Law in a Time of Crisis | Lord Jonathan Sumption

the line which many people would like to draw is a line which would prevent you from insulting offending or hurting people i think insulting offending or hurting people is discourteous but i do not think that the law has any role here because it seems to me that what is insulting or offensive is too subjective a concept and too variable a concept variable over time and variable from one person to the next [Music] lord sumption is a celebrated historian barrister and former judge of the supreme court of the united kingdom after being an oxford university historian he pursued an extraordinary legal career and in due course was sworn into the supreme court while pursuing his legal career he also wrote celebrated works of medieval history most notably four volumes of the projected five volume history of the hundred years war which was a period of history that's been enormously influential in advancing freedom including in australia and yet is very little understood over the years he's also weighed into public debates most recently regarding covert policy in the united kingdom and also the demonisation of western history particularly surrounding the black lives matter protests and riots in 2020 his most recent books are trials of the state law and the decline of politics and law in a time of crisis lord assumption it's very good of you to have us here in your own home in london i really appreciate it and i just wanted to begin by saying in the english-speaking world we often talk about the the rule of law almost in huston sometimes you know sort of a sacred doctrine that stands behind freedom and justice but we rarely hear it defined so i'd love to hear your explanation of how we should understand the rule of law and secondly how common is it you know where is its origins it seems to me to be not as common as we might assume it to be the rule of law is uh has become something of a cliche of political discussion uh it's used about 20 times more often in judicial decisions than it was a generation ago and you're right that not many people pause to work out what it actually means i think that it implies three things first of all i think that it means that public authorities have no power to coerce us except what the law gives them secondly it means that there have got to be a minimum of rights there's a lot of debate about what those rights are but i think that they must at least include laws that safeguard you against arbitrary interference with your life with your freedom and with your property because otherwise you're not a society at all you're simply a group of people in which the strongest prevails thirdly i would say that the rule of law comprises independent courts to enforce those minimum rights to enforce the criminal law and to ensure that governments and public authorities remain within their powers having said that i think it's quite important to understand what the rule of law doesn't mean the rule of law doesn't mean that every moral or political dilemma and every public issue has to have a legal solution a lot of people think that that is what it means it doesn't the rule of law can include a situation in which the laws are pretty unpleasant in which rights are minimal beyond the ones that i've outlined i wouldn't like to live in a society like that but i wouldn't say that it lacked the rule of law an important distinction i i get what you're driving at um so if we um building on that come to the issue in our own culture of the separation of powers because it's been i think designed or what stands behind it is the idea that you don't allow anybody to gain so much influence that they can ride roughshod over the laws and over other people a lot of historians the the ideology that preoccupies english thought up until the 20th century perhaps is best not so much they thought of in terms of conservativism or liberalism or socialism but the english constitution so you've had a lot of ink spilled trying to distill the essence of the english constitution one aspect of it was famously discussed by the french thinker montesquiou and before him by lock the separation of powers what do we mean by the separation of past and how do we take into account this issue of judicial review that we hear a lot about now the rise in people looking to the law for all sorts of things that perhaps the law shouldn't do the separation of powers is clearly important montesquieu was wrong to regard it as the foundation of um of the english constitution because the executive the judiciary and the legislature in england have always been intermixed to a degree that i think he never really understood but what it does mean is that although there's a good deal of overlap um each of the three major organs of the state is expected to respect the specific functions of the other now that's perfectly consistent with judicial review because the proper role of judicial review is to keep government within its powers and that seems to me to be entirely consistent with the respect for the proper function of government judicial review can be carried much too far at the point where it starts interfering with government policies which the courts for one reason or another simply don't like um there's been too much of that in the united kingdom and too much of it in the united states they are the two countries who have been the the biggest uh performers in this area of the advance of judicial power the united states has got the disease a lot worse than we have partly because of the extreme immobility of the legislative process in congress which means that the only dynamic public institution in the united states is the court system but in particular the supreme court in this country the courts are retreating from some of the more advanced positions which they occupied in the last 30 or 40 years this is a development which i very much welcome although it is caused much dismay among many other lawyers i think it marks a reversion to the basic basic orthodoxy of the british constitution which is based on the supremacy of parliament and on the existence of lines of responsibility which are essentially political rather than legal now i wouldn't favor that kind of system if i lived in a country without the strong constitutional traditions of this country they're not unique but they are still