BBC Sounds Music Radio Podcasts

Who would have believed it?

That the people of a proudly free nation would lock themselves up, keep themselves, ourselves

incarcerated, stay in captivity to use Boris Johnson's terminology with so little resistance.

What we learned this week though was that there was, there is no shortage of resentment at

the lockdown and the realisation that not everyone, not even the Prime Minister's chief

adviser, was following the same rules as the rest of us.

The rage many felt stemmed, I suspect, from being told by the very people who made the

rules so many abade so carefully that what really mattered was, in fact, judgement and instinct.

My guest on this week's political thinking argues that that is how it should always have

been. Jonathan Sumpshon, Lord Sumpshon, a justice of the Supreme Court until 2018 has argued

that the lockdown should never have been enforced by law and that it is up to us, not the state,

to decide what risks we should take.

Jonathan Sumpshon, Lord Sumpshon, welcome to political thinking.

Glad to be here.

Are you enjoying your new role no longer the lofty, the detached justice of the Supreme Court?

Not quite a man in the political trenches, but certainly a man making political arguments

now.

Well, I neither enjoy it nor object to it.

I think that it would be very much more satisfactory if the sort of points that I have been making

had been made by professional politicians.

But the amount of group think and collective hysteria, partly I have to say officially

...