In the Times, former Supreme Court justice Jonathan Sumption warns Fraser Nelson that democracy is at risk as power shifts from parliament to the courts, fuelled by lockdowns, a safety-first mindset and the enshrining of principles like DEI in law. Here’s an excerpt:
Some years ago, a man dived into a shallow lake in a Cheshire beauty spot and broke his neck. He sued the council for compensation, saying that the “no swimming” signs were not enough because people were ignoring them. A court agreed. The case made an impression on Jonathan Sumption, not as proof of lawyers going mad (the case was later rejected on appeal), but as proof of a wider trend: the expansion of a safety-first mindset and, with it, the steady erosion of liberty. …
His third collection of essays and lectures, The Challenges of Democracy: And the Rule of Law, develops the theme of his 2019 Reith Lectures: that power is shifting from parliament to the courts in a way that threatens democracy. He says his theory found terrible vindication when Covid arrived and people demanded draconian restrictions that had no basis in science. He sees this not as a freak event but as a leap in a long-term slide towards a kind of soft popular autocracy. “We are entering a Hobbesian world,” he writes in one of the essays, “the enormity of which has not yet dawned on our people.” …
He sees lockdown not as an anomaly but as the moment when Britain “turned the corner” on liberal democracy, “a change in our relationship with the state” that was, essentially, consensual. “It was what people wanted. Government manipulation partly explains that, but I certainly don’t think it’s the whole of it. More important was a more general propensity of the population to look to the state for things that the state is actually not capable of doing.” In this case, stopping a virus in its tracks. …
Rarely among lawyers, Sumption is critical of what he calls “the legal view” of society: that certain principles (equality, diversity) ought to be enshrined in statute and be put outside the reach of politics. “There are lots of people who essentially want their own social policies to have the force of law, preferably a fundamental law which governments could not encroach upon.” The Equality Act and the Human Rights Act both made it easier to sue using judicial review. “This is actually a serious problem and it can only really be dealt with by raising the threshold at which you can quash or can criticise a government policy,” he says. …
Is this what he means by the death of democracy: more laws, red tape and courts governing ever more of our lives? “No, I don’t think the courts are the main enemy. I think that the main enemy is the public at large.” Too many people want the “smack of firm government”, he says. “It’s an image that perfectly summarises what many people want. A smack. It implies a nanny, with a great rod.” …
One improvement, he says, would be withdrawing from the European Convention of Human Rights. “My view is that we should enact the convention in its proper language, and transfer the power of interpretation to our own courts from the Strasbourg court.”
Worth reading in full.
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This is also worth watching: Matthew Crawford: the dangers of Safetyism
Of course.
This is the end game for the left. It has been developed over many years and brought to completion over the past 20 years, during most of which time the Conservatives Party provided the PM.
I believe Lord Sumption is wrong to say the public accepted this. What happened was tax payer financed propaganda using a department created by Cameron-Clegg. The public have no idea what is being done to them by the elites.
Depressingly, too many people did seem to want this, and vanishingly few want to hear they’ve been had.
I’m still looked at as crazy when speaking on topics for which I know I have better information than them. The portcullis slams down. You can almost see it happening. I lose respect for such people, but I know they feel likewise.
Out of interest @EppingBlogger, why does it say at the end of your post “Last edited by Hardliner”?
Good question, perhaps @Hardliner would like to explain.
Well they should. You are either an autonomous free being, in which case you take responsibility for yourself and what happens to you, or you are serf. Or worse still an Eloi that doesn’t even have to produce anything or do anything beyond be a sitting duck. That certainly seems to be where much of the population is heading.
From the article: He sees lockdown not as an anomaly but as the moment when Britain “turned the corner” on liberal democracy, “a change in our relationship with the state” that was, essentially, consensual. “It was what people wanted. Government manipulation partly explains that, but I certainly don’t think it’s the whole of it. More important was a more general propensity of the population to look to the state for things that the state is actually not capable of doing.” In this case, stopping a virus in its tracks. …
Viruses don’t exist chud. They don’t fly and ‘infect’ you.
Lockdowns and the quote above – Inevitable I would say. Scientism. A religion. Obey, shut up and follow. Don’t do your own research. Follow the magic words and wizards and their data fraud and word salads.
Technocratic Scientism. Predicted in the 1930s by Orwell, CS Lews, and many others. Advocated by socialist shills like HG Wells and others.
The smack really needed is a smack in the teeth of government to clear off out of our lives, apart from fundamentals such as defence, border control and resource security, that should all largely get taken care of behind the scenes.
Interference in football is the latest prospective encroachment. Another case of Nanny doesn’t know best. Better off sticking to changing nappies.
