Introduction

Until three years ago, Laura Dodsworth was a photojournalist, known for Bare Reality, a project in three series in which she interviewed women and men about their private parts and took pictures of them. But in March 2020, Covid reached the UK and everything changed.

Dodsworth’s experiences of lockdown motivated her to write A State of Fear (2021), a bestselling if controversial book which David Aaranovitch lambasted in The Times as ‘a covidiot’s guide to the pandemic’ and ‘an outrageously dumb book selling conspiracy hooey’. She also turned her photographer’s gaze on the effects of lockdown on people’s lives, authoring one photo-essay called ‘2 metres’, on the impact of social distancing, and another with Nina Murden on the ‘ideological significance of face masks’.

‘The freethinker,’ as Bertrand Russell once put it, ‘will not bow to the authority of others, and he will not bow to his own desires, but he will submit to evidence.’ If the idea of ‘freethought’ brings to mind the radical-liberal, secular humanist tradition represented by Russell or J.S. Mill, then Dodsworth is not your typical freethinker. She describes herself as ‘between social conservative and libertarian’, although her political views are ‘in flux’. She appreciates the value of hierarchy and social order, and has some sort of religious ‘faith’.

During the pandemic, though, she ran a podcast entitled ‘Freethinking with Laura Dodsworth’. And just recently, she has finished a book, co-authored with Patrick Fagan, called ‘Free Your Mind’, subtitled ‘the new world of manipulation and how to resist it’. Fagan himself was formerly Lead Psychologist at Cambridge Analytica. He has criticised the government’s Behavioural Insights Team, or ‘Nudge Unit’, for its ‘authoritarian maternalism’ during the pandemic. Fagan’s own website describes him as ‘turning minds into money’ through his ability to ‘nudge people’s behaviours’ – which does make you wonder if there is not a certain inconsistency somewhere. ‘Free Your Mind’ will be published by HarperNonFiction on 8th June.

I caught up with Dodsworth over coffee on the fifth floor of Waterstones, Piccadilly. We discussed her experience of the pandemic, the origins of her two latest books, and why, for her, freethinking is fundamentally about knowing your own mind.

The interview raises many questions. Does the individual matter – even in a pandemic? Did Britain’s intelligentsia fail to think critically? Is the political cause a new form of religion? Are we all more easily manipulated than we would like to imagine? Comments are open below.

~ Emma Park, Editor

The interview

Freethinker:  What was your personal experience of lockdown?

Laura Dodsworth:  It was horror. There was very little about the experience that was not horrific. The fear that was instilled in people, the way people reacted out in the countryside where I live – they would jump to the edges of lane, seemed almost to bury their faces in bushes. People were so jumpy and frightened about contact with others. While that might have been a reasonable response at the beginning, we now know it was an excessive response. So much of that was down to the way the government amplified fear, used martial language, and put us onto a wartime footing.

A lot of my own work got knocked off the table at the beginning of lockdown, which was worrying. Self-employed people were not well looked after by the state at the outset. As a single mother who has to earn a living, I was also worried about how I would be able to help my children with their education. My sons were 13 and 15 at the time, and in different state schools. In some subjects, we had no contact with teachers at all. It was obvious that their education was suffering.

I was horrified and appalled by the impact of lockdown on society. There are so many things that we should value as a society. One is good health, evidently, and not curtailing the natural length of our lives. But we should also value freedom of movement, freedom of thought, the ability to work, the ability to worship, the ability to be educated. You cannot do all that within the four walls of your home. I experienced difficulties as a result of lockdown, but, to me, it was obvious that other people would experience much greater hardship. I was stunned that so many people – commentators, the media, people I knew – were not considering how lockdown would affect the most disadvantaged. So I decided to photograph and interview women in single-room accommodation in London.

I remember I was driving around the motorway to East London to meet one woman. It was just a few weeks after the beginning of lockdown. It was rush hour, and the motorway was deserted. It was disorientating – it made me feel as though I was in an apocalyptic film. I have spoken to other people who went out in lockdown and said how beautiful London was when the streets were empty. But I could not enjoy it because, for me, it was a sign of devastating disruption.

What was lockdown like for the women you interviewed and their families?

There was one woman and her son who lived in a room with no windows, no ventilation. That is illegal. But there are people who live like that. Her son had a really bad cough, which I would attribute to mould – the property was sub-standard. There was another family where the boy had developed anxiety quite badly. He would not put his feet on the ground because he was worried about insects and rats in the property. Normally he would go to school and escape, but now he was in this room the whole time. Since the start of lockdown, he had already made one attempt on his life. He was under ten years old. I found these stories heartbreaking.

Some people said that the ultimate point was that people should be provided with better accommodation. Yes, they should. But more immediately, nobody should ever have been told to stay indoors in lockdown. It was not safer for them to be in single rooms at that time. It was a cauldron of stress and anxiety and missing out on school. These children really needed school. They needed their free school meals. They needed the education, the pastoral care and the escape from their living arrangements. And as children and young women, they were at vanishingly small risk from the virus.

Did other people’s responses to the lockdown surprise you?

There was an exchange on Facebook among my “friends” – in air quotes – where somebody who was a nurse and therefore a key worker, with all the prestige that meant at the time, was saying that she had seen a window cleaner’s van on the roads. She was outraged that a window cleaner was out disobeying lockdown because he was not a key worker: he had no right to be out – he could be spreading the virus. She had seen him, of course, while out in her car going to work. But that was okay, because she was a nurse.

