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Lord Sumption – mass civil disobedience has begun Lord Sumption: Our status as a free society doesn’t actually depend on our laws or our constitution, it depends on convention. It depends on a collective instinct as to the right way to behave. There are many things governments can do which it is generally accepted they should not do. And one of them, until last March, was to lock up healthy people in their homes.
Interviewer: So, do you think we have taken an irreversible step towards being more Chinese, more dirigiste?
Lord Sumption: I very much fear that we have
– From an Unherd interview titled: Lord Sumption: mass civil disobedience has begun
I do not agree with Sumption on every point by any means but this interview is well worth your time.
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Presently the government is saying that the restrictions will come to an end over the next couple of months as the vaccinations roll out.
If that happens then I think there will be no massive civil dissent – but if there is an effort to reimpose restrictions again “there is a new variant – sorry, but we must all go back to LOCKDOWN” then I think there would be mass civil dissent. People have very much had enough of all this – we will accept another few weeks of it as the vaccinations are done, but NO MORE OF IT. “New variant” will not cut it – not for another lockdown.
And if a new lethal disease appears and starts killing very large numbers of people – then the question “well who created this?” is going to be asked, and not very politely. And the answer “it is a coincidence – just another totally natural virus, now DO AS YOU ARE TOLD” will not be accepted.
One mass killing disease – perhaps totally natural. Two of them one-after-the-other – NO just NO.
Think again “Stakeholder Capitalism” “Great Reset” “Sustainable Development” international establishment elite – just BACK OFF.
People have had enough of all this.
This wasn’t even a mass killing disease. It’s killed fewer people worldwide than a bad flu season.
I agree with Paul. I think people are psychologically in the shelters waiting for the “all clear”. When the all clear does sound and people reemerge blinking in the sunlight I suspect they will be horrified at the devastation lockdown had wrought and not be at all sympathetic for a repeat.
Yep. The Wuflu has made some very strange bedfellows (both on the freedom and mask/lockdown sides). Lord Sumption was not someone I expected to find agreement with on many things, but some of his comments seem to echo fictional heroes of mine such as Prof Bernardo de la Paz
Who’d have thought Sumption a proto racist?
But his point does have a certain ‘je ne sais quoi’. It seems obvious that one relatively homogeneous society has a ‘collective instinct’ as to the right way to behave. That the collective instinct in, say Pakistan, is markedly different from the collective instinct in Britain. (For example; It being acceptable to rape little girls, or murder your daughter or wife, for bringing opprobrium on your family, in the former, which activity is technically frowned upon in Britain, although tacitly condoned by the British authorities for purposes of terror management).
It goes without saying, but seems necessary to do so, import enough people from alien cultures and your society changes from a collective instinctive view of how Society should be conducted, to a factional what used to be called ‘balkanized’ model of society, where there is no ‘societal’ good, just petty factional advantage.
Pity.
Sumpton was still wanker enough to accept the vax passport shite–and Uk internal not just foreign travel–bad as that is in itself.