X Close

Jonathan Sumption on Gaza, lockdown and the ECHR Will humanity ever escape the shadow of war?

“War is the origin of the state.” Fairfax Media/Getty Images/Getty Images

“War is the origin of the state.” Fairfax Media/Getty Images/Getty Images


October 22, 2023   24 mins

Jonathan Sumption is a difficult man to define: revered historian, esteemed lawyer and one of Britain’s greatest public intellectuals. He came to greatest popular prominence during the Covid pandemic as one of the most lucid opponents of the Government’s lockdown policies. But as that era came to a close, he returned to a lifelong project — his acclaimed history of the Hundred Years’ War, now completed with the publication of the fifth volume.

This week, he joined me at the UnHerd Club to discuss everything from our evolving attitudes to war and Joan of Arc, to Covid, the ECHR and Roe v. Wade. Below is an edited transcript.

 

Freddie Sayers: Lord Sumption, you’ve kindly agreed that we are on “ask me anything” rules. Our ambition is to move between your recently completed history of the Hundred Years War and contemporary controversies that a historical perspective might shed light on. Let’s see how that goes! 

To begin with, it’s remarkable how much the historical period you’ve devoted 43 years of your life to is defined by war.

JS: War is crucial. Until the beginning of the 20th century, the two principal collective activities of mankind were religion and war. The purpose of the state was to serve the second of those things, but usually the first as well. War is at the heart of the experience of societies. It is what created the state, in that war made it necessary for the state to find a way of organising the resources of a country. It’s something that, during the Hundred Years War, the English government initially did very much better than the French, which is why, although they were a smaller, less populated, less rich country, they won their battles initially. The tables were reversed later. But war is absolutely critical to an understanding of the creation of the state and of human societies. That doesn’t just apply to this country. It applies to pretty well every country.

Medieval societies had a completely different attitude towards conflict. We regard war today as an unwanted catastrophe that periodically breaks in on us against our wishes. They regarded war as the norm, the normal way of settling international disputes, and quite a few internal disputes. And so, people didn’t say: “This is terribly wasteful, we could be spending the money on new universities or the National Health Service.” It was not felt that the duty of the state extended to relieving poverty or to promoting human happiness. Therefore, there was nothing wrong with war, it was a perfectly reasonable thing to spend what money you had on. It’s an attitude that, today, it’s quite hard to work your way into.

FS: Although given the news of the past fortnight, it is clear that primal war over territory, between peoples that don’t have any hope of seeing eye to eye, is still a feature of today.

JS: It is as old as the hills. In the 14th century, the English adopted what I can only describe as terrorist tactics to try and batter the French government into submitting to their demands. They conducted huge raids in which they indiscriminately killed large numbers of people and burned whole villages. This is what we would call terrorism. It really wasn’t until the 18th century that war became a battle between organised armed forces. We’re now reverting to an earlier pattern in which at least one side in any war is a disorganised group of people. Hamas is a good example. They’re semi-organised, and their object is indiscriminate violence because they do not have the resources to confront whoever their enemy is with the same sort of weapons. If you are a semi-state, and the underdog, this is how you wage war. England was 100% of a state in the 14th century, and they still waged war that way.

FS: So you think what we saw on 7 October in Israel — the killing of infants, the kidnapping of elderly people: there would be no qualms about that in the 1400s?

JS: None at all. There were theoretical qualms about killing priests and pilgrims. But that was it. Everyone else was fair game. We have an image of the late Middle Ages as an age of chivalry. Actually, chivalry was a purely decorative concept, a form of aristocratic showing off. It had almost no implications for the conduct of war, except that it governed the rules about taking prisoners and ransoming them — taking prisoners was very profitable because you could sell them. So apart from that, chivalry was a decorative illusion. It was actually a very grubby and violent period. On the whole, I don’t believe that humanity changes very much. The technological possibilities which enabled them to achieve their objectives have changed quite radically, obviously. But their ambitions and moral sensibilities have not changed at all and we can see that all around us.

FS: Do you think we are regressing back to a more medieval mode of warfare?

JS: Organised wars, conflicts between disciplined armies — I’m certainly not suggesting we won’t see more of those. That would be tempting fate. But all the wars since the Second World War — possibly the Korean War is an exception — have involved loose associations of guerrillas and terrorists either facing other similar groups or facing organised armies like the Western armies in Iraq and Afghanistan.

FS: Much of your history is concerned with the formation of England and France as nations. Do you think that nations are receding from the prominence they have historically enjoyed?

JS: On the contrary, I think nations, after a period in which they were thought to be rather old hat, are coming back. I think that national self-interest is reasserting itself in quite a big way.

FS: Since we touched on the current conflict, it would be remiss not to ask what you think the legal situation should be here in the UK regarding Israel-Palestine protests. There has been a lot of discussion of whether slogans like “Palestine shall be free, from the river to the sea” should be deemed illegal as they are supporting a terrorist organisation or advocating the destruction of Israel. Where do you think the line should be?

JS: There’s been an awful lot of nonsense talked about this, some of it coming from surprising authorities like the Home Secretary. Hamas is a proscribed organisation. It’s illegal to support them. I don’t think that it’s illegal to support — lawfully, without violence — the cause which they support violently. I do not think it’s illegal to say that Palestine should be a distinct state. I don’t think it’s illegal to say that Palestinians have a legitimate grievance. (These are not necessarily my views, but they are views, which it’s perfectly legal to express.) The mere fact that most Palestinians live in an area, Gaza, which is controlled by Hamas, does not mean to say that everything that you say in favour of the Palestinians is necessarily to be treated as equivalent to supporting Hamas. So a great many of the slogans, the demonstrations, and the flags that we’ve seen in the streets are not illegal at all, at least not on that ground.

FS: Are you worried that normal freedom of expression is being imperilled?

JS: I don’t think so far it’s been imperilled. I think what we’ve seen so far is some rather silly and ill-considered statements from people who should know better. We’ve got to see how the situation develops. My impression, for what it’s worth, is that we are tending slightly to recede from the initial feeling that all good men and true must necessarily support Israel. I think that a realisation of the humanitarian consequences of the Israeli invasion of Gaza has caused quite a lot of people — not everybody, but a lot of people — to pause. And on the face of it, it looks as if an invasion of Gaza would have some of the indiscriminate qualities that people quite rightly objected to when practised by Hamas.

FS: I’m going to take us back to the late Middle Ages now. Joan of Arc is perhaps the standout character of your last volume. And it’s just the most extraordinary story and oddly quite a contemporary one.

JS: She is the most interesting phenomenon, I agree. The Middle Ages basically believed that women were unfit for any responsible job other than heads of state. You could be a queen, but you couldn’t be anything else. Joan of Arc clearly and spectacularly broke that convention. She was a 17-year-old peasant who reversed the course of the war in the space of a year. That was a very remarkable thing. She challenges objective history. No serious historian can really believe in miracles, however religious he may be (and I don’t). On the other hand, some of the things that she did are difficult to explain short of divine intervention.

