London will be deprived of an Old Etonian mayor next year (Rory has pulled out) but we have an articulate and intelligent Prime Minister, a classicist, and an OE. Another OE, an even more intellectual member of the Establishment, has not minced his words. If you do mince them it is an anagram of sword and Jonathan Sumption wields his weapon with vigour. Gosh, can I digress again? Do you remember another Jonathan; Jonathan Aitken, another OE (Eton and Christ Church), who wielded the simple sword of truth? He minced his words and got sent to prison for perjury in 1999. The Private Eye masthead still depicts him and his sword on its masthead.
Lord Sumption sent lots of people inside. He was Justice of the Supreme Court until 2018 when he was mandatorily retired, just when he was getting into his stride, because he was seventy years young. Now, remember he is Eton and Magdalen, he kicks against the pricks. Lord Sumption has been critical of the government’s lockdown policy. Here are some Sumption quotes.
”The real problem is that when human societies lose their freedom, it’s not usually because tyrants have taken it away. It’s usually because people willingly surrender their freedom in return for protection against some external threat. And the threat is usually a real threat but usually exaggerated. That’s what I fear we are seeing now. The pressure on politicians has come from the public. They want action. They don’t pause to ask whether the action will work. They don’t ask themselves whether the cost will be worth paying. They want action anyway. And anyone who has studied history will recognise here the classic symptoms of collective hysteria. Hysteria is infectious. We 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.
The government have really got to stop treating the whole of the population as if they were children.
Those who still want a lockdown, can isolate themselves. Let those who don’t, exercise their own common sense and own sense of self-preservation, and get on with their lives. I think this should become voluntary. It would be perfectly possible to make compliance voluntary but to keep closed venues such as restaurants, pubs, theatres, football matches and so on.
The government has quite deliberately induced panic in the public in order to induce them to comply. They have succeeded handsomely. They are now wanting to get people back to work and find that they can’t do it. They’re trapped by their own rhetoric.”
I am showing my support for Lord Sumption by copying his hair style.
Good to know that we can count on Buffy B to have his finger on the pulse of daily news developments by highlighting Lord Sumption’s elegant and important tirade. Quite a few bent swords indeed. And while we’re playing with metaphors, taking a leaf out of Professor Gattinoni’s elegant phrasing of the Covid ventilator situation, if we were to describe government and media communications policy, what kind of metaphor of an automotive kind might we choose to use? “It’s like using a Ferrari to go to the shop next door, you press on the accelerator and you smash the window.” Suffice to say the misuse, panic and even death by ventilator is just one rather important aspect of the whole Covid story that seems to have taken about a month to be covered by most ‘mainstream media’. If at all. Yet the story was actually broken and went viral in the medical community within hours thanks to a concerned New York doctor via youtube who would probably have been sacked if not for Gattinoni’s obscure scientific paper written only the day before. And meanwhile press government and concerned citizens just press on regardless, deploying tired battle metaphors and 3rd form style context-less aggregate statistics: “death toll”… “death toll”… “death toll”… And we clever university-educated people (approx 40% of the population) lap it all up. Ha! This said, to help us make a more informed freedom/sickness risk-calculation, Lord S might have mentioned that when epidemiologists talk about the prevalence of ‘mild’ cases, this actually just means that they were not life-threatening. But still usually very unpleasant.
Generally I quite enjoy it when the opinions in your posts challenge my own however I am tickled pink to find that I TOTALLY agree with Lord Sumption – and good to see it so well put !
Just to add to the kicking by Melanie Phillips this morning, from a different viewpoint …
The maths of an epidemic are similar to taking a laden supermarket trolley down a steep car-park. If you go slowly you can control it, but as you go faster the weight of the trolley, added to its momentum, makes control more difficult. Beyond a certain speed you lack the strength to slow it and it will accelerate out of your grip. Lord S says, just let it go anyway, even if it knocks over a few old folks on the way down. But he – nor anyone else – can be sure what other damage it will have done by the time it reaches the bottom.
Acceleration is linear. An epidemic is exponential. Few of us have experience of exponential growth in our everyday lives. This virus is more transmissible than most diseases, twice more so than Spanish flu. Despite its relatively benign impact on those under 60, the consequences of an uncontrolled epidemic, which could follow from his proposal, on the economy, society and politics cannot at this stage be known. It is too soon to be confident that the cure is worse than the disease.