This woman was an active Labour Party member, and the whole Facebook thread was about how wrong it was that a window cleaner was out in his van. What everybody had forgotten was that he was just somebody trying to earn a living, trying to do labour for money, probably for himself and his family.

I was surprised that people who were left wing, who I had thought of as good critical thinkers in the past, wanted to scapegoat somebody for trying to earn a living. It did not take much critical thinking to realise that he was not killing people by being out in a van on a road. I found that kind of response horrifying.

How was the course of your career affected by the lockdowns?

My three Bare Reality books involved interviewing people and turning the interviews into first person stories [accompanied by photographs]. Otherwise the only journalism had been writing about my own projects, although I had studied journalism in my 20s. When lockdown started, for the first time, I had a reason to research and write, which I had not had before. At the time, I felt very much like an outlier. In fact, somebody who had commissioned me before in the media messaged me to say that I was one. But no innovative thinking, no great art, no scientific discovery, no entrepreneurship has come from anywhere except the outlying regions. You always need people who can think outside of the group and outside of the box. To be called ‘outlier’ as an insult shocked me.

How did you come to write State of Fear ?

When China shut its borders in early 2020, I looked at the footage and I thought, ‘That’s terrible – those poor people being shut in their apartments.’ I never thought that we would do anything that mad. When we did, I realised that the things I had taken for granted – the freedom to leave the house, to work and to have relationships, but also freethinking – were illusory, because if they were real, they could not have been curtailed so easily.

A censorship machine kicked in very quickly. I was stunned to watch the mass evocation of fear and compliance. The SPI-B minutes about increasing the level of perceived threat seemed to indicate a real departure from how we used to think of ourselves in Britain – from ‘Keep calm and carry on’. So I started researching, initially for an article, how the government had used fear to make people follow their rules.

I mentioned the idea to my publisher. He said, ‘That’s interesting – do you think there is a book in it?’ I started to think about it, and realised that there was. I knew it could make me unpopular and that it could be the end of my career in the media. But the direction that society was travelling in was so bad, the economy was going down the pan – everything was going so wrong, I thought I might as well commit to doing it.

What are the main points that you want the reader to take away from the book?

There were pandemic plans. The government did not use them.Normally you would not use fear to increase compliance with a lockdown. The government did. People do not realise how much ‘nudge’ and behavioural insights are embedded into the government’s way of doing business. The ‘Nudge Unit’ is keybecause it was set up within the Cabinet Office and was part of policy since its inception.

[Note: the Behavioural Insights Team, or ‘Nudge Unit’, is now independent of the UK government and fully owned by Nesta, a registered charity that describes itself as an ‘innovation agency for social good’.]

There are also behavioural scientists throughout other departments. Other bodies include, or have included, the British Army’s 77th Brigade, the Rapid Response Unit, the Counter-Disinformation Unit, and the Research Information and Communications Unit. ‘Nudge’, censorship, surveillance and polls are thoroughly symbiotic with each other.

Another key point is there was never an exit strategy for the use of fear and behavioural science during the pandemic. If this had been a lab experiment, the scientist asking you to take part in it would have had a plan for how to de-escalate your fear and get you back to a safe place. There was never a plan for how to de-escalate people’s fear of the virus. When the SPI-B advisors were recommending that the level of threat was increased, they never had a plan for how they would bring people back down from that heightened emotional state.

The use of fear and nudge is fundamentally anti-democratic because it moves the Overton window for policymaking. Once you have frightened people, you have softened them up for policies they never would have accepted otherwise. The campaign of fear and the lockdowns have created mental health, economic, social and cultural effects that we will take decades to come out of. That is why it is really important to understand how propaganda and psychology can be weaponised against people.

Was there a tendency in public discourse to stress the importance of the collective and to portray individualism as selfish? Does respecting people as individuals still matter – even in a pandemic?

I think people were forgetting the lessons learned after the World Wars. All the great thinkers of that time, from Arendt to Jung, talk about the importance of the individual. Hitler used to amass people in huge groups, shout at them, and create big shows – because then people lose themselves in the group; they are more likely to identify with the group and be capable of bad things. It is very important to hold on to your own sense of values.

What are the worst legacies of our society’s response to the pandemic?

The pandemic was an epiphany for me, because it was the first time I understood how much we are lied to, and how much the media gets on board with upholding lies. Even now, we are told the ‘cost of living crisis’ is due to Brexit, but we are never told it is due to lockdowns. The worst legacy is that, having seen how people can be manipulated en masse, we know that it will be done again. But I have faith in the individual, and in people’s ingenuity, agency and power to say no, and to think for themselves.

Talking of which, you have done a podcast on ‘freethinking’. What, in your view, does ‘freethinking’ mean?

Everybody wants to be an individual and everybody wants to know their own mind. No one says, ‘I don’t want to know my mind, I just want to be told what to think all the time.’ Everybody wants to be able to think for themselves regardless of influence – to develop their own thoughts and arguments. A second point is that, once you have have the confidence in what you think, you must have the confidence to express it. There is some value in knowing your own mind, but if you never express it to anybody and you follow the flow against your better judgement, you have not gone the whole way. Clarity of thinking and courage in expressing your thoughts are both important.

It is a question of practice. Once you have done it, once you have been in the outgroup and unpopular once, it gets easier. There is also the satisfaction of knowing that you have done it because you have been guided by your own thinking, conscience, morals and values.

Has free speech become a ‘right wing issue’? If so, why?