So what is one to do if the probability points to something that you can’t possibly believe in? I think the answer is that, in war, there are risks and there is bluff. And people who take risks, and try bluffing, often get somewhere. It’s usually luck. It’s not an act that can be sustained for that long, but it wasn’t sustained for very long. Joan of Arc’s military career lasted less than a year. Napoleon said that, in war, three quarters of it is morale, and the rest of it is manpower and all the rest. And I think a lot of experienced soldiers, certainly a lot of historians, would agree with that.

FS: So a 17-year-old girl — you describe her as anorexic in your book, illiterate, who dresses in men’s clothes, somehow manages to get herself to the court of the Dauphin and become the mascot of the French within months. So, she was a sort of influencer?

JS: Yes. She transformed the morale of the French, and completely destroyed that of the English. And that was something that not only the French thought, but the English agreed with. The Duke of Bedford, who ruled the English occupied parts of France, in his post mortem on what had happened, said: this woman was a miracle worker. He didn’t think that she was inspired by God — the miracles were the work of the Devil — but that she had supernatural powers, and that they destroyed the English morale was something that he regarded as self-evident. The records that we have of the interrogation of English prisoners of war taken by the French around that time bear out exactly the same story.

FS: Is it ridiculous to make the comparison to someone like Greta Thunberg?

JS: Well, Greta Thunberg has this much in common with Joan of Arc: Joan of Arc was widely regarded by the professional soldiers as a damn nuisance. They kept their councils of war in the middle of the night when she was in bed, or when she was somewhere else. And I think there’s a lot of feelings of the same sort, among people who are actually serious climate change authorities, about Greta Thunberg. But Greta Thunberg was a demonstrator; Joan of Arc was a fairly active doer.

FS: Although she didn’t actually fight. 

JS: No, she didn’t actually fight. She was in the middle of the melée, and she had a sword and axes and things, but she never killed anybody. She told her judges that, and all the evidence bears it out. She was there essentially as a morale booster.

On the coronation march to Reims to crown Charles VII, all the towns opened their gates because she simply appeared in front of them and said: “Open your gates, in the name of God.” They had heard slightly exaggerated stories of her miracle-working in the Loire Valley and they were terrified. And that worked a dream until she came to the walls of Paris. They didn’t open the gates. Paris was the great capital of the English and the Dukes of Burgundy, and the population was onside and they fought back. She announced her mission, demanded that they open the gates, and said they would be sent to Hell by the God of justice if they didn’t. And the response from a quite lowly crossbowmen was, “Shall we now, you brassy trollop,” whereupon he loosed his crossbow and caused her quite serious injuries, which prevented her from taking any further part.

FS: The beginning of the end for Joan of Arc.

JS: It rather damaged her credibility!

FS: One other event that took place in this huge period between the 1300s and the mid-1400s was, of course, the Black Death, the huge plague that ravaged both England and France. Do you think this history and your sense of proportion were part of your background thinking when our own pandemic took place in 2020? 

JS: My sense of history told me that there had been an awful lot of epidemics, which were at least as serious, usually more serious than Covid. And it seemed to me, therefore, that to overreact, to treat this as an occasion for closing down all social life, was, frankly, absurd. It was a serious enough illness. But it was not unprecedented. And humanity has survived without inflicting these appalling tortures on itself perfectly satisfactorily through much worse epidemics. The Black Death was one example. But there are very many others.

There is one similarity, which is worth noting. In the Black Death and during other epidemics of bubonic plague in the Late Middle Ages, people used to believe that they had suffered a terrible infliction sent to them by God. It was due to their sinfulness. So they organised processions around the walls of the towns in which they lived in which they flagellated themselves. And during the Covid inquiry, we flagellated ourselves quite unnecessarily.

In my view, they were more sensible approaches than lockdowns. But what the two incidents had in common was a feeling that if you didn’t modify the flesh, if you didn’t inflict some misfortune on yourselves, you were going to be a sucker for this disease. People did it without any kind of religious motivation. So that’s an important difference. But the desire to inflict damage on yourself in order to ward off what you believe to be an impending catastrophe is a fundamental feature of human psychology at most historical times.

FS: If we look at other dissenting figures of authority, I think you could almost observe a trend, that people who had a broader learning, a broader interest than purely one particular branch of one particular science, tended to take a view more similar to yours. Sunetra Gupta for example, the scientist from Oxford, is also a novelist. Do you think there’s something in that?

JS: I think the more experience that you have of life — and history is essentially a source of vicarious experience — the more sceptical you are likely to be about any magic bullet solution. What was remarkable about Covid was that in deciding upon lockdowns the Government didn’t even look at perfectly modern examples of reasons why you shouldn’t do this. It is absolutely clear that they never considered, and discouraged other people from considering, the downsides — economic, financial, educational, social, mental health issues. This was a classic example of an extreme magic bullet mentality: “We are going to lock people down, we do not care what the collateral consequences might be, because we’re only interested in one thing, which is reducing deaths from Covid. We don’t mind if deaths from dementia go up, if deaths from untreated or undiagnosed cancer go up.” It is the most narrow minded conceivable approach to any major policy issue. You don’t need to go back to the 14th century in order to see why.

FS: When you look back at the Covid period, now three years on, do you think you can now say with confidence that you were right and that lockdowns were a mistake?

JS: I felt I could say that with confidence at the time actually! I think that the proportion of people who think lockdowns were a good idea has diminished, but a majority still think that. I also think that I converted very few people. What I did do I suspect was cheer up a lot of people who already agreed with me.

Now, lots of people come up to me and say: “Thank you for what you said, during the lockdown.” And I got a huge postbag of 200 letters a week and I would think 90% of them were supportive. I’m not suggesting for a moment that this is a statistically representative sample of the British population. But the sorts of people who take the trouble to write your letter are people who want to say: more power to your elbow. And that’s obviously cheering — you feel you’re doing something useful, even if it’s not persuading people on the other side of the argument.

FS: Do you look at society differently — with greater trepidation — or feel like the institutions of our liberal society are more fragile than you had thought they were? Has it changed your world view?

JS: Yes. I was surprised by the readiness of people to submit to this. I have always been fascinated and appalled in roughly equal measure by the political writings of Thomas Hobbes. Ever since I was a teenager, when I first read Leviathan. Everybody should read Hobbes, because he is the most persuasive master of the English language and of advocacy that I know. If you follow his syllogisms, one after the other you agree with them all, and you suddenly end up in a place you didn’t want to be. And you say, “Blimey, how did I get here?”

But the serious point about Hobbes is that he believed life was horrible, and that fear of its horrible qualities was what made people accept despotism. Hobbes believed in absolute government and he quite correctly noted that fear was what drove people to support absolute governments. Now, we have actually managed, since Hobbes was writing in the middle of the 17th century, to live our public lives on quite different principles. We’ve managed, without fear and without the systematic application of coercion, to achieve a moderately civilised system of political discourse and decision making. And that’s very remarkable. But what struck me about the Covid epidemic, was that quite suddenly, you found yourself reverting to a pattern which I thought we had abandoned for nearly 300 years. That was a dismaying experience.

And it was one reason why I took a reasonably public and prominent role in criticising it. And I actually believe in the principle that former judges should, on the whole, not engage in politically controversial things unless they have a strictly constitutional or legal nature. But it seems to me that everybody has a threshold beyond which the issue is so serious that you have to stand up and be counted. And I felt that this was a change in the collective mentality of not just this nation, but European nations and North American nations generally, which had really sinister implications for the future of liberal methods of government. And it seemed to me this was far more important than any conventional limitations on what former judges ought to say.