quite strong there are countries where i would not trust political conventions where i would want to see greater legal intervention but this isn't one of them it's a very interesting thing to explore we do have the debate in australia we don't have a bill of rights so there's often an accusation uh pointed at what might be called activist judges that they are trying to de facto build a bill of rights in america as you've said you know there's always tremendous tension around the issue of who goes on to the supreme court are they people who will be activists as they known or will they be people who respect the political process and there's a couple of major issues coming up there now and and no matter what they decide there'll be a lot of unhappiness i suspect do you think there's a problem of the degrading of the the law in the standing of um the people's eyes if they become too activist if they because they're not elected you see and they can't be removed by the people well that has on the whole not happened in the united states where whatever people may think of individual justices there is a considerable body across the political spectrum of respect for the institution of the supreme court as such but i wonder how long that can last the problem about many of the decisions of the us supreme court is that it has taken out of the hands of citizens um decisions on uh intensely important moral issues in particular like abortion same-sex um relationships and so on um i personally agree with most of the decisions that the critics of the supreme court dislike i'm in favor of a carefully regulated right of abortion i have no problem about same-sex relationships or marriages but i do think that the way in which these things have been introduced into the polity of the united states was a serious mistake because i think that the legislative process can have an important influence in reconciling people to radical changes in social values if it's imposed on them by a judicial body i don't think that the process is anything like as smooth it's very striking that abortion is virtually a non-issue in in europe and that is because every country in europe pretty well without exception has adopted a regulated right of abortion i think malta is now the only exception and they've always adopted it by legislation this country the united kingdom was the very first to do so in the 1960s and i think that the fact that this was the subject of serious debate and of legislative resolution is a major reason why this is no longer an issue even among those who would like to see abortion more tightly regulated or even outlawed it's it's gone away whereas it is an electric issue in the united states uh increasingly elections in the united states have become contests for the right to appoint members of the supreme court that seems to me to be a profoundly unhealthy state of affairs here in britain i think the great surprise of the decision at a referendum to separate britain out from europe again had implications as well for the judiciary and the law in the country would you make any comments about how that unfolded well there were two uh major decisions of the supreme court in which the government's the method which the government had adopted of pulling out of the eu was declared to be unlawful they were both decisions arising out of applications by gina miller who was a pro and active pro-european campaigner i was party to the first of those decisions uh which decided that the government could not serve notice on the eu to withdraw without parliamentary authority um i was not party to the second because i had by then retired um but i have publicly defended the second decision so it follows that i support both of them they both have a common factor which tends to get overlooked they are both defenders they're both decisions which defended the powers of parliament against an overbearing executive that was particularly true of the second which declared illegal the government's attempt to prorogue parliament in order to silence it in the build-up to the late stages of the negotiations with the eu what the government wanted to do was to put parliament into abandons for a period of some a particularly vital period of some five or six weeks um and they were prevented from doing that and it seems to me that the reason why they were prevented which is not quite the way that it was expressed by the judgments but it's the way that i would express it if the government had been right about this the public power to prorogue parliament would have been converted into a private privilege of the prime minister because it would have been beyond challenge um there would have been no parliament so it couldn't be challenged in parliament it couldn't be challenged by the public because they have no institutional means of challenging government policy politically other than through parliament it couldn't have been challenged in the court because if it had won its right to prerogue parliament would have been declared lawful so you would have had a complete void at the heart of government in which the government was in the most technical sense of the term completely irresponsible that is to say there were no where no way in which it could be held responsible for the decisions that it made it is fundamental to our constitution and part of the reason why we limit the political role of the court that politicians and government ministers are politically answerable this would have made them politically answerable to nobody so i was in favor after a certain amount of hesitation at the outset i was in favor of the decision which the supreme court arrived at i think it's wrong to regard this as an example of judicial activism when we talk of judicial activism what we normally mean is an intrusion by the courts into the policy-making functions of the executive this was an attempt by the courts to prevent ministers from intruding into the proper legislative and political functions of the legislature and since the legislature and its complete power is absolutely at the heart of the british constitution that was a development of great importance understood understood there's a traditional view and it's certainly alive in australia as well or sentiment to the effect that the more laws a country has the worse or more vicious its inhabitants must be and i