“The next few years is likely to see a radical and lasting transformation of the relationshipbetween the state and the citizen. With it will come an equally fundamental change in our relations with each other, a change characterised by distrust, resentment and mutual hostility. In the nature of things, authoritarian governments fracture the societies which they govern. The use of political power as an instrument of mass coercion is corrosive. It divides and it embitters. In this case, it is aggravated by the sustained assault on social interaction which will sooner or later loosen the glue that helped us to deal with earlier crises. […]The government has discovered the power of public fear to let it get its way. It will not forget. Aristotle argued in his Politics that democracy was an inherently defective and unstable form of government. It was, he thought, too easily subverted by demagogues seeking to obtain or keep power by appeals to public emotion and fear. What has saved us from this fate in the two centuries that democracy has subsisted in this country is a tradition of responsible government, based not just on law but on convention, deliberation and restraint, and on the effective exercise of Parliamentary as opposed to executive sovereignty. But like all principles which depend on a shared political culture, this is a fragile tradition. It may now founder after two centuries in which it has served this country well. What will replace it is a nominal democracy, with a less deliberative and consensual style and an authoritarian reality which we will like a great deal less.” From the Cambridge Freshfields Annual Law Lecture, which Lord Sumption delivered on 27 October 2020.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/-this-is-how-freedom-dies-the-folly-of-britain-s-coercive-covid-strategy
See alternatively: https://youtu.be/amDv2gk8aa0