FS: Do you think we’re going to get it back, that liberal mood, or do you think it is broken? 

JS: I’m both an optimist and a pessimist on this. It depends on what your timeframe is.

FS: How about the next 50 years?

JS: At the moment, we are in a mood which progressively jettisons basic liberal positions, like the observance of Rules of Procedure for government, which are more important than the outcome of any particular issue. And you’ve got to have a devotion to the rules, which transcends your attachments to particular issues, so that you do not regard it as an outrage when you lose on some, as you inevitably will. I also think that the classic liberal position on free speech is seriously undermined. I would expect these trends to continue for a while, certainly beyond my lifetime, and possibly beyond yours, I don’t know.

What will happen is that the current trend which is common to both Left and Right, to favour more authoritarian ways of doing things, to favour the idea that society should only have one view on something, and it is a political responsibility to determine what that view is going to be — all that is going to get worse. And I think that the ultimate result will be an authoritarian style of government across Europe and North America. North America may well be the first place that one sees it in its ultimate culmination. I think that at that point, people will say: “We don’t like this very much.” And at that stage, you will see a reversion to a more considerate model of social existence. I can’t say how long that’s going to take, but it might be decades.

FS: One example that you’ve been in the news talking about recently — which might seem to go against what you’re saying, in that it’s about leaving behind a set of rules — is the European Court of Human Rights. To some people, that court would be a nice example of a liberal institution respecting rules beyond individual tribes and nations. And yet, you want the UK to leave it?

JS: Yes. I don’t think this is likely to happen, but it would be a good thing if it did. I am not against a rule-based system and I am not against human rights. I simply think that we need to decide what human rights we want and to what degree we want them. At the moment, the problem is not the Convention itself, which is a collection of principles, not a single one of which I would question in any way. What I oppose is the legislative process by which the Strasbourg court, the European Court of Human Rights, has emancipated itself from the only thing that the states party to the Convention ever agreed, which was the text of the Convention. I do not think that it is the function of judges to revise the laws to bring them up to date — that is a function of representative institutions, certainly in a democracy.

So I would favour withdrawing from the European Convention and substituting it for an identical text, but simply interpreting it responsibly in accordance with what it’s intended to mean, and not in accordance with a wider political agenda — which I’m afraid is the animating spirit currently of the Strasbourg Court. I had hoped before that the Strasbourg Court would learn from the occasions when, particularly in this country, we have jibed at what they’ve done. I had hoped that things would improve as a result of the Brighton declaration, and its statement in favour of what was called, rather pompously, “subsidiarity”. I no longer believe that the Strasbourg Court is capable of independent reform.

FS: So you don’t mind the rules, but you think they’ve been politicised or they’re being incorrectly applied?

JS: I think the point about rules is that they’re designed to bring some kind of order to human affairs. If you have a rule which depends on whatever a legislator in Strasbourg thinks it ought to be, the essential predictability which rules are designed to achieve is gone. I have no problem about the notion of a foreign tribunal deciding whether our observance of human rights is adequate provided that the tribunal in question follows the rules. What I object to is a situation in which they require everyone else to follow rules of their own devising, but recognise no rules governing their own decisions.

FS: Do you think we should be renegotiating or reconsidering the Geneva Convention on refugees as well?

JS: I don’t know. I certainly think that the Geneva Convention was made for a different world: a world in which travel across national borders was a lot more difficult, and a lot more expensive. Originally, asylum rules were designed for very prominent national leaders of rebellious movements such as Lajos Kossuth, the great Hungarian nationalist of the 19th century. Then, in the wake of the catastrophe involving millions of displaced persons at the end of the Second World War, there was a strictly temporary Refugee Convention designed to enable these people to be resettled. In 1951, that was changed so that it became a permanent institution, and not limited to the persons displaced by the Second World War.

I think the people who agreed to that at the time did not appreciate that, with the disappearance of the European colonial empires, a lot of the world would come into chaos; that people suffering persecution would become very numerous — millions and millions in many countries of the world; and that, simultaneously, the improvements and the easing of the actual logistical difficulties of travel over long distances would enable lots of them to make their way towards the remaining ordered parts of the world.

FS: It sounds like you think the Geneva Convention is no longer fit for purpose?

JS: It isn’t fit for purpose, but whether one should depart from it is a different question. I confess that I’ve not studied this as carefully as I have studied the problems associated with the European Convention on Human Rights. I think it’s obvious that the Refugee Convention was made for a world that no longer exists. I am much less certain about what we should do about that.

FS: We’re going to go back to the late Middle Ages one last time. The whole series of volumes is about Britain (or England) and France — and whether they were to become one country or not. There was a moment when it looked like the Lancaster kings would manage to unify the kingdoms. That obviously didn’t happen. We retreated and the Channel became our border. 

You have a house in France. You spend a lot of time there. You were against Brexit, even though you’re now in favour of leaving the Strasbourg Court. Do you feel like we are more separate from Europe than at any time since the Hundred Years’ War?

JS: Well, before the Hundred Years’ War, England was a European polity because it ruled a significant chunk of western France. It was never an island politically until the Hundred Years’ War: it became one as a result of the war. But Britain has always engaged with the Continent. William Pitt the Younger was one of a number of people who remarked that the frontier of England is actually on the Rhine. He wasn’t asserting a right to rule everything on the western side of the Rhine. He was saying: that is the boundary on which our security depends. It’s not the Channel. So there’s a mixture of insularity and pre-European integration with Europe. It’s part of the dualism around British foreign policy that has always existed.

One of the reasons why I think that Brexit was a mistake was that it is a repudiation of five centuries of intelligently conceived foreign policy in Britain. The main policy of successive governments in Britain, since the 16th century, has been to avoid a situation in which a single power dominated the whole of continental Europe. That is why we went to war with Louis XIV at the start of the 18th century, with Napoleon at the beginning of the 19th century, and with Germany twice in the course of the 20th century.

What we have done by withdrawing is, first of all, to remove from the European system the principal opponents of the federalisation of Europe. We were undoubtedly the leading objectors to this, and we had actually successfully resisted it for many years. In this way, we have contributed to what will over the next few years become the greater unification of Europe. And at the same time, we have abandoned any possible claim to influence what it does. So we have done something that, it seems to me, has negated decades, centuries of serious thoughts about the strategic position of the United Kingdom in Europe.

FS: Would you vote to rejoin?

The problem about rejoining is that we wouldn’t get the golden terms that were there when we left — and that is a really serious problem. What I think will probably happen is that we will, over the next generation or two, conclude a succession of agreements with the European Union that will bring us closer to it without actually being members. And I would applaud that personally. Eventually, we may well decide that we might as well join and recover our influence.

FS: This is the perfect time to take some questions

Question One: In your Reith lectures, you talk about how the judiciary has usurped the legislature throughout many Western countries — and you give the particular example of the United States, and the controversial Roe v. Wade Supreme Court ruling. If you could advise the six conservative Supreme Court justices, what would you advise them moving forward?