think you pointed out the english statute books now fill up about 50 thick volumes and say in relation to tax law in australia as people have found more and more ways to evade their responsibilities the tax law in australia now is just incomprehensibly dense it's not much better here and voluminous i mean it is just unbelievable and we seem to be creating new laws at the drop of a hat now at a faster rate i don't know how anyone in the judiciary ever keeps track of everything that's happening let alone the citizen in the street and you've also talked about the sort of social absolutism that we now see emerging uh increasing intolerance of living with risks that we once would have thought normal what do you think about and what drives this explosion of resort to legal remedy and more and more laws or more not so much legal remedy but more and more laws the main reason is the development of democratic institutions since the end of the 19th century certainly in this country and i think in many other countries as well as political power becomes more democratic people develop higher expectations of what political action can do and law is the instrument by which political action can be imposed on the population at large i don't object to all of this i think that it has gone too far and in particular i think that what started as a quest for basic security uh and therefore a high degree of regulation of bodies whose decisions can radically affect people's lives that's that is how it started there is a economic argument for and against high degree of regulation but there's no doubt that that's what the public expects and therefore in a democracy it's what we must expect what i think is particularly unfortunate is the tendency of people to use law as a means of imposing their own moral values on others who don't share those values there are some things thou shalt not kill which can be regarded as universal values there is a high degree of consensus that they ought to be forbidden and there is no way of forbidding them effectively otherwise than by law but that does not apply to things like animal rights legislation just to take one random example there are laws in this country um against wearing not against wearing mink but against farming mink there are demands for laws against wearing it now there are also demands for laws california actually had such a law for a short time until he was squashed against eating things like foie gras which are thought to be cruel now whatever one might think about this it's a point on which people disagree um in many countries eating foie gras is fine in this country it's fine for quite a lot of people they do not feel a moral imperative to suppress the french foiagra industry or to suppress the the british mink farming industry now that seems to me to be a classic kind of issue on which people are entitled to make their own mind up and to act in accordance with their own moral views i find the desire to use law as a tool for imposing conformity uh extremely dangerous it can be carried into fields a great deal more significant than animal rights legislation um and i would be dismayed if it ever were do you see something anything of a relationship between this moral absolutism and the desire to exercise a lot of control over other people's lives do you see any linkage between that and the decline of that once very powerful institution [Music] christianity in this country is there any leakage there in your mind no i wouldn't have thought so i think that although organized religion of every kind has declined in the west generally and certainly in this country [Music] i don't think that the moral sentiments which animate christianity have in fact declined there are some areas where it may have done particularly in the area of sexual behavior but on the whole i think that the basic moral principles which animate not just christianity but most other religions are basically intact in most western countries and certainly here foundational to modern law has been mill's famous harm principle the state only has a right to intervene in our actions if they're harmful to others i'm not quite sure how you define harmful anymore but he intended the principle to be a freedom enhancing one nowadays it does seem to be deployed or at least people seek to deploy it to increasingly restrict freedoms and relate in areas like speech and religion because words can be harmful um yes i mean a shift in how we understand harm whether words are harmful is very much dependent on the individual who hears them [Music] and i think that if you have a principle that you can't harm people by words people will claim to be harmed by all sorts of words which wouldn't have harmed anyone or be thought to harm anyone a generation ago um i think that you've therefore got to have some element of objectivity i think the question needs to be whether you would be harming people in the eyes of reasonable people i think that nobody is entitled to intellectual safety nobody is entitled not to have their most fundamental and cherished views challenged the traditional line which english law has drawn is between words which simply outrage people and words which would cause a breach of the peace among reasonable people that seems to me to be a defensible line to draw the line which many people would like to draw is a line which would prevent you from insulting offending or hurting people i think insulting offending or hurting people is discourteous but i do not think that the law has any role here because it seems to me that what is insulting or offensive is too subjective a concept and too variable a concept variable over time and variable from one person to the next at a sort of personal level i have to say there have been times when things have been said that i to me that i've found very hurtful but when i've sat down and thought about them i've had to grapple with the fact that there was some legitimacy in fact sometimes i think we only advance when we do have hotly contested ideas and when when people actually have to confront the fact that they might have called it wrong all knowledge and all opinion is provisional until something more persuasive comes along and sometimes if we shut down the persuasive process we will stop advancing this difficult concept we have in australia i think you have it here too of hate