I do not think people on the left trust people to know their own minds and think and speak for themselves. They like top-down policies and collectivism. But I am apolitical. I spoilt my last ballot and if there was an election tomorrow, I would spoil it again.

The response to lockdown was partisan. Trump said that he did not like lockdown, and so everybody on the left decided to coalesce and oppose people like him, rather than to think for themselves. It became a partisan issue – both in the UK and the US – and it should never have been. But I do not see the paradigm in terms of left versus right. I think it was about authoritarianism versus – I cannot say ‘liberalism’, that does not mean anything – versus freedom of thought and speech. If people were actually freethinkers, this would not have happened.

The suggestion that people on the right wing must be exploiting free speech for their own ends is nasty and ungenerous. The people that stand up for free speech have often done so to the detriment of their reputation and career – I have experienced it myself. I am lucky that State of Fear was a bestseller, because there are plenty of places that may never commission me again. I lost professional contacts and friends. If you stand up for free speech, it is not to further your career or your reputation.

In an extreme situation like the pandemic, where the government was ruling in this manipulative way and in disregard of Parliamentary process, would there be a case for civil disobedience?

Yes, I think there can be a case for that. Take the Milgram experiment, where people were told by men in white coats to give patients what they thought were real, even fatal electric shocks. People will conform – they will obey authority. What we saw in the pandemic was that these tendencies will be mercilessly exploited to encourage us to follow rules. Throughout history, governments have asked their people to do things that are morally wrong. In such cases, there can be a moral compunction to disobey.

How important is freethought in dealing with the manipulation of our behaviour by others – whether in the government, the media or elsewhere?

In the short term, it is the only answer. The government’s deployment of behavioural science  is anti-democratic. We have never been consulted on it. It causes harms. There were people who developed Covid Anxiety Syndrome or a whole range of mental health problems as a result of lockdown. People lost jobs; businesses went under. What the government was able to achieve by making people comply with the Covid regulations was the most depressing act of self-destruction our country has seen in our lifetime. Where is the oversight? Who is the regulator? What ethical framework is the ‘Nudge Unit’ operating in? The answer is, they have no ethical framework.

We cannot rely upon the people who enact these programmes to oversee them safely or to curtail them. It is too useful. The only answer is for the individual to take some agency in educating themselves and in learning how to spot when they are being manipulated. You, the individual, can learn to spot when you are being manipulated – it is like learning how a magician does his tricks.

Can freethinking help us to work out our moral values?

Absolutely. You have to know your own mind, which means you have to know when you are being influenced and be able to let it happen if you choose, or not to let it happen. What people need to do is to be brave and bold about speaking up when they do not agree, and not be afraid and feel that they have to follow the crowd.

Can you tell us more about Free Your Mind?

The aim is for people to free their minds. It really is that simple. If you want to be a freethinker, this book will help you to get there.

Increasingly, we live in a world of manipulation, because governments all around the world are using propaganda, as they always have, but combined with more sophisticated techniques from social psychology. These in turn have combined with technology, to give us the propaganda in digital environments. We are all on our devices all the time. We are exposed to thousands of marketing messages and news items every day. We are constantly bombarded by information telling us to buy this, vote for that party, believe this, support that charity.

To know your own mind, you have to be able to recognise the influences that are trying to penetrate it. There may be times when you want to let it wash over you, but it should always be your choice.

Each chapter sets out a principle and then illustrates it using interviews, our own theories, cultural references and the latest research in behavioural science and psychology. The chapter finishes with three rules that people can follow to back up the principles. You can read it chapter by chapter and come away with practical ideas about how you can be more psychologically resilient and less susceptible to mind manipulation.

Does freethinking necessarily go with an outlook that is critical of religion?

I don’t know. Since lockdown, I have become more sympathetic to religion than I have ever been. I have faith, but that does not mean I agree with everything that I hear in a church service or read in the Bible.

Because we are in a post-religious world, people are reaching from the collective unconscious, without even knowing it, for a new religion. Look at what came out of the pandemic, the way people wore masks: many religions have covered parts of the face or the head. There were images in the media of elderly people spaced out in cathedrals waiting for their vaccination. Altar cloths were covered with NHS rainbows. In some of those images, you could almost see an intersection of the old religion and the new one.

The human mind is incredible. The things that people are worried about now, like artificial intelligence or ChatGPT, were created by our minds. But the mind should not be enslaved by other people. Your own mind is like treasure. It is everything: how we perceive the world, how we think, the font of all our achievements. And so it should be free.

Update, 5 August 2023: see also Emma Park’s review of ‘Free Your Mind’ by Dodsworth and Fagan, and ‘The Battle for Thought: Freethinking in the 21st Century’, by Simon McCarthy Jones, in the Literary Review.

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The post ‘You have to know your own mind’ – interview with Laura Dodsworth appeared first on The Freethinker.

Sumption read history at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he taught from 1971-74. In 1975 he was called to the Bar, and started as a tenant at Brick Court two years later. In the early 2010s, outside the legal profession and the rarefied world of medieval history, he was perhaps best known for representing the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich against Boris Berezovsky, another oligarch who had sued him for £3 billion over a dispute about a subsidiary of Gazprom. The trial judge, Gloster J., found very firmly in Abramovich’s favour; things did not end well for Berezovsky.