JS: I can’t imagine a situation in which I would end up advising them — or a situation in which they would pay attention to me if I did. But it would be quite difficult.

The rationale of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization — the case which overruled Roe v. Wade — was that there was no constitutional right to abortion, from which it necessarily follows that the right to legislate on this subject reverted to the individual states. That view has been in keeping with the conservative view on the Supreme Court for a long time — although it was until recently a minority view: that the federal government, and the federal legislature, have intruded too far on the autonomy of the states.

FS: Do you think it’s a good thing that it’s gone back to the states?

JS: Yes, I do. I thought that Roe v. Wade was a bad decision because it took an intense moral issue on which a very large proportion of ordinary Americans had strong views of their own, and decided it in a way that marginalised and rendered irrelevant the views of the public. I think that was the main reason why in Europe, where regulated rights of abortion were introduced by legislation, the issue is pretty uncontroversial now. In every case, it was done by statutes. (The only country which doesn’t have a right of abortion tool now is Malta.) The result was that people, whatever their initial views, accepted it; they don’t in the United States because they were never consulted.

Although I think that Roe v. Wade was a very bad decision, I think that Dobbs was in a way an even worse one, because I actually believe that there ought to be a regulated right of abortion. But I do not believe that it is a fundamental right. I don’t believe that it is part of the United States Constitution or any other constitution that I know of. I think it’s a matter for legislative choice. And I think the sensible legislators will do what most European legislators have done.

I think the problem about Dobbs was that Roe v. Wade had survived for 50 years, and there was no respectable reason for departing from a judgement that had become part of the basic legal structure of life in the United States. The reasons given by the Dobbs court for overruling Roe v. Wade in spite of the precedence were to my mind wholly unconvincing. I do not agree with Justice Breyer’s justification of Roe v. Wade in principle, but I wholeheartedly agree with his view that — having decided Roe v. Wade the way that they did, and having in successive decisions of the Supreme Court reaffirmed it — they should not have disabled it.

Question Two: You said that the nation-state was coming back, and I wonder what your comment would be about the level of migration which we see in this country. The figure of net migration last year of about 600,000 was widely reported — do you think that will alter the legitimacy of the nation state?

JS: I don’t believe that the nation-state is inconsistent with very high levels of migration. I think there are other objections to very high levels of migration, but not that one. The classic example of the nation state in the modern world is the United States of America, which is entirely made up of ethnic and cultural minorities coming from elsewhere. It’s the great migration state.

An awful lot depends on the culture within the state, the ability of a society to absorb migrants, and to encourage them to adopt collective attitudes which are the same as those of the rest of the original population. I actually think that this country has been quite good at that — better, for example, than France, to name one obvious country, which has also suffered even higher levels of migration.

As to what can be done about it — the argument against high levels of migration is that it promotes insecurity, it strains resources, although migrants also create wealth as well as consuming it. But these are different arguments to the ones about the existence of the nation. What can one do about it, if one takes the view that migration is excessive? The answer is it’s a mixture of national and international measures. We have the misfortune to be an island. And it’s easier to get into an island than it is to a country with land borders. This sounds ironic, but the fact is, if you’ve got a land border, you can erect a physical barrier and keep people out who do not satisfy whichever test you choose to impose on new arrivals. If you are an island, you can’t erect a barrier in the middle of the sea. But actually, our own migration figures are not as large as those of Italy, France, Greece, Germany, or Sweden. So we are not we’re not in a unique position here.

FS: It’s notable also that the French are not being especially helpful in solving the boats situation in the Channel.

JS: One can understand that — they have a bigger migration problem than we do. And they are, no doubt, happy to see some of their migrants disappearing across the Channel.

Question Three: In the last 10 days or so we’ve heard a great deal about the law of armed conflict, and international humanitarian law, which seems to be a way of possibly stilling Israel’s hand. Both concepts grew out of the just war tradition, and I’m wondering, how recognised was that in the Hundred Years’ War and did it make any difference? And will international humanitarian law make any difference or is it really about the battle of the narrative?

JS: The notion of just war is a form of natural law. And it was much favoured by theologians and civil lawyers, the successors of the Roman law tradition. In the Middle Ages, it had virtually no practical impact on the way that wars were conducted. Current just war theories are very different because they’re essentially based on treaties, in particular the various Hague and Geneva Conventions, which control the way that we use force.

One of the rules, which has been in existence at least since 1908, is that you may not target civilians, and you may not conduct operations in a way that will inevitably produce casualties among civilians disproportionate to those among actual fighters. Now, these are quite difficult concepts to apply to a fighting force, which is not a disciplined army — of the sort that people had in mind in 1908 — but is a semi-organised group of, for want of a better word, thugs, like Hamas.

FS: Should we try, though?

JS: We should try. The difference is that more is expected of organised states like Israel, with disciplined armed forces recognising an orthodox hierarchy of command. So it seems to me to be perfectly clear that for the Israelis, to conduct the war on a basis that indiscriminately targets civilians is contrary to international law, and has been for quite a number of years. It’s also contrary to international law to forcibly displace people from their homes, to blockade them in the way that Israel has been doing certainly since 2007.

FS: So you believe Israel is breaking international law?

JS: I certainly believe that it has done and that what it threatens to do now would do.

Question Four: You mentioned the destruction of civil liberties that took place during the pandemic and what struck me especially was the abolition of negative liberty, and in particular, bodily sovereignty. Given the Hobbesian view that the security of the people is the supreme law, and given that power-hungry despots must certainly share that outlook or be aware of that, what’s to stop supranational opportunists, who may want a Leviathan, from seeking or even creating continuous insecurity and crises in order to impose their supreme law? Will we have solutions in search of problems?

JS: Well, the notion that Salus Populi Suprema Lex is actually due to Cicero and it is, to my mind, complete rubbish. The authorship of Cicero lends to it spurious respectability. But it’s actually a recipe for tyranny at a time of crisis. So I’ve never been impressed by that as a maxim of government. As to whether foreign powers or supranational authorities might promote disorder for the purpose of taking advantage, I don’t know any example where that is actually happening.

FS: I suppose maybe she was thinking about the World Health Organization, organisations like that, which might try to get the right to dictate pandemic policy in the future.

JS: That’s not creating disorder. The problem about that kind of thing is that it assumes that one size fits all. It seems to me that a completely uniform, internationally-regimented approach to dealing with, for example, a pandemic, would deprive us of the possibility of experimenting with a different approach. I think that one of the principal lessons of the pandemic was the success of Sweden in achieving a lower death toll than this country and a death toll broadly in line with the European average, without a lockdown. And it seems to me, therefore, that had we been deprived of that possibility by some kind of international arrangements, we would be much poorer. I’m in favour of a situation in which different pressures, different political situations, different constitutional positions, can produce a variety of solutions, because they are much more likely to ensure that one of them is right.

Question Five: You said previously that you think that in the near-future we probably will see a major shift towards authoritarianism across the West, and that the US might well be the first country to exhibit it. What concrete aspects, practically speaking, might take America, both politically and judicially, in that direction?