speech i don't know how you define hate speech anyway but it's led to some fairly uncomfortable propositions i think in the public square hate speech is not as yet in this country a legal concept except in the case of hate speech that provokes a breach of the peace among reasonable people um where it's been part of the law for as long as anyone can remember there is a demand for its suppression by law and in particular for its suppression uh by regulating uh for example the social media and the problem about this is that any attempt to regulate speech short of speech that provokes a breach of the peace ends up uh by enforcing uh the the the middle position uh it ends up by enforcing a high degree of conformity to received opinion it seems to me that intellectually morally socially we advance very largely through challenges to received positions and sometimes these challenges result in the received positions changing sometimes they result in people questioning the foundations of their own views and coming up with exactly the same views but for better thought out reasons both of these are extremely beneficial processes interestingly you've pointed out that in the early 1950s the conservative party had nearly three million members of the labour party one million but now the royal society for the protection of birds has more members than both combined it's the same in australia in the broad it's the same in very many countries there's this civic disengagement from politics at the same time as we demand more and more from our politicians ironically when we march on the streets it's it's noted all over the developed world yes you say uh if i'm quoting you correctly this disengagement will in the long run likely lead to a far more partisan and authoritarian style of political leadership i think that is likely to happen simply because if people are not interested in politics they are essentially leaving the field to professional politicians they may not like the thought they may not think of it that way but that is actually what they are doing it is very much more difficult to challenge fanatical issue fanatical single single-issue pressure groups for example uh or politicians with a b in their bonnet or simply politicians with an excessive appetite for power if our institutions do not have a really high degree of participation there are lots of reasons why this has happened in part it's happened because of a growing disgust with the political process which i regard as both pernicious and unjustified and it's partly also i think because people have social habits have changed in a way that have made participation in politics less attractive to people a major change occurred in the social life of most countries with the arrival of a television in every sitting room now that has meant that people go out less often they receive their entertainment passively in their own homes the degree of socialization that occurs is reduced um in the 1950s when those figures were that you cited were broadly true um there were very large numbers of political clubs uh both conservative and labor many of them were concerned mainly with things that had nothing to do with politics they they ran entertainments of every imaginable kind they were just ordinary social clubs but for people of similar political views and they sprang into life when there was a general election this kind of background was i think extremely healthy we're not going to recover it but basically political clubs have faded away in this country they have been taken over by a very small number of people with extremely strong feelings about politics or some aspect of politics who are using them as a vehicle for imposing those views on on the much larger world and and you know this is a tendency that will lead to a more despotic kind of government people who are highly active in politics people with very strong feelings about political issues are natural despots what we need is a large number of members of the public who care about politics enough to participate but who do not care about politics so much that they want to impose their political views on everyone else well this is uh the i think might be described as the the loss of ability to find reasonable middle ground and consensus social media seems to have turbocharged all of this it's given a whole set of tools to people who want to behave in a way that suggests that they know best and no one else knows anything i wonder whether the great one of the great problems behind this isn't that it's a bit like flogging a tired old horse we expect more and more from our politicians we'll support them less we whip them endlessly thinking that's the way to get them to perform better in reality what we're doing is ensuring that if i can put it this way decent horses are more and more reluctant to line up to have a go at the job so the whole thing becomes self-fulfilling the prophecy that that we're not being well served because they're only self-interested or they're limited or they don't have the ability well the social media basically amplify whatever trends of opinion are out there anyway i think its importance is therefore often exaggerated but it is true that we have um very high excessively high expectations of politicians and to what the political process can achieve we've had them for much longer than they've been social media and the problem about these is that they they are bound in many cases to be disappointed because there's a great deal that politics can't achieve and the failure of politicians to achieve them is therefore held to discredit the whole political process and this is the reason why in many countries including this one if the polls are to be believed there is an appetite for strong men for more authoritarian styles of government getting things done is is is the mantra um there are people who are not going to be sidetracked by tiresome things like legislatures or careful discussion of the issues or compromise with people who take completely different views do you think that's driven in part by i think another western problem that's endemic either a a very poor understanding of history because it's been taught by revisionists or selectively only or an almost total absence of an understanding of history and the lessons that it brings to the table i think that's probably part of it one of