In 2012, Sumption was appointed as a Justice of the UK Supreme Court. Most unusually, he did not sit in the High Court and Court of Appeal first. In December 2018, upon reaching the mandatory retirement age of 70, he stepped down, but remained on the Supplementary Panel of judges called in for occasional hearings. In the summer of 2019, however, he notified Baroness Hale, then the court’s president, that he did not intend to sit for the foreseeable future, owing to his public commentary on the constitutional implications of Brexit. In December 2021, he formally resigned. As he stated in an internal email, this was ‘in view of public criticisms which I was making of the government.’

In August 2015, the Guardian published a profile of Sumption by Wendell Steavenson in which he was described as ‘the brain of Britain’ and as ‘a uniquely British object, almost a metonym for the establishment, one of the guardians of a system that has provided the most stable democracy in the world despite never being written into the Constitution.’ In March 2021, the same newspaper published a review of his latest book, Law in a Time of Crisis, by David Runciman, professor of politics at Cambridge. Runciman commented that Sumption had lost his sense of historical perspective and that he sounded ‘more like a sclerotic judge than an urbane historian’.

During the pandemic, as this apparent volte-face by the Guardian suggests, Sumption was a divisive figure. For some, like Runciman, he was a ‘take-no-prisoners lockdown sceptic’; for others, he was a beacon of sanity in a time of collective madness. In a recent interview for the Freethinker, human rights lawyer Adam Wagner argued that Sumption’s response to the lockdowns was irremediably ‘libertarian’ in virtue of his being a ‘privileged, wealthy man’.

Part I of my interview with Sumption focuses on his criticisms of the way the pandemic was viewed and handled by the government, the opposition, the police, the scientific establishment and wider society. He also responds to Wagner. Part II, on Brexit, Sumption’s career as a lawyer, his role as an appellate judge in Hong Kong, and his fascination with medieval history, will be published in the New Year [now available here]. As usual, comments are open below.

~ Emma Park, Editor

There is a clear difference in the way you were portrayed by Wendell Steavenson (2015) and David Runciman (2021) in the Guardian, six years apart [see introduction above]. It seems like a dramatic change, even within the pages of one newspaper.

I do not think either of them necessarily represents the view of the Guardian, so I would discount both quite heavily.

Would you say that, in general, there has been much of a change in the way you have been perceived by the public, or portrayed in the media, between 2015 and now?

No, not very much. I have become well-known for different things over that period. Before I became a judge, and indeed afterwards, I was known for my scepticism about some aspects of human rights culture, and for earning a lot of money at the Bar. Since the lockdown, I have probably been best known as a ‘lockdown sceptic’. There is nothing particularly ‘sclerotic’ about a view that gives liberty a rather higher place in the scheme of things than the government has usually been prepared to allow, and I am completely unashamed of that. The ‘sclerotic judge’ of David Runciman’s imagination is probably the sort of person that rejoices in sending people to prison all the time. I have sought to persuade people that sending the entire population to a qualified version of imprisonment is objectionable.

During the pandemic, do you think that people who were politically left of centre gravitated towards support for lockdowns more readily than they might have done in other circumstances, just because the opposition to lockdowns was led by the right wing? Did lockdowns become yet another rallying point in the culture wars?

It is right that the issue became politicised. I do not think it was because opposition to lockdowns came mainly from the right wing of the Conservative party, because the opposition to lockdowns within the Conservative party did not become apparent until after the Labour party had declared itself. Initially it was the Labour party which politicised it, by becoming the consistent voice for more and longer lockdowns. That is regrettable.

A pandemic does not lend itself to analysis in left and right terms. It is therefore unfortunate that, at an early stage, it became a political issue in which, by and large, people did divide on left and right lines. The classic points of distinction between the left and the right had absolutely nothing to do with either the epidemiology or the other factors that went into the decision.

I am not a right-wing figure. I am unclassifiable politically and have voted for all three national parties in my time. On the political spectrum, I would put myself somewhere in the middle, but I object strongly to portfolio politics. People have often said to me things like, ‘You are against lockdowns, why aren’t you a Brexiter?’ This seems to me to be a perfectly daft question. I see no reason why, simply because a lot of people who agree with me on issue X also have strong views on issue Y, I should believe in issue Y as well. One takes each issue as it comes.

Going back to 2020, what was the original justification for the lockdowns and was this maintained over the course of the pandemic?

The original justification for lockdown represented a considerable change of front by the government, as with many governments in Europe. This was not simply because they had not advocated it before. Ever since the SARS pandemic of 2004, a great deal of preparatory work had gone into planning a response to the next pandemic. By and large there was a consensus among health authorities, both in this country and in Europe, that the principles should be, first of all, that you should not adopt one-size-fits-all solutions but concentrate state interventions on vulnerable categories; and secondly, that you should avoid resort to coercion and treat people like grown-ups. Both of those principles were thrown out the window in a moment of panic, not only in the UK but in other countries.

As to why it happened, what we know about it comes mainly from Dominic Cummings’s remarkable evidence to the Technology Committee at the House of Commons. But what lay behind it were some extravagant modelling exercises, of which the most influential both in this country and in some European countries were those of Professor Neil Ferguson and his team at Imperial College.

There were two basic problems with Professor Ferguson’s calculation. One is that he chose a case mortality rate at the top end of what was then thought to be the range. That has proved to be far too high. I would not blame him for that, because the case mortality rate was a very difficult thing to predict at that relatively early stage of the pandemic.

What I would blame him for is the fact that he made a completely unrealistic comparison. He compared the situation which you would have if you locked down the whole population, barring those who had to keep the wheels moving, with the situation that you would have if people did absolutely nothing to protect themselves. The latter was a completely unrealistic hypothesis. Human beings have a developed sense of self-protection. The idea that nobody would do anything to protect themselves unless they were made to do so by law was frankly absurd.