JS: I wasn’t necessarily thinking of judicial interventions. The United States has a very rigid Constitution. It has a fair-weather constitution. And the United States has had remarkably and unusually fair weather throughout its history. There have basically been only two periods of American history in which there have been serious economic difficulties. One was in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, and the other was in the Thirties. So, America has experienced an upward trajectory, both in absolute terms, and relative to the rest of the world, for the greater part of its history.

The Great Destroyer of civil society is the disappointment of entrenched expectations. That was why most of Europe turned totalitarian between the wars. The Depression of the Thirties disappointed expectations of continuous upward movement which had become entrenched for a long time and had only briefly been interrupted by the First World War. I think that the problem that the United States has is that its rigid constitution, and in particular its legislative immobility is very ill-adapted to deal with a situation of long-term decline. I don’t think that the United States will decline in absolute terms. But I think it’s pretty clear that it will decline in its relative position in the world.

And I think that the implications of that for jobs that aren’t at the cutting-edge of technology are really very serious. And I don’t think that the Americans are likely to be very good at managing it. A much more flexible political constitution such as ours has managed to accommodate a significant relative decline since the Second World War rather successfully. And I am concerned that Trump and Trump’s doings and followers are not simply an incident related to this particularly extraordinary individual, but a symptom of a much broader malaise in the United States associated with capricious patterns of inequality, with the decline of traditional skills, and with the exportation of jobs, which is the inevitable result of the decline of traditional skills.

I am not optimistic about the future of the United States because I think that its current political travails are essentially part of a pattern that is dictated by the general situation of the country and its history, and not an unfortunate accident of the arrival of this particularly monstrous individual.

FS: Does that mean that you’re more optimistic about the prospects of the UK? Will our flexible constitution mean that we weather future declines better? 

JS: Yes, I think it will. But that doesn’t mean to say that we will avoid future decline. I think that the political consequences of decline will be much more serious in the United States than they are here. But decline is an uncomfortable experience, whether you accommodate it politically or not.

Triumph and Illusion, Volume V of Jonathan Sumption’s history of the 100 Years War, is out now.


Freddie Sayers is the Editor-in-Chief & CEO of UnHerd. He was previously Editor-in-Chief of YouGov, and founder of PoliticsHome.

freddiesayers

Join the discussion


Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber


To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.

Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.

Subscribe
Subscribe
Notify of
guest

109 Comments
Most Voted
Newest Oldest
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
J Bryant
J Bryant
11 months ago

That was a most interesting discussion. In contrast to so many intellectuals who seem to believe arcane jargon is essential to establishing their credentials, Lord Sumption uses plain English, and clear thinking, to great effect.
I was particularly struck by his prediction (or at least his sense) that we may live through a period of increasing totalitarian government in which the “accepted” opinion throughout society on key issues will be determined by politicians and the rest of us must accept that or, in some way, be branded as outcasts. Only when people tire of this form of ideological tyranny will they rebel and society return to a state more akin to classical liberalism. What really struck me was his proposed time frame for the eventual return to something approaching normality: at least a decade.
Like many others, I would like to see the end of left-wing ideological tyranny soon, and I don’t want it replaced with right-wing ideological tyranny. Sadly, we might all have to wait quite a long time for the reassertion of common sense.

Billy Bob
Billy Bob
11 months ago
Reply to  J Bryant

It’s always been that way. The Puritanism of Cromwell was replaced by large feasts and general excesses. The strict conformity of the Victorian age eventually gave way to the hippies of the 60’s and 70’s. Communitarianism gave way to Thatcherite individualism, and in my opinion is now heading back the other way.
Democracy’s greatest strength isn’t in its elected politicians or leaders (who are largely useless) but in the way the public are able to prevent any system going to the extreme fringes

J Bryant
J Bryant
11 months ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

Agreed, but my main concern is how long the rebalancing will take. In my heart I suspect Mr. Sumption is correct. The woke religion is now so deeply embedded in our institutions I suspect it will take years to root it out.

Billy Bob
Billy Bob
11 months ago
Reply to  J Bryant

Quite possibly, it’ll be the young children now who will rebel against it so realistically you’re looking at a couple of decades minimum before they’re in a position to have the power to alter it. Only thing you can do in the meantime is not go along with all the nonsense, just concentrate on yourself, friends and family

Nik Jewell
Nik Jewell
11 months ago
Reply to  J Bryant

Decades, I fear.

Charles Stanhope
Charles Stanhope
11 months ago
Reply to  J Bryant

Why Mr Sumption here, yet Lord Sumption in your previous post, 7 hours ago pray?

Charles Stanhope
Charles Stanhope
11 months ago
Reply to  J Bryant

Remember the infamous’King and Country Debate’ on the 9 February 1933 at the Oxford Union!

The motion presented:- “This House will under NO circumstances fight for its King and country”!
It passed at 275 votes for the motion and 153 against it.

Just over six years later things were rather different.

Ari Dale
Ari Dale
11 months ago
Reply to  J Bryant

Lord Sumption.

Ari Dale
Ari Dale
11 months ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

But are we, the public, censored and censured at every turn, still able to put the brakes on our systems?

Nik Jewell
Nik Jewell
11 months ago
Reply to  J Bryant

Yes, very depressing indeed. Reference his comments on Israel-Palestine here – they are the same as mine, but they are not the same as Douglas Murray’s (who has lost my respect in the past couple of weeks).
Pandemic measures, gender ideology and critical social justice (and, to some extent, Net Zero) have led to an alliance between liberals and conservatives and a healthy scepticism about narratives and truth vs propaganda. Along comes this conflict (and it happened, to a lesser extent, with Ukraine), and that alliance has been torn asunder in an instant, revealing a suspension of critical thinking and an authoritarian streak on the right, matching that we are seeing on the left. A reversion to tribal thinking has taken place.
I can only hope that we reunite again in attempting to slow this slide into authoritarianism by resisting CBDCs and digital ID, though again, the Right here is susceptible to arguments about using digital ID as a tool against migrants.

Charles Stanhope
Charles Stanhope
11 months ago
Reply to  Nik Jewell

I have been too IDLE to monitor Douglas Murray of late, may I ask what has he been saying?

Nik Jewell
Nik Jewell
11 months ago

Dismissed international humanitarian law, overgeneralised about the motivations of protestors, recommended arresting thousands and deporting those who can be deported, and fed it all into his narrative about the moral decline of the West.
I’m sure that is music to the ears of some, but not mine (nor is it legal for Lord Sumption).

Charles Stanhope
Charles Stanhope
11 months ago
Reply to  Nik Jewell

Thank you.

“Moderation in ALL things”.*

(*Hesiod and later Plautus.)

Ari Dale
Ari Dale
11 months ago

Tell it to HAMAS.

Georgivs Novicianvs
Georgivs Novicianvs
11 months ago

Cleobulus, too.

Jane Awdry
Jane Awdry
11 months ago

Including moderation… 😉

Stephen Hunter
Stephen Hunter
11 months ago

I recommend you check out the source material rather than rely on a summary whose content bears no relation to anything I have read by Douglas Murray lately. At no point in his Spectator articles at any rate has he done/advocated any of the above.

0 0
0 0
11 months ago
Reply to  Nik Jewell

The down buttons are intersting – this is a mere statement of fact – what Douglas Murray said.