the advantages of history is that it's a great source of vicarious experience and one of the things that it teaches you is that human beings are nothing like as good as they think they are at changing the world around them the world has a capacity for resistance that people tend to underestimate the last prime minister of this country who really knew much history was harold macmillan and some prime ministers have been woefully lacking in historical knowledge or basic culture one prime minister who i won't name visited the national gallery for some public reception and said basically as he arrived to the director nice place you've got here i never realized it existed this is i mean i think a lack of the vicarious experience that history gives you is one of the many causes of our present malaise the problem is that we all need we all live in ivory towers it's not just you it's not just me uh if this is a an accusation commonly leveled against anybody who might be called a tough but actually it's true of everybody we are all to some extent imprisoned in our own social world we depend for most of our experience on vicarious experience the experience of others history is the largest fund of vicarious experience available to us some understanding of it seems to me therefore to be vital in any well-governed country amen your most recent book is called law in a time of crisis i didn't choose the title well can we explore anyway something that seems to be very important here we hear more and more of the language of crisis um we hear it's an emergency it's a crisis it's unprecedented i hear that all the time in relation to the climate in australia and when there's a flood or a fire and it is usually uttered by a young news reporter and when you actually have a look at the records you'll find it's not unprecedented but the word is banded around and it's all aimed at the language of emergency sort of it it seems to to sort of try and drive law and policy without much debate you know it's sort of almost emotional and highly intense rather than let's sit back and talk calmly yes well i think that's a serious issue that you've raised and i mean and climate change is obviously one area where it's particularly evident my problem about greta thundberg is that because of her age and her personal courage and her sweetness what she is actually trying to do uh is to persuade people to respond emotionally to what is essentially a technical it's a very important technical issue but it is a technical issue emotion gets in the way it just doesn't help on that kind of thing i believe climate change is a very serious problem i think that it exists i think that it is largely human-made so i accept the basic um scientific case which is made for its being a potentially not yet but potentially terminal problem it just doesn't help uh to talk of this in the sand of terms that greta thunderberg does or what many climate activists do my own feeling about it is i mean the problem about climate change is it's one of those issues like 10 people sitting in a restaurant the bill is going to be divided by ten so you might as well order lobster it's individual action is wholly ineffective and collective action is not going to happen until people feel sufficiently and immediately threatened i think that this is beginning to happen now attitudes are changing i don't accept the case that there is a tipping point beyond which everything is irreversible i think that kind of language is not sensible it seems to me that the the longer we leave it the more disruptive the more expensive and the more despotic will be the eventual solutions but i think that there will be an eventual solution if we leave it too long the human cost of the solution will be catastrophic that's why i'm in favor of early action but i think that this isn't the language of tipping points this is a question of degree yeah i agree with you strongly i think i see two problems one is that the excessive emotionalism is in of its in and of itself sapping young people's sense of hope and of challenge so that they become despondent we know this children everywhere have climate change anxiety uh young people are having there's been three or four reports in australia of young men having vasectomies because they don't want to bring children into this world in reality we want them to see these things as challenges to be thought through and tackled methodically the other problem is that so often that emotionalism leads people to advocate for solutions that are non-solutions and the thing that really worries me about this if i can say it about some european countries for example i get the strong impression that while they're very condemnatory of australia um on climate for example what a lot of european countries consumers are doing is they're not really dropping their consumption at all it's being outsourced so all right we don't make our motor car here we bring it in from some other country so we look good but it's not actually having a net global effect my point is there's too much feeling not enough clear thinking yes i mean you know there's a there's a great deal in that um but it raises the point that uh this is actually a global problem and there won't be any solution if it isn't a global solution and that i think carries huge implications for our future i am for the reasons that we've been discussing a strong believer in democracy but i think that one of the biggest challenges that democracy faces is the need to grapple with the problem of climate change because democracy is essentially national you need to have a a a unit the nation which collectively feels a common instinctive loyalty to a group of institutions there is no current example of people having that kind of respect for international institutions they do think in national terms there is no such thing as an international democracy or an international parliament now when faced with a an issue that can only be resolved at international level i think there is a serious danger that this is going to end up uh by being a world in which decisions are made by agreement between governments without reference uh to um elected bodies i regard that as the main challenge to our democratic future um if uh internationally there was a a much stronger feeling that we needed to tackle the issue i think that the issue would become