While Boris Johnson struggles to persuade a nervous public that it’s safe to take even “baby” steps out of lockdown, a motley band of naysayers who think such restrictions were always unnecessary has acclaimed a stellar champion.
Lord Sumption, a former justice of the Supreme Court, has said lockdown should be voluntary and the damage it has done to the economy isn’t justified by its “not very impressive” results.
Those who believe the pandemic has been exaggerated as part of a government plot to bring the economy to its knees and deprive the British people of their liberties have hailed Sumption as a hero. So what were his pearls of wisdom?
The virus mortality rate, he told BBC News, ranked very low in the list of pandemics since 1918. He failed to acknowledge that the number of deaths — currently standing globally at 316,000 over less than four months — had been reduced by restrictions imposed across the world.
Most who had died, he said, had “really serious pre-existing vulnerabilities”, adding that “almost all of these people are very old” and that “the overwhelming majority of them would have died a bit later, but not much later”.
He has no evidence for that last claim; and in any event, he was effectively dismissing the lives of the very elderly as worthless. He also ignored the fact that those said to be most vulnerable include people of 70 who aren’t “very old”, or have a wide variety of underlying illnesses including diabetes, heart complaints and respiratory ailments, or are obese. That’s a significant proportion of the population.
Lockdown, he said, should be a matter of free choice. Even potential virus carriers should feel no obligation to restrict their activities; instead, those who were frightened of the virus should stay at home.
If everyone, however, behaved as Sumption suggested the likely rise in infection levels would inflict an even more terrible toll on society. For him, freedom seems to mean his right to behave as he wishes regardless of the harm he may cause others.
Of course there’s no such thing as a risk-free society. And of course the damage to the economy has been appalling. The public has nevertheless supported these hardships because they’ve understood that the government –—however flawed its efforts — wants to save as many lives as possible from an exponentially infectious virus which would otherwise cause individuals and the economy even worse harm.
Yet in saying the public have been terrified for no good reason, Lord Sumption implies that the people are too stupid to see what he sees: that Covid-19 is not virulent, that the epidemic is “very mild” and that the government only imposed the lockdown to “spare themselves from criticism” by the self-same stupid public.
Having acknowledged that he had observed the restrictions he was condemning, Lord Sumption told the BBC’s Mishal Husain: “I comply with the law because I don’t wish to place a weapon in the hands of people like you. I have been a very public spokesman for a particular point of view and I’m not going to undermine my own position by disregarding the law.”
Is it not a cause for dismay that this erstwhile senior judge observes the law in this case merely to avoid personal attack?
Lord Sumption, a former Reith lecturer, is renowned as one of the most brilliant intellects in the legal world. His behaviour, however, calls irresistibly to mind the medieval heresy of the Brethren of the Free Spirit, described by Norman Cohn in his classic book The Pursuit of the Millennium as “an elite of amoral supermen”.
Arising in 14th-century western Europe out of the apocalyptic frenzy fuelled by plague, famine and other disasters, Free Spirit adepts believed that they had attained a perfection so absolute they were incapable of sin.
These mendicant mystics believed that, unlike the majority of the people who were “crude in spirit”, they were “subtle in spirit” and even more omnipotent than God. Every act they performed was to be free from conscience or remorse.
“It would be better,” one adept told a perplexed inquisitor, “that the whole world should be destroyed and perish utterly than that a ‘free man’ should refrain from one act to which his nature moves him”.
This freedom gave them the right to behave in any way they pleased. Their infinite superiority entitled them to appropriate other people’s money or property as their own. Sexual licence? Don’t ask.
And from those who sought to join their sin-free state, they exacted an oath of blind obedience made on bended knees.
As Cohn observes, such sects of the medieval “elect” were the precursors of 20th-century totalitarianism.
It reminds us of what seems to escape Lord Sumption’s subtle mind: that moral responsibility is the core of society, that without it there is no freedom, and that the belief that only the “elect” understand liberty or any other virtue is the road to tyranny.
The Free Spirits were burnt at the stake. While the dazzling Lord Sumption will hopefully enjoy many more years to entertain us all in the tradition of great British eccentrics, it may be as well to conclude that the preservation of life, standards of common decency and civilised values depends on lesser mortals.
