Lord Sumption tells Allison Pearson…

“If you are going to inaugurate the greatest invasion of personal liberty in our entire history, even including wartime measures, if you dare to do that, then you have to move straight into justification mode. The government has now found itself trapped in a position where, first of all, it has to exaggerate the extent of the problem in order to justify its past actions. And secondly, by exaggerating the scale of the problem, it is contributing to the difficulty that it now faces in persuading people to go back to school and back to work, because naturally what people ask is, well, what has changed since?”