less significant but it won't go away because there are some countries who do not accept the basic case because it's not in their interest to do it um the united states under trump was one example but a much simpler example would be disafforestation countries like brazil and malaysia depend economically to a relatively high degree on the exploitation of forests which has a worldwide impact on the climate now ultimately it seems to me that far from being a unifying factor climate change is likely to expose serious divisions um between countries and between societies which are not going to be overrun without some kind of global pressure which depending on the methods employed could fairly be described as despotism now we really are in a position of having a collision between an irresistible force and an immovable object and i don't know what the solution is going to be lord assumption on this issue that you rightly point to the need to build consensus and to think clearly about the challenges coming at us with something as enormous as climate change the other issue that really occurs to me and i see a lot in our country is internal division and one of our guests joel cotkin talked about the way in which you have a sort of alliance now between business leaders in these days often they're tech millionaire billionaires and they they don't dress formally and they don't speak in the language of business leaders of old aligning with the green movement concerned about climate change often in the context of governments that are pretty confused about how to handle this and then ordinary people whose jobs might depend on in my country for example coal mining or whatever thing well this is all very well my job's on the chopping block but they're living an extraordinary lifestyle and i'll bet they're not going to give it up and indeed in the context of the political debate in australia there are a lot of people who stand to make a lot of money out of renewable energy who often will say very provocative things in the public arena without owning up they've got a personal financial interest in it so what i'm driving at is this the sort of division that we're getting where there's a bit of a feeling that the elites are being dismissive of a potential impact on everybody else's jobs and income and it makes it harder to progress these these sort of divisions are it's hard for me to see how they're going to be overcome this arises out of the basic dilemma posed by just about every suggestions to how one might deal with the problem of climate change um it is difficult to envisage any solution that doesn't involve a reduction of consumption and reduction of consumption is always going to be unpopular with consumers um the richer you are um the more um just the more discretionary uh your choices of expenditure are and so it's not surprising to see uh very rich businessmen who've made their pile supporting reductions of consumption that affect people whose existence is marginal much more powerfully than it affects them but i think one must avoid treating questions treating questions that naturally arise about people's motives into a reason for dismissing the issue or the solutions any solution is going to provoke a large number of losers and some winners but frankly we've got to work out whether the proposed solution have some prospect of improving the lot of humanity generally i'm not suggesting that this is easy but the problem that you've pointed out is absolutely fundamental to the whole issue it is after all looking at it internationally the reason why malaysia does not wish to give up logging in order to assist rich industrial countries who exhausted their own forests years ago in dealing with the consequences which they have been largely instrumental in creating i can't help thinking of the way in which the early days of our own colony in new south wales starvation was a real threat uh the initial governor of australia governor phillip who was quite a remarkable man put himself on the same starvation rations as the convicts and i think one of the things that will be needed if we're to progress this is a genuine demonstration by those who have power and wealth and and that this the staggering concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands and very often they're people who who want to rewrite the rule books around climate change in a way that disadvantages everybody except themselves part of the solution will be people pointing to their own willingness to make sacrifices i think i think there will be a powerful increase in egalitarian sentiment and up to a point i don't have a problem with that but a wholly equal society would be a society in which some of the most basic and most creative instincts of mankind was suppressed and i would regard that as unfortunate to put it mildly it would also mean i fear that we need actually a a degree of inequality a degree of in unequal access to leisure to enable us to advance as societies if everybody had had exactly the same opportunities in the past they would have been very limited opportunities this can only actually work by limiting people's opportunities if you limit people's opportunities you limit the inventiveness and creativeness of humanity and you push us back a long way and certainly prevent us from advancing i understand exactly what you're saying but i think um you would probably agree with me as well that it's important that the people who are calling for change don't sound hypocritical yes i think that's probably what i'm driving at yes and i mean i think on the whole i suspect that people don't resent the fortunes of people like bill gates they're much more likely to resent uh the fortunes of people who are much closer to their own economic position and therefore much more visible in the streets as opposed to just on television just on the public discourse you've had a bit to say about the uh the common narrative surrounding covet in recent times um i think it's fair to say the mainstream media would either ignore alternative interpretations of data or policy responses or they turn around and attack people who put a different proposition so in my country all the emphasis from particularly the left of centre of media was on the need to confront the dangers of this and go for powerful lockdowns very little discussion around the impact on