This prevented the government from making use of one of the most striking features of the Covid pathogen, which is that although it infected people fairly indiscriminately, it was highly discriminating in the categories that became seriously ill or died. If you were under 65 and did not suffer from a number of identifiable conditions, mainly concerned with the respiratory system, your chances of becoming seriously ill or dying were very small indeed. That distinguished Covid from, for example, Spanish flu, which was probably the closest parallel epidemic back in the beginning of the 20th century. Spanish flu had mainly attacked healthy people in their twenties, thirties and forties.

It has occasionally been suggested that I put liberty above all other things. This is not true. Liberty is an extremely important value, but it does not necessarily trump other factors. My concern about the government’s reaction was that they should have adopted a voluntary system coupled with objective and trustworthy advice directed mainly at the vulnerable categories. This would have been easier to do with Covid than it would have been with Spanish flu because the vulnerable categories were, for the most part, economically inactive. If the elderly and those suffering from serious respiratory conditions had been urged to shield themselves, if we had managed the problems about care homes better, we would have achieved a lower death toll from Covid-19 even without coercion. That would have enabled those who were not particularly vulnerable to serious illness or death to get on with their lives and continue in productive work.

Instead of which we spent what the National Audit Office has calculated as £376,000,000,000, of which less than a quarter was spent on improving health facilities – the rest was almost all spent on paying people not to work. So we suffered in three ways: we had less productive capacity; we wrecked the public finances; and we reduced tax revenues so that we eventually had to borrow at a relatively high rate. This was not a healthy state of affairs. We are living with the consequences now.

Even if one approves of the policies themselves, you cannot possibly approve of the method by which these decisions were made. It is clear from statements made by insiders, from Rishi Sunak to other less public sources, that there was no cost-benefit analysis at any stage. At no stage did someone say, ‘How much is this going to cost?’ They did not ask what this was going to mean in terms of children’s lost education, or of other health conditions, mental health, cancer and so on.

It seems to me to be a fundamental rule of government not to make radical decisions affecting an entire population without knowing what the results might be.

Why did they never ask themselves that question?

In the beginning, it was because they were in a panic, and because the decisions were being made by a very small number of people without proper discussion. I also suspect, although this has not been verified, that they thought that if they locked down the population it would be for a shorter time – perhaps six weeks. I do not think they ever envisaged that it would continue on and off for two years. But once they had started, they found themselves compelled to go on. It is extremely difficult, when you have inflicted untold loss and misery on an entire population, to say, ‘On reflection, we have changed our minds because it does not seem such a good idea after all.’

It was the sort of decision where the decision itself commits you to continue. I think they found themselves caught up with the logic of their own arguments and with the results of the fear that they quite deliberately engendered in order to improve compliance with the lockdown.

You might have thought that the tactic of engendering fear was undemocratic and authoritarian.

It is undemocratic because experience shows that you can manipulate people relatively easily if you frighten them enough. We know that this was a deliberate policy because Sage’s minutes show that. Adam Wagner has suggested that I have misunderstood the relevant Sage document. I do not think I have.

The Sage document in question is not concerned with the question, lockdown or no lockdown. What it is saying is some people are not very vulnerable to this pathogen, and those people might not be sufficiently frightened to protect themselves. Therefore what we must do is to frighten them some more. In other words, we must encourage a degree of fear which is not justified by the real vulnerability of those people. That is an undemocratic thing for a government to do. I do not believe that these are wicked people, but they sometimes found themselves driven by the logic of their own decisions to do wicked things. That was certainly one of them.

Adam Wagner and others have argued that shielding the vulnerable but letting others carry on working would not have prevented the virus from spreading through everyone. What is your response to that?

How does he know? The argument seems to be that, if the healthy had been allowed to get on with life, more of them would have got Covid, which is true, and that would have spread to the vulnerable, which is not necessarily true. It would only have happened if the vulnerable had not shielded themselves. That is an implausible hypothesis.

If we had adopted a voluntary policy, we would probably have had a death toll which was maybe slightly in excess of the one that we had. But you have to compare that against the catastrophic collateral damage. At the moment we are seeing death rates of about ten per cent in excess of normal. These are people dying from things other than Covid. The principal victims are cancer and dementia sufferers. Undiagnosed and untreated cancer has been a serious problem as a result of lockdowns, not just in this country, but in nearly every European country. There have been a number of studies that demonstrate that clearly.

The impact on dementia has been very significant indeed. Dementia deaths exceeded Covid deaths for most of the pandemic. Dementia is aggravated by loneliness and a lack of mental stimulation. That seems to be the most likely explanation for a noticeable spike in dementia deaths, which is still continuing. I had an elderly relative whose incipient dementia had been kept at bay by stimulation. During the lockdowns, the lack of stimulation, the end of her bridge clubs, the loneliness, caused a precipitate decline. I know lots of people who can say the same of members of their family.

This is a tragedy. It is a collateral consequence which they never thought about. I think that it would have been worth putting up with a marginally higher rate of illness and death from Covid in order to spare ourselves the catastrophic consequences that we are suffering at the moment. And those are just the consequences for people’s health.

The educational consequences have been appalling. The brighter pupils who are better supported by their families – generally middle class families – will undoubtedly get over it, but the pupils who are more challenged, who come from difficult family backgrounds, will probably never get over it. Their education, their acquisition of social and industrial skills, has been permanently retarded.