Ari Dale
Ari Dale
11 months ago
Reply to  Nik Jewell

Your defense of your anti-Murray position has all the moral gravitas of pie-throwing.

mike otter
mike otter
11 months ago
Reply to  Ari Dale

I don’t think its a defence of any position, more a narrative. Plus i’m sure most people will agree that whilst Murray’s heart maybe in the right place he is not a rigorous thinker. He would do his cause more good to step back and leave the heavy lifting to those capable of doing it!

Sam Brown
Sam Brown
11 months ago
Reply to  Nik Jewell

I think you continue to fall into the trap of liberalism, which is why we are in this mess in the first place, in thinking that within the protestors there aren’t a large body of people who do not wish this country well, indeed actively work to impose their non-Western cultural agenda, but are sly enough to know how far they can push the boundaries of free speech and not cross a line into criminality. Although not specific to the marches (as I have no idea if he attended or not) an example of such is Mohammed Hijab who, in a discussion with Jordan Petersen, when challenged about having incited violence immediately responded with a grin to please point out where on the film he said this. His confidence and obvious delight in knowing how far to push is obvious, but his real intent is clear, he just doesn’t say it on camera. And there are many, many like him. We have been too timid, too afraid of being called racists or Islamophobes, or just wanting to be too nice, too British and have allowed a religion and an ideology that is incompatible with Western society to flourish.
With regard Gaza, we have a narrative of innocent Gazan civilians being indiscriminately wiped out by an evil state, Israel. This seems to be all you hear and is what the many marches are purported to be about; little is said about the innocent Israelis butchered in a sub-human way by the Hamas terrorists on 7th Oct. “Hamas does not represent the Gazan people, they are innocent.” Yet 75% of them do support Palestinian Islamic Jihad, PIJ, one of the many radical groups operating there, whose stated aim is the destruction of the Jewish people and of Israel. So their hands are not quite so clean as it first appears but no one mentions this. The PIJ, incientally, being the group who fired the ill-fated rocket that is believed to be responsible for the hospital disaster.
As Mosab Yousef, the son of one of the founders of Hamas says, having been educated to be a jihadist but later turned away from a life of terror: ““Islam is not a religion of peace, it is a religion of war,” ….. “If people don’t see the truth we will keep spinning an empty cycle of violence. The problem, according to Yousef, is that most Muslims are not educated enough about their religion. “Out of 1.6 billion Muslims, perhaps only 300 million actually understand the language of the Koran,” he said. This is because for most Muslims, Islam is far more than a religion – “it is an identity and culture, it is everything they know.” He further posited that a full understanding of the text of Mohammed’s life necessarily leads Muslims towards extremism and terrorism. According to Yousef, anyone who studies the life and the behavior of the prophet will arrive at the conclusion that Islam is a religion of war. “It is time to expose the life of Muhammed.”
The simple fact is that as Karl Popper said: ““if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them” and Douglas Murray is making exactly that point – we have been too tolerant for far to long. As an example, how have we allowed a senior member of Hamas to come to the UK, gain British citizenship and a council house, which he has now bought at a £112,000 discount. When you read that you think it must be false….. but its not, its all true. Unless we are prepared to face reality rather than keep pretending it isn’t true, eg every time another innocent is slaughtered by someone shouting Allahu Akbar, it is by someone mentally ill not someone acting on their belief in jihad and the afterlife, then we are doomed. If you find that distasteful you might find what unfolds if we don’t challenge it even more so.

Jane Awdry
Jane Awdry
11 months ago
Reply to  Sam Brown

I would agree that we’ve invited and courted Islam in the UK and that time & time again we’ve seen 2nd & even 3rd generation Islamic young men proving that they don’t have warm fuzzy feelings about the UK, or anywhere in the West.
Older Islamic scholars & leaders don’t appear to be particularly effective at teaching their youth much about supposedly ‘peaceful’ Islam. But can we not at the same time acknowledge the decades-long illegal blockading of Palestinians in Gaza & elsewhere in the territory as well as the absolute horror of the recent wanton violence by Hamas?
Each driven by their absolute conviction that they alone have religious and historical claims to the territory, neither side can disconnect from their sense of god-given rights. So it’s hard to see how they could ever resolve their differences. And if they’re both going to target civilians in a t*t-for-tat orgy of revenge attacks, it’s almost impossible rationally to support either side. Even if you’ve studied the history of the region and are broadly non-partisan, you’ve only to say anything sympathetic to the Israeli cause to be branded an Islamophobe & by the same token anything suggesting Palestinians have rights too and you’re antiSemitic.
Was there ever a more perfect storm of a conflict?

Sam Brown
Sam Brown
11 months ago
Reply to  Jane Awdry

The underlying problem, Jane, is that the conflict is not about land. Hamas, the PIJ, and by inference from support for them amongst three quarters of the Gazan population as I mentioned above, have a stated intention to destroy Israel and the Jewish people. Concessions on what land they occupy will not alter this. Beyond Gaza, in London last weekend we had a march by, incredibly, Hizb ut-Tahrir, an organisation banned in many Muslim countries ( https://www.counterextremism.com/threat/hizb-ut-tahrir ). In 2002, Hizb ut-Tahrir leaflets found in Denmark urged Muslims to kill Jews “wherever you find them, and turn them out from where they have been [sic] turned you out. The Jews are a people of slander…a treacherous people.. So you see it is a wider problem of fundamentalist Islam and a hatredof and determination to wipe Jewish people out. Israel nor any Jewish leaders that I am aware of have ever expressed such intentions against Muslims, only the specific terrorist organisation like Hamas. There is a fundamental diiference in motive between the two sides which, until Islam reforms, which is contrary to the teaching of Mohammed, will never be resolved, only contained.

Cathy Carron
Cathy Carron
11 months ago
Reply to  Nik Jewell

Douglas Murray remains a formidable writer and thinker, even though you might not agree with his views of the current situation in Israel.

Last edited 11 months ago by Cathy Carron
Sam Brown
Sam Brown
11 months ago
Reply to  Nik Jewell
Ari Dale
Ari Dale
11 months ago

Naughty Douglas defended the right of Israel to extirpate HAMAS in any way it can.

Jane Awdry
Jane Awdry
11 months ago
Reply to  Ari Dale

Including dredging the same depths of horror that they quite rightly condemn, as should all right-minded people, in Hamas? Does Israel really think that illegally targeting Palestinian civilians will bring on a sudden change of heart in the vicious little minds & hearts of Hamas? Firebombing the population will never root out Hamas’ ideology. They will double down.

Sam Brown
Sam Brown
11 months ago
Reply to  Jane Awdry

Israell is not targetting civilians… you have been sucked in by the pro-Palestinian propaganda. Israel is targetting Hamas…but as Hamas embeds itself amongst the people in residential areas this inevitably leads to collateral civilian deaths. Hamas is committing a war crime by hiding behind civilians and are totally responsible for the excess deaths. Do you really expect Israel to not attack Hamas after what they have done and given their objective is the destruction of the Jewish people? And so people die…

0 0
0 0
11 months ago
Reply to  Nik Jewell

Totally agree. On the pandemic, gender ideology and critial social justice/race theory I felt I had something in common with the right with an abhorence of the authoritarian and somewhat childish left. Then along comes the current conflict and many on the right have lost all claim to critical thinking as the reveal an ugly authoritarianism in which we are supposed to swallow all propagana whole and have no concern for the conventions on the rules of war to limit civilian suffering. Douglas Murray being one of those who I too have lost any respect for.

