it possible to say coronavirus was the main cause of death. So yes this is serious and yes it’s understandable that people cry out to the government.\u00a0But the real question is:\u00a0Is this serious enough to warrant putting most of our population into house imprisonment, wrecking our economy for an indefinite period, destroying businesses that honest and hardworking people have taken years to build up, saddling future generations with debt, depression, stress, heart attacks, suicides and unbelievable distress inflicted on millions of people who are not especially vulnerable and will suffer only mild symptoms or none at all, like the Health Secretary and the Prime Minister.<\/h5>\n
Q\u00a0 \u00a0The executive, the government, is all of a sudden really rather powerful and really rather unscrutinised.\u00a0Parliament is in recess, it’s due to come back in late April, we’re not quite sure whether it will or not, the Prime Minister is closeted away, communicating via his phone, there is not a lot in the way of scrutiny is there?<\/h5>\n
A\u00a0 \u00a0No.\u00a0Certainly there’s not a lot in the way of institutional scrutiny.\u00a0The Press has engaged in a fair amount of scrutiny, there has been some good and challenging journalism, but mostly the Press has, I think, echoed and indeed amplified the general panic.<\/h5>\n
Q\u00a0 \u00a0The restrictions in movement have also changed the relationship between the police and those whose, in name, they serve.\u00a0The police are naming and shaming citizens for travelling at what they see as the wrong time or driving to the wrong place.\u00a0Does that set alarm bells ringing for you, as a former senior member of the judiciary?<\/h5>\n
A\u00a0 \u00a0Well, I have to say, it does.\u00a0I mean, the tradition of policing in this country is that policemen are citizens in uniform. They are not members of a disciplined hierarchy operating just at the government’s command.\u00a0Yet in some parts of the country the police have been trying to stop people from doing things like travelling to take exercise in the open country which are not contrary to the regulations, simply because ministers have said that they would prefer us not to.\u00a0The police have no power to enforce ministers’ preferences, but only legal regulations which don’t go anything like as far as the government’s guidance.\u00a0I have to say that the behaviour of the Derbyshire police in trying to shame people into using their undoubted right to take exercise in the country and wrecking beauty spots in the Fells so that people don’t want to go there, is frankly disgraceful.<\/h5>\n
This is what a police state is like.\u00a0It’s a state in which the government can issue orders or express preferences with no legal authority and the police will enforce ministers’ wishes.\u00a0I have to say that most police forces have behaved in a thoroughly sensible and moderate fashion.\u00a0Derbyshire Police have shamed our policing traditions.\u00a0There is a natural tendency of course, and a strong temptation for the police to lose sight of their real functions and turn themselves from citizens in uniform into glorified school prefects. I think it’s really sad that the Derbyshire Police have failed to resist that.<\/h5>\n
Q\u00a0 \u00a0There will be people listening who admire your legal wisdom but will also say, well, he’s not an epidemiologist, he doesn’t know how disease spreads, he doesn’t understand the risks to the health service if this thing gets out of control.\u00a0What do you say to them?<\/h5>\n
A\u00a0 \u00a0What I say to them is I am not a scientist but it is the right and duty of every citizen to look and see what the scientists have said and to analyse it for themselves and to draw common sense conclusions.\u00a0 We are all perfectly capable of doing that and there’s no particular reason why the scientific nature of the problem should mean we have to resign our liberty into the hands of scientists.\u00a0We all have critical faculties and it’s rather important, in a moment of national panic, that we should maintain them.<\/h5>\n
Q\u00a0 \u00a0Lord Sumption, former Justice of the Supreme Court, speaking to me earlier.<\/h5>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A former senior member of judiciary warns: \u201cthis is how societies become despotisms\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39262,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[61,105],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-204826","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-Commentary","category-coronavirus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204826","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/39262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=204826"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204826\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":204854,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204826\/revisions\/204854"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=204826"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=204826"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=204826"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}