In his interview with you, Adam Wagner described me as a ‘privileged, wealthy man’, and I am – as indeed is he. That is why it is important that people like us should be prepared to speak up for the principal victims of the lockdown, to speak up for those who live in crowded accommodation, at the bottom of the income scale, with children in educationally challenged circumstances. The lockdown is generally acknowledged to have aggravated levels of inequality in Britain, which were already high.

And you would say Adam Wagner is in a similar position.

Of course he is in a similar position. I think extremely well of his book. My complaint about it is about the things that it deliberately does not cover. The subtitle is ‘How we lost our freedoms in the pandemic and why it matters’. But he will not say whether it is justified, at least not in his book. He goes a bit further in his interview with you.

If the loss of liberties was justified, then why does it matter? Wagner’s approach devalues the whole issue into a row about procedure. But it is not just a question of procedure: it is much more important than that. The loss of liberty matters unless it is justified. It matters because of the collateral consequences, and because it was simply unnecessary to adopt such extreme and unproven measures.

 I am not a lone voice crying in the wilderness on this. There are plenty of epidemiologists who would say exactly the same. They are not just people, like Sunetra Gupta, who have been unfairly and outrageously abused by some of the scientific establishment.

[In the US, compare Twitter’s deliberate suppression of the views of Jay Bhattacharya, a professor at the Stanford School of Medicine – who also discussed Covid policies with Sumption. – Ed.]

Take The Year the World Went Mad, by Mark Woolhouse – the title tells you what his attitude is. He was on the Sage modelling group SPI-M-O and the Scottish equivalent of Sage. He is Professor of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at Edinburgh University. As time goes on, people are becoming more conscious of the catastrophic collateral consequences of lockdown, and of the significant strand of scientific opinion which was squeezed out of the groupthink of Sage.

When one thinks of science and the scientific method, one thinks about it as being about disagreement, developing theories, and testing them through experimentation, in a continuous process of refinement. But during the pandemic, there was a widespread tendency to assume that ‘following the science’ meant lockdown, and that was that. Was there a failure here?

The basic proposition in science is that all ‘facts’ are provisional, until better researched, better informed or better reasoned hypotheses come to light. There is no such thing as a definitive answer. That is why scientists disagree about many issues, and disagreed about the appropriate response to Covid. There is not simply ‘the science’. There are many different views.

More fundamentally, the government has no business to just ‘follow the science’, because the science is only one relevant factor in an extremely complex decision that involves many non-scientific elements. You have to take into account the educational, economic, financial and social consequences of the restrictions. If you are only looking at one among a number of factors, you are almost certain to make serious mistakes – as indeed they did.

In January 2021 you appeared on the BBC’s Big Questions. You outraged public opinion by telling a woman with cancer that her life was ‘less valuable’ than others’. You also said, ‘All lives are not of equal value – the older you are, the less valuable yours is, because there’s less of it left.’ Could you clarify what you meant by this in the context?

I cocked up on that interview because I was at cross purposes with Deborah James. We were actually talking about slightly different things. It was not my intention to suggest that the lives of some individuals are morally less valuable than others. I made my peace with her but I am sorry about the impression that I unintentionally gave.

I was trying to make a serious point. Governments cannot make policy decisions on the basis of their assessment of the moral value of particular individuals. They have to look at the position as a whole. When you have to decide how resources should be used, and there are not enough to go round, it is basic health economics to try and find some metric by which you can measure and compare the consequences of different policies. The standard way of doing this in most countries is to use what are called ‘quality adjusted life years’ (QALYs). If you have to choose between a policy which protects some people and a policy which protects other people, you need to be able to compare the impact of the two.  ‘Quality adjusted life years’ is a tried and tested way of doing it, which has been at the heart of National Health Service policymaking for decades. That was the point I was trying to make.

If you have a disease that primarily affects people older than 65 – actually, very largely people older than 80 – people who have only relatively few years left, one question that you have to ask is how much damage should you inflict on younger, less vulnerable people in order to shield them. It is a particularly important question to ask if there are other ways of dealing with the problem which help the vulnerable without damaging the rest.

For example, permanently damaging the educational prospects of young children in order to extend the life of people in their eighties is not good policymaking. You have to work out what the impact of what you are doing is on every class of society and make difficult choices.

Do you yourself have any religious beliefs that influence your views about life and death?

I am an un-pious practising Anglican. I do not believe that that has any impact on my views about Covid or any other issue of public policy.

Some have argued that the NHS has become an object of quasi-religious worship in recent years, especially during the pandemic. Would you agree?

Saving the NHS was a good propaganda point for the government. All the banging of pans and the signs on people’s houses indicate that. What has been quite striking is that people are discovering that the NHS is actually very badly managed, that its low levels of morale, although partly due to underfunding, are due to many other much more deep-rooted malaises, and that it needs root-and-branch reform. The tendency to treat it as an alternative to the established church has declined noticeably in the last couple of years. But during the pandemic it did become a totemic thing, which distorted the debate and closed people’s eyes to some important dilemmas.

To what extent would you say that there was a loss of humanity during the pandemic?

The most fundamental characteristic of human beings is their capacity to come together. We are social animals. It is the foundation of our whole civilisation. If you coerce people so as to obstruct interaction between human beings, you are going to dehumanise them. That is why the government’s measures amounted to a sustained assault on our humanity. They attacked the most important thing that makes us better than animals.

From early on in the pandemic, you criticised the police for their abuse of power. What were some of the most egregious examples of that abuse of power?