Dougie Undersub
Dougie Undersub
11 months ago
Reply to  0 0

Did we warn the citizens of Dresden to leave before we bombed it? Was the suffering of German civilians justified by the necessity to defeat Hitler? Seems to me that the Israelis are being much more circumspect than the Allies in WWII.
If Hamas laid down its arms tomorrow, no-one would die. If the IDF laid down its arms tomorrow, 9m Israelis would die. Once you’ve taken that in it’s easier to understand the Israeli point of view.

Billy Bob
Billy Bob
11 months ago

The only problem with your assumptions is that events on the ground over the last few years simply don’t back up your theory.
The much more moderate PA has been in charge of the West Bank, and their reward for following largely peaceful means is an ever further encroachment of settlements on that territory.
If the Palestinians feel that peaceful means will simply be taken advantage of, then you can’t really blame them for then resorting to violence

Miriam Shalom
Miriam Shalom
11 months ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

They do not follow peaceful means . There were almost daily terror attacks, stabbings, car attacks etc. You probably don’t know about this because the BBC only report these things if there is an Israeli response that they can criticise. The PA/PlO have a history and a present of terrorism.

Billy Bob
Billy Bob
11 months ago
Reply to  Miriam Shalom

There are also daily attacks by the settlers on the Arabs, forcing them from their homes often under the gaze of the IDF.

Jane Awdry
Jane Awdry
11 months ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

Israeli border guards routinely shoot Palestinians who throw rocks at them.
The Israeli position that they are somehow entirely blameless is disingenuous at best.
And Hamas’ position that it is an any way acceptable to slaughter innocent Israeli civilians is grotesque & disgusting no matter which way you look at it.

Alan Osband
Alan Osband
11 months ago
Reply to  Miriam Shalom

But is the Israeli project of promoting Lebensraum in the East (building Jewish settlements in the occupied territories) not itself somewhat questionable .

Jane Awdry
Jane Awdry
11 months ago
Reply to  Miriam Shalom

Not everyone gets their news from the BBC. I find their coverage of everything facile & partisan. So I will simply say:
Zionist extremists bombed the King David Hotel in 1946, long before the PA, the PLO or Hamas. I’m sure they were just as able to justify their reasons as Hamas is able to justify their own grotesque violence. So this conflict is not about good guys on one side & bad guys on the other. It’s about two entrenched religious & territorial ideologies each of which believes that they have the greater historical claim to the land and each of which will resort to extreme means in order to exert it.
Religious dogma makes for eternal conflict.

Isabel Ward
Isabel Ward
11 months ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

The PA may indeed be more moderate than Hamas but it is not moderate. There are many examples but here are just a few: “pay to slay”; it is illegal to sell any land under their control to a Jew – punishable by execution; it is illegal to be homosexual- punishable by execution ( they have been known to throw such people off high buildings) etc.

Jane Awdry
Jane Awdry
11 months ago

Except that, long before the existence of Hamas, when Rabin tried to do just that, including withdrawing illegal settlers from the West Bank & the Gaza Strip, he was assassinated by one of his own.

Ari Dale
Ari Dale
11 months ago
Reply to  Nik Jewell

So Douglas Murray’s defense of Israel and understanding of the radically violent nature of HAMAS have landed him in your doghouse, it seems. He should grab your poor dog and get to hell as far away from your anti-semitic enclave asap.

Ari Dale
Ari Dale
11 months ago
Reply to  Nik Jewell

And don’t be depressed, Nik. Cheer up, come to Israel, and help HAMAS.

Steve Murray
Steve Murray
11 months ago
Reply to  J Bryant

Whilst i agree broadly with your sense of what Lord Sumption describes in the discussion, there’s two aspects that might be questioned. The first, is that it’ll be politicians calling the shots. It seems to me that politicians are simply reactive to wider cultural trends, and that includes supranational interests. (LS’s views on the nation-state, as an interest defined by fighting wars is interesting in that societies have to do so to protect what they already have, from when agriculture first took hold, so which comes first? But i digress.)

Secondly, i’d distinguish between authoritarianism and your reference to totalitarianism. The two are different, even if the end result might be the same. The first is the acquiescence of populations to authority (as with lockdowns); the latter is an absolute takeover of state control with no possibility of dissent. I doubt the West would go that far, following the model of statism that world wars were fought to prevent.

Last edited 11 months ago by Steve Murray
Steve Murray
Steve Murray
11 months ago
Reply to  Steve Murray

This has just appeared after being in moderation, hence my later, abbreviated comment. Can’t be edit-deleted now either. Poor, Unherd

Steve Murray
Steve Murray
11 months ago
Reply to  J Bryant

I’d distinguish between authoritarian government, which LJS refers to, and totalitarianism, which brooks no dissent. It’s also open to question whether it’d be politicians in charge or those cultural and supranational forces we so frequently discuss within these and other online pages.

Last edited 11 months ago by Steve Murray
Ari Dale
Ari Dale
11 months ago
Reply to  J Bryant

I could not help but feel that he was relishing the role of spoiler. HE WAS !

Walter Schwager
Walter Schwager
11 months ago
Reply to  J Bryant

Left-wing ideological tyranny? Joe Biden? The Tories?

Mark Osiel
Mark Osiel
11 months ago

In an otherwise wise commentary, Sumption completely misunderstands the international law on “proportionality,” a body of law I’ve taught for thirty years. It is never a question of comparing casualties on one side of a conflict to those on the other. The question is whether the incidental loss of enemy civilians through a particular war or military operation is greater than the anticipated gain from it in securing military objectives, principally national self-defense. A correct understanding of “proportionality” could easily lead to conclusions very different than Sumption’s about Israel’s use of force

John Riordan
John Riordan
11 months ago

Extremely interesting talk, which it being Sunday morning I had the time to watch in full, as opposed to reading the transcript which is what I usually do. On my big TV as well, which puts something approaching a life-size Lord Sumption in my living room.

His final point on Brexit answers a question I had when I read his piece on the ECHR last month – clearly he has not changed his mind about Brexit, which I speculated he might have done.

His main point about it here is that Brexit stops the continuation of 5 centuries of intelligent foreign policy aimed at preventing the emergence of a united European polity. I agree with the historical analysis but do not agree that Brexit becomes a bad idea on this basis, and I refer to Philip Cunliffe’s crucial insight about the real nature of EU integration, namely that the transfer of power to the supranational institutions of the EU does not happen in the face of opposition by the democratically-elected governments of the bloc’s member-states, but with their direct cooperation and willing assent.

If Philip Cunliffe is right (I personally think so) then it follows that the five centuries of intelligent British foreign policy described by Lord Sumption here did not stop with Brexit, but actually ceased some time prior to Brexit, and as a direct consequence of the conditions of continued EU membership. (I’ll speculate that this would have been in 1991 with the deposing of Margaret Thatcher, but that’s a tangential issue).

