Lord Sumption, retired justice of the supreme court of the UK,  insists that the measures taken by the UK government in response to the threat posed by the Covid-19 pandemic represent a “hysterical slide into a police state” and an “irrational overreaction driven by fear”.

Moreover, he told the BBC, the public, consumed with panic, have abandoned their critical faculties: failing to ask whether the action they have demanded of the government will actually work, whether the cost of it will be worth paying, and whether the cure is worse than the disease...

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