My first public statement on the point was provoked by the extraordinary behaviour of the Derbyshire Police, who, for some reason I never understood, seemed to have been at the forefront of this. But this mainly happened at the early stages of the pandemic. The government issued enormous quantities of guidance which went a lot further than the regulations. Therefore it is perhaps understandable that people were confused about what exactly was law and what was the government’s advice or request. The position was improved when the College of Policing issued a single page sheet of paper, which basically said what the police could and could not do. They said, you can only enforce the law, you cannot enforce the government’s guidance. Most of them behaved reasonably after the first few months.

Some of the police interventions were outrageous. One Chief Constable threatened to go through people’s shopping baskets to make sure they had not bought something inessential, although food shops were allowed to open for essential and inessential products alike. The police did overreach themselves, mainly in the early period. They should have known better, because the police have legal departments to tell them what the law is.

In December 2018, you reached the retirement age for full-time Supreme Court justices (70), but remained on the court’s supplementary list, which you would be eligible to do until you reach 75. However, you chose to stop hearing cases in 2019, and then resigned altogether in January 2021. What were your reasons for doing so?

I heard an appeal in a shipping case in spring 2019. In the summer of August 2019 I began to comment on the constitutional implications of the parliamentary rows over Brexit. I was due to hear a patent appeal in October, but I wrote to Lady Hale and said, I think I should come off the panel listed to hear that appeal because I had been commenting publicly on things that, although legal, were politically controversial. I asked informally not to be listed for the time being. When it became clear that I had other issues with government policy, I formally resigned from the Supplementary Panel of judges who could be called on to sit. It seemed to me unlikely that there would ever be a time before I was 75 when it would be appropriate to list me.

At that point, did you think it was more important to criticise what the government was doing than to be a judge?

I wanted to be free to comment on the constitutional position of the government on Brexit, and later on the wisdom, or lack of it, of government policy on Covid. Commenting on the constitutional position of the government on Brexit was the sort of thing that a former law lord would have been at liberty to do in the days when law lords were members of the House of Lords. So that was relatively marginal; I was taking an ultra-cautious view.

I think the consensus of judges would have been that ordinarily you should not be as openly critical of government policy as I was on Covid. Broadly speaking, I accept that. But I believe that there are some issues which are so important, not only for the development of current policy, but for the future of our country, that you have to be prepared to stand up and speak about them – especially if nobody else is doing so.

How did it feel to be one of the very few respectable people who spoke up against the lockdowns during the pandemic?

It felt quite lonely, although I received plenty of ‘undercover’ support. I got a large postbag. Many of the letters were from NHS people who firmly supported what I was saying, but said they would not dare to say it themselves because their jobs would be in danger. I got letters from politicians and civil servants saying much the same. In the case of the politicians, I thought this was rather shameful. So I was not as lonely as all that, but it sometimes looked that way.

As far as you are aware, to what extent did members of the Bar support your views about the lockdown?

I do not know. Most of the ones who spoke to me supported my position. But of course people are more likely to speak to me on the subject if they agree than if they disagree. I would not discount the possibility that there was a majority of barristers quietly snarling in corners.

What should the role of the judiciary be in a crisis like the pandemic? And how far did Britain’s judiciary fulfil that role in this case?

I think the judiciary has exactly the same role in a crisis as at any other time. The famous case study is Liversidge v Anderson (1941), about the administrative detention of people whose activities or opinions were thought to be unhelpful to the war effort during the Second World War. The relevant regulations said that the Home Secretary could intern people if he had ‘reasonable cause to believe’ that they were dangerous. The House of Lords said this meant that the Home Secretary could intern people if he thought they were dangerous, whether or not they actually were. This is now widely regarded as craven. There was a famous and much admired dissent by Lord Atkin who said – and this is now orthodoxy – that the laws are exactly the same in peace and in war, in crisis and in non-crisis. He objected to the motto silent leges inter arma (‘the laws are silent amidst the clash of arms’). His position is now regarded as the true one.

Did the judiciary live up to Lord Atkin’s statements during the pandemic? No, I do not think they did. The decision of the Court of Appeal in Dolan (December 2020) was badly reasoned. It is a fundamental constitutional principle that if you are going to have a regulation which authorises breaches of fundamental rights – and there is no doubt that locking people up is a breach of fundamental rights – the regulation has got to spell it out in letters of brass. You cannot rely on general language, because there is too great a risk that the more extreme consequences of that language will have been overlooked by people in the course of the passage of the relevant legislation through Parliament. That is a principle which had led the courts, time out of mind, to strike down Acts which are radical, but justified only by general words. It was a principle that the Court of Appeal shied away from applying when they interpreted the Public Health Act 1984. That was an unfortunate failure.

[See Sumption’s article, ‘Covid-19 and the courts – expediency or law?’ in the Law Quarterly Review; and this article by two law students at Oxford.]

 The Supreme Court compounded the failure by refusing to entertain an appeal [in Dolan]. My own belief is that the reason why they refused to entertain an appeal is that, at the time, there was much muttering in the Conservative government about the possibility of abolishing the Supreme Court, in revenge for having decided the two Miller cases against the government. I think they were afraid that they would inflame anti-Supreme Court tendencies in the government and parts of the press if they were to question what the government was doing about Covid.