Is this what he means by the death of democracy: more laws
It’s not “more laws” as such that is the cause of our problem. It’s who makes the law – the voters representatives, or the self-congratulatory “the great and the good” (the “anointed”, to use Thomas Sowell’s term), the people who feel that they are so exquisitely wise that they know better than the voters what our laws should be. What’s actually happened in the West is that these “anointed” have annexed “human rights” and “equality” as a means of extending their power. But as we all know, there is no such thing as equality, while as “human rights” are endlessly extended, freedom diminishes.
The answer is to return to laws made only by the voters representatives.
“The answer is to return to laws made only by the voters representatives.”
People like Andrew Gwynne?
At least that toad is subject to an election – when did you last vote to elect a judge? In a proper democracy the people in his constituency could call for a vote to remove him.
Unfortunately, it would appear that Jonathan Sumption has failed to take account of one huge problem – our judiciary is now largely corrupt.
Ironic, coming from someone who publicly came out declaring that the jab roll out seemed the only way out of lockdowns.
So he played his part in creating a society that hands over more power and responsibility to the state.
Yes, he spoke up against lockdowns but failed to stand firm against the jabs.
I wonder if he recognises in himself the weakness he ascribes to the general population.
I’m not so certain about COVID-anything being consensual, except in the sense that people without power will try to live with whatever people with power impose onto them. But even assuming that it was, this doesn’t excuse the authorities from strongly suggesting that they were capable of doing something, namely, control movements of airborne viruses, by controlling movements of people, ie, adopting Chinese theory that virus infections are caused by special forms of antisocial behaviour and that one just needs to proscribe social behaviour in order to prevent them, when they were clearly not.
On top of this comes the lop-sided enforcement. Even during the lockdowniest phase of lockdown, the members of Reading’s clan of professional beggars held their usual, fairly large-scale open air social gatherings as they always do and they’re were obviously still chatting up everyone in order to pester them for spare change, oftentimes clearly in sight of the public behaviour police who simply didn’t seem to see them. That’s proof positive that the forces behind COVID measures knew that they were just scamming the population.
Similar informal exceptions applied to Travellers. During 2020, a large gathering of these people had settled in Hills Meadow Car Park where they were – often quite drunk, judging from the look of them – socializing freely around camp fires. The council provided portable toilets to them (probably a good idea) but – as far as I know – never even made an attempt to enforce COVID regulations for them.
NB: I certainly don’t think they should have. Walking past this place was always a very encouraging reminder that some people had remained sane, ignored the whole shebang and were obviously not dying in droves.
I found the Times article rather odd. Not helped by Fraser asserting that Brexiteers would not want to come out of the ECHR. Eh, where did he get that from?
Sumption wanting the ECHR to be established as a UK court (sounds more like a power grab by the UK judiciary) was also rather disconcerting. I thought some of his assertions that it is we, the voters, who want more nanny state to be just plain wrong. Ok maybe Gen Z, perhaps…
muddled ideas too about the firm smack of government equating to nanny state, when in fact what most want is a decent police force that locks up the badies. That is not the equivalent to a dictatorship which Sumption seems to be saying. All a bit odd.
The Blue Branch of the Uni-Party got one helluva smack in the teeth at the last election and the Red Branch will get one at the next.
There are enough of us who are not obedient, well-trained poodles to cause the Establishment a great deal of anguish.
I hope Reform are paying attention to David Starkey’s analysis of Blair’s Constitutional Destruction and will consult the likes of Lord Sumption when they are preparing the Great Repeal Bill.
Democracy has left the room GB. Make sure and turn off the lights when you close the door.
Lord Sumption has frequently expressed admirable, common-sense views in the past on various important topics.
Not this time. Shifting blame away from the courts onto the public, even implying that the peasants are masochist pervs secretly lusting after a “smack from nanny”??? WHAT???!!!
This article was useful in illustrating the yawning chasm between the citizens and the so-called elites in the executive, legislative and judiciary branches of government who are PAID by the citizens’ taxes to carry out functions beneficial to the citizens.
In this, the so-called elites have been miserable failures.
Humanity managed to survive for millennia without lawyers, judges, courts or thousands upon thousands of “laws”. We don’t need them.
During the pandemic the public were brainwashed. They were captured by the government narrative so it was no surprise they cooperated with government dik tats. It’s well known the captured love their captors. It’s called the Stockholm syndrome. They feel safe, cared for and protected so little wonder they fell for the faux pandemic scare story hook, line and sinker. Lord Sumption maybe right about the erosion of our democracy but what’s needed is for government to return sovereignty to the people and for governments to have constitutional limitations on their powers so that they can never evade the scrutiny of parliament or the public ever again.