young people um the economic impact and indeed the mental health impact let alone the medical implications of the lockdowns and their values it has been a debate characterized by a very high degree of fanaticism my definition of a fanatic is that somebody who's only got room for one idea in his head at a time and the main problem there were many problems but the main one about lockdowns and about the advocates of lockdowns is a refusal to examine the collateral consequences those consequences fall partly under the heading of health policy itself the lockdowns have been disastrous in areas other than covid they have had a very unfortunate effect in increasing the death toll from undiagnosed or untreated cancers from dementia which in the uk is the has for many years been the biggest single killer it has reduced the exposure of particularly young people to to pathogens and to health problems for which they have traditionally acquired in the course of their daily life a high degree of immunity at the moment in many countries including this one we have an outbreak of of unexpected outbreak of hepatitis illness in children one theory a plausible theory is that which has been adopted recently by the head of our health service is that this has been the result of children being locked in their homes and not having acquired a degree of basic immunity if you interfere with a mechanism which has been basic to human experience for as long as human beings exist you must expect a large number of unexpected side effects and that's the unexpected ones there are expected ones too we are as human beings social animals everything that we do everything that we create is done by virtue of our interaction with each other to criminalize social interaction between human beings is as it seems to me a profoundly wicked thing to do the people who do this are not profoundly wicked people but it's a profoundly wicked thing that they are doing it's there is a debate about how effective it is even in suppressing covid uh it is absolutely clear that it is disastrous in other health fields like mental health cancer heart disease and so on and that is before one comes to think of the collateral consequences outside the domain of public health particularly the economic ones no society in history ever made itself healthier by making itself poorer but that is what the collective wisdom of the world both despotisms and democracies has imposed upon us in the last two years it is i think a collective folly induced by fear some of which was spontaneous but some of which was attributable to the actions of governments in this country the government refused to make use of the most significant fact about kovid which is that it is a disease which attacks people indiscriminately but causes serious illness only in certain categories it had to justify this by presenting wholly abnormal uh instances of young people without underlying health issues who died of covid as if they were the norm when in fact they were exceptionally rare the the broadcast media felt duty-bound to follow the government line about this i think the first requirement in any major health crisis is a requirement for a balanced opinion expressed in reasonable and calm and informative terms by public authorities that is something which we did not have in this country and judging by media reports you had even less of it in australia uh yes i think the key to understanding australia is that like america were a federation so it was dreadful in parts and not so bad in others some states were terrible in what they did and and others were relatively relatively enlightened but the horror stories have been so horror stories are mostly concentrated in victoria that is correct yeah yeah but not only victoria no no but i mean the worst examples uh i mean you did not the police did some pretty odd things certainly at the outset in this country but they didn't rugby tackle um young women in the streets in front of our children for not wearing masks yeah i agree now you've said something that i think is very important you've called for calmed reason balanced debate taking into account all of the factors a lot of this emotionalism around it that was if you like turbocharged by modelling which most of which turned out to be wildly inaccurate yes i think there's a problem here i have to be honest with climate as well because some of the people that i really respect in the scientific field as you've done you're not a scientist i know but have pointed to the soundness of the science on climate change but to the low confidence we can have in the modeling about the impacts again it comes back to this question of the role of calm and measured debate given that on the one hand the urgency as you see it of climate change action i think i'm right in saying that you've said that you think climate change or you suspect that climate change will be the greatest challenge to democracy in the coming years i think you're probably right but i'd just be interested in a neat summation from why you see it as the greatest challenge to democracy given that it's a problem that goes well beyond the democratic countries which are around say 40 loosely out of 190 200 countries that we recognize because democracy depends on lines of responsibility which are essentially national but the only solutions that are likely to emerge to the climate change issue are international they are therefore likely to be imposed by governments and may well be rejected by democratic electorates because they will involve tightening of belt and that is not a popular policy to sell in that remarkable lecture that you gave the 2021 roger scrutin lecture i think in memory of that remarkable man's life you made the point that democracies usually die from within rather than if you like be taken over by external forces um and indeed people like frank faroodi are making the point that many of the attacks on our history seem to be designed to encourage our young people that they're inheriting a culture that's nightmarish and not worth defending given you know that we we probably do need to understand our past properly as a platform for taking ourselves forward you've seen the this attempt at uh relaunching uh history in this country called history reclaimed and it stands against quote the abuse of history for political purposes aimed squarely