The truth was that the government had the power to do what it did, but only under a different statute: not the Public Health Act, but the Civil Contingencies Act 2004. That was important, because the Civil Contingencies Act deals with emergency legislation and allows the government to do that sort of thing, but only subject to tight parliamentary supervision. The government escaped parliamentary supervision by relying on the wrong Act. This is something that is well brought out in Adam Wagner’s book, although he does not go so far as to say that the decision in Dolan was wrong. I think that it was wrong.

[Further discussion of the above Acts in Law in a Time of Crisis, chapter 12.]

The judiciary criticise governmental abuse of power when the occasion justifies it. I do not think they would have been criticised if they had said that the government had used the wrong Act. I do not think that they would have been criticised if they had held that in such fundamental matters the government must submit to democratic control. People would have blamed the government for using the wrong legislation, rather than the courts for pointing the fact out. The courts are more sensitive to the political atmosphere than they admit, but they ought to have come up to the plate when they were tested. They did not. In the event of course it made no difference, because the government’s measures had opposition support, but the principle matters. Oppositions will not always be so cowardly.

What can we as a society do to ensure that future governments will never be able to exercise this type of near-absolute power again?

I think it is unlikely that we will go into another lockdown, even if similar epidemiological conditions arise again. It is too much to expect the government to admit that it was a mistake. It is too much to expect the opposition to admit that their position was a mistake. We are never going to get any humble confessions, but people are now much more conscious that you cannot interfere with the basic mechanisms of society without inviting really serious economic, social and medical consequences. The fact that we are now in the midst of a financial crisis, which would probably have been avoided if we had not bust ourselves on Covid, has been a sobering lesson, as indeed the present Prime Minister pointed out during the pandemic. I think we are likely to be more cautious in future.

The problem is that the defence of liberty is a state of mind. The barriers to despotism are more psychological than legal. It is often said that certain things are unthinkable: that you would not use your power in that way even if you had it. But once you do, then what was previously unthinkable has become thinkable. It is very difficult to row back from that. The psychological barrier has gone, the dam has burst, and the psychological implications for other crises, possibly unconnected with health, will be with us, I fear, for a long time.

One way to resist this psychological lowering of the ‘barriers to despotism’ is presumably to keep on talking about what happened during the pandemic and try to come to terms with it.

That is why I am talking to you. It is always tempting to say, it is over now – let bygones be bygones. But I do not think we should do that. We have to learn lessons from experience. The fact that we are not in mid-crisis now does not mean that we should stop learning.

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The post ‘The defence of liberty is a state of mind’ – interview with Jonathan Sumption, Part I appeared first on The Freethinker.

For thousands of years, people have dimly suspected that exposure to the natural world might be good for them. But now Freddy McFrog, Professor of Behaviour Management at the University of North Uxbridge, has carried out a study which proves it.

A randomised sample of 374 adult humans was divided into two groups, ‘Walkers’ and ‘Pill-Takers’. The endorphin levels of each group were measured before, during and after either a walk in the countryside or a dose of anti-depressants. While the average endorphin levels of both groups were similar at the start of the experiment, they increased noticeably in the Walkers while they were out in the local nature reserve, and dropped slightly in the Pill-Takers immediately upon consumption of their medicine.

Staggeringly, three hours later, the Walkers’ endorphin levels remained high, while those of the Pill-Takers had fallen further. According to the report, some of the Pill-Takers even demanded more pills, ‘in the misguided belief that this would reverse the effects of the first dose.’

The results of the experiment show that, even in the twenty-first century, nature is still a more efficacious drug than pharmacological nurture. ‘This is a stunning discovery,’ said McFrog. ‘It seems that science has yet to reproduce the benefits that can be gained by simply heading to the nearest green space. It certainly gives us a new target to aim for.’ 

The project, involving a team of fifty researchers, was funded by WeMindU, an international health and technology conglomerate where McFrog is a consultant. The report has now been published in the leading science journal, Knowledge.

‘Previously, the idea that strolling up hill and down dale might make you happy was a truth that people had merely intuited by observation and reflection,’ said McFrog. ‘Now it has been established by science and become a fact.’  

When asked what the difference was between truth and facts, he replied, ‘Truth is a layman’s concept. It’s what we call “subjective” – it’s just your opinion. But facts are science: they have been checked by scientists. You can’t argue with facts.’ 

But what would happen if another scientist were to dispute those facts? McFrog’s reply was blunt. ‘Then he would be wrong, dangerously wrong. At best a useful idiot, playing into the hands of right-wing libertarian fascists. We would not publish him in any peer-reviewed journals. And of course he would be erased from the internet.’

Based on the results of McFrog’s study, WeMindU is now producing an app, TreesPlease, to continuously monitor its user’s endorphin levels. If it detects they are lower than average, it will automatically switch into ‘nature’ mode, with options like flowers, birdsong, and trees rustling gently in the breeze.

‘TreesPlease will be the perfect solution for those who are unable or unwilling to leave their homes,’ said Taylor Sunshine, a WeMindU marketing specialist, ‘or for those living in human-heavy areas where nature has been eliminated.’

The app costs £0.99 to purchase, but will be pre-installed on all new operating systems by regulations made under the Pandemic Act 2020. ‘The benefits of this technology will be enormous,’ said Doreen Norbert, Minister for Science and Religion. ‘At the cost of a mere £100 million to the taxpayer, it’s a bargain.’

‘We anticipate that the app will succeed where drugs have failed,’ said McFrog, who is on the government’s WISE committee. ‘It will optimise people’s mental health. And make it much easier to lock them down next time we need to.’

The post Scientist’s Discovery Leads to Ground-breaking App appeared first on The Freethinker.