at demoralizing western countries as a historian do you think there has been an attempt to deploy history to undermine people's confidence in in our culture and our values in our society i don't think that's the purpose of it uh among those who pull statues down or uh or demand that history be taught in a different way i think it may well be the effect essentially this arises from a a frustration particularly of young people at the inability of their inability in a democracy to have a decisive influence for their own views and that is why they pull down statues in order to publicly express the intensity of their own views now i happen to think that the views of any group of individuals simply exhibiting the intensity of one's own views is a singularly pointless and sometimes very destructive activity um demonstrating the intensity of your views may well be a useful process if you are dealing with an issue of current sensitivity where policy decisions have to be made the same is true if you are demonstrating your views about some future state of affairs climate change may be a good example of that but demonstrating the intensity of your views about the past which by definition it's too late to do anything about there's absolutely nothing to redeem humanity from any identifiable problem it is simply a form of exhibitionism which has no valuable impact on anyone or anything in in that same lecture last year you addressed an approach to reforming our contemporary democracy that's becoming in vogue in some quarters namely direct democracy quote unquote whereby citizens assemblies or citizens juries are used to make law this direct democracy sits in contrast to representative democracy uh i'm just wondering how you might describe them and what your concerns might be about such an approach i mean it sounds appealing it no doubt reflects frustration with the way things work now i have to say i'm not convinced they could be made to work but i don't want to put words in your mouth this is a very old dilemma aristotle uh criticism of democracy was that it uh created a political class and he considered that all political classes were ultimately self-interested and corrupt and that is an instinct which i think was wrong in his day is wrong in ours but is nevertheless accepted by a very large number of people advocates of direct democracy citizens assemblies and the like are essentially trying to create something which feels like a democracy but doesn't have a political class i think that this is an illusion we have absolutely no way of knowing how representative the citizens jurors or citizens assemblies will be all we can really know about them is that they are not professional politicians we need a professional political class uh to debate issues we need it first of all because they are likely to debate it with a higher degree of knowledge and experience we also need it because a professional political class in order to survive has to in a democracy certainly has to at least try to appeal to the widest spectrum of opinion in order to get elected and that is a powerful engine of compromise it's the way in which irreconcilable interests and opinions among the population can come a little closer to being reconciled so i am a strong believer in representative democracy i think the truth is that we cannot have liberty or democracy without politics and we cannot have politics without politicians i can't help thinking that these mechanisms would simply result in a new political class which might very well be more dismissive of minority rights than what we have now it might but it will the advantage of it from the point of view of its advocates or that it will change the citizens assemblies of today will not be the citizens of the assemblies of a month's time so you have a system not unlike the system which aristotle advocated under which office holders would be chosen by lot and held office without prospect of renewal for relatively short periods that's the object of this exercise and it seems to me that as a root for disastrous incompetence in government it would be difficult to devise anything more effective well you've been very generous with your time to bring this home can i ask you if i were to put it to you that i think britain's heritage has been remarkable and has done a very great deal despite the downsides the negativities that we are keen to play up and talk about today in reality in spreading freedom and building the institutions that have freed many people you know over the last couple of centuries in particular do you think britain might now having been through a period of quite deep questioning is still going through it as to what it believes and where it ought to go can be a leading light in helping us find our way to a more robust and durable democracy in the future given the challenges we face we are politically and economically relatively less powerful by a long chalk than we were 100 or 200 years ago so our capacity for achieving that is diminished um i think that the most that we can hope for is to be that to make our past a beacon for our own future uh i very much doubt whether it would be regarded as a beacon for anyone else's this is partly because western societies are relatively uniform among themselves the big difference is between the basically democratic west and more authoritarian models associated with either so-called managed democracy which means no democracy at all i.e despotism achieved by manipulation which is the position of russia or overt dictatorships like china which can for a long time buy public support with economic success but as the united states is now discovering economic success is never a permanent state of affairs thank you very much indeed lord sampson for your time and for your insights i've found them invaluable and i've no doubt those who join in will feel the same way perhaps i hope so [Music] you

Channel: John Anderson

Views: 50,115

Keywords: John Anderson, John Anderson Conversation, Interview, John Anderson Interview, Policy debate, public policy, public debate, John Anderson Direct, Direct, Conversations, climate chnage, lord sumption, jonathan sumption, the rule of law, law in a time of crisis, united kingdom, law, court, supreme court

Id: END98dJwpCg

Length: 66min 52sec (4012 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 10 2022