It is even possible to extrapolate from this that Britain is in a stronger position to affect European affairs simply because it is no longer directly controlled by EU law: all strategic cooperation between Britain and Europe must now be on the basis of deals, and deals are things that must be in the interest of both parties, unlike the increasingly burdensome obligations of EU member-states, which are borne irrespective of national self-interest.

Even if I am mistaken about that however, I do wholly reject the implied argument that Britain as an EU member still possessed the significant degree of control over European affairs required to satisfy Lord Sumption’s analysis, and certainly did not possess the ability to control the EU’s primary objective of becoming the single European polity in question. That objective must and will happen, and it would have happened whether Britain was an EU member or not. I know Lord Sumption is much cleverer than I am, but on this point, I submit that he is mistaken.

Last edited 11 months ago by John Riordan
Charles Stanhope
Charles Stanhope
11 months ago
Reply to  John Riordan

I would postulate that those “five centuries of intelligent foreign policy” ended well before Brexit, in fact in August 1914, when of our own volition we committed ourselves to that catastrophe known as The Great War.

Last edited 11 months ago by Charles Stanhope
thomas Schinkel
thomas Schinkel
11 months ago

Stanhope makes a very good and valid point

Steve Murray
Steve Murray
11 months ago
Reply to  John Riordan

I agree, and that’s a real blind spot for him. What we must beware with all “guru” type contributors to the national discourse is to assume that because they’ve had a really good think about a particular issue that they’re bound to reach the right conclusion. Having said that, his opinion does add to the debate in an intelligent way, which is far superior to the blatant name-calling of many who still wish we’d stayed in the EU.
I suspect he’s right that as time goes on, we’ll find ourselves becoming more attached to the EU without ever being in a position to rejoin (hopefully). That wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing – provided the EU remains attached to itself, of course!

John Riordan
John Riordan
11 months ago
Reply to  Steve Murray

My guess on the future trajectory is that the UK will probably join the EU “associate” status that, finally, euro-federalists such as Emmanuel Macron now realise is an inevitable compromise the EU itself will be forced to make for the sake of its own survival. If and when the UK does join such a thing, I’d guess it will also already include the Visegrad nations and may even contain some smaller nations presently in the Eurozone which would have left it by then. (The Eurozone is about to have another one of its regular existential crises, but that’s another story, I guess.)

Britain’s Europhiles are stuck in a pre-2016 past that no longer exists and can never now be re-established. Not just with reference to the EU, but also the Blairite consensus the UK could afford in the late 1990s and 2000s but which it now cannot, and which is now just as dead as Thatcherism has become.

Last edited 11 months ago by John Riordan
Bernard Stewart
Bernard Stewart
11 months ago
Reply to  John Riordan

Thank you. I felt somewhat taken aback by Lord Sumption’s assertions on this topic, and you have articulated a worthy response.

Dougie Undersub
Dougie Undersub
11 months ago

An interesting discussion, though I think Sumption is a bit blasé about immigration.

Charles Stanhope
Charles Stanhope
11 months ago

When he is NOT in Châteaux Sumption, his brooding fortress, set high above the valley of the Dordogne, he is an inhabitant of Greenwich, the South London satellite of Quislington, therefore some allowance must be made, if you get my drift?

Charles Stanhope
Charles Stanhope
11 months ago

By far and away the finest discussion I have read on UnHerd for many a year, and a perfect panacea to compensate for a simply catastrophic sporting weekend for England.
Thank you.

Nik Jewell
Nik Jewell
11 months ago

Whilst I never expected us to win going into last night, I was gutted by the end.

Charles Stanhope
Charles Stanhope
11 months ago
Reply to  Nik Jewell

Yes indeed, I now know how Australian must have felt in 2003!*

(* Not that that exculpates Mr John Howard’s appalling post- match behaviour.)

William Cameron
William Cameron
11 months ago
Reply to  Nik Jewell

Moral of the story. Dont argue with the Ref and get marched ten yards closer to the sticks and thus give away three points.

John Williams
John Williams
11 months ago

“And on the face of it, it looks as if an invasion of Gaza would have some of the indiscriminate qualities that people quite rightly objected to when practised by Hamas.”

Did Hamas warn the kids at the festival? No.
Do the IDF operate as a religiously motivated force that advocates rape, torture and murder of men women and children whose only ‘crime’ is to be a member of a different human group?
Do Israelis perennially lie about and inflate their own casualty figures?
Apart from a vague reference to medieval barbarism on the part of Hamas in bringing about an Israeli retaliation this is almost an attack on Israel’s right to exist.
Has he any solution, or does he think like so many people that Israel should just suck it up and pipe down?

Last edited 11 months ago by John Williams
Charles Stanhope
Charles Stanhope
11 months ago
Reply to  John Williams

I didn’t interpret it like that.
To use an old expression, LJS expects the Israeli’s to “play the white man” during its forthcoming assault on Gaza, and NOT replicate the barbarism of Hamas.

Is that asking too much?

Last edited 11 months ago by Charles Stanhope
Louise Durnford
Louise Durnford
11 months ago

Yes, it is, considering Israel is in a fight for its existential survival.

Charles Stanhope
Charles Stanhope
11 months ago

If you really feel like that then perhaps you should start building a new Auschwitz and commence immediate production of Zyclon B, and get rid of the blighters once and for all.

Or what about a rerun of Oradour-sur-Glane? That worked well didn’t it?

Last edited 11 months ago by Charles Stanhope
Charles Stanhope
Charles Stanhope
11 months ago

Ms Durnford are you, despite your nomen, in fact a Jewish woman or Jewess as we used to say?

I only ask because I find it almost impossible to believe that an Englishwoman would make such a remark as you have! What you have said in effect is that old Biblical expletive “AN EYE FOR AN EYE AND A TOOTH FOR A TOOTH”.* Surely as a representative of the ‘brightest people on earth’ you don’t really mean/believe that?

(* Is it in fact part of Jewish Law does anyone know?)

Last edited 11 months ago by Charles Stanhope
Miriam Shalom
Miriam Shalom
11 months ago

Your ignorance of Jewish law is apparent. An eye for any eye is a limitation on the level of punishment. Don’t take a life for an eye. Such a prescription existed for hundred of years before English law which still executed people for relatively minor crimes. I hope when the Islamists come for Britain it will be able to act as humanely Israel and not descend to its own historic primitive instincts.

Billy Bob
Billy Bob
11 months ago
Reply to  Miriam Shalom

So because medieval England had some barbaric punishments, it’s fine for Israel to do it today? Most civilised societies did away with this thinking many generations ago mind you.
We also burned witches for a while, maybe Israel can have a go at that if they feel like they missed out?

Charles Stanhope
Charles Stanhope
11 months ago
Reply to  Miriam Shalom

I didn’t say I had the slightest clue about Jewish Law, hence my question at the end, or did you miss that?

However thanks to your facetious reply, and thus I must ask why ‘you’ crucified Christ? That was hardly an ‘eye for an eye’ or have I missed something?

The ‘Islamists’ as you so politely call them, are already HERE. 4 million at the last count, thus we shall be watching you lot very carefully as to how to handle them in Gaza.

If I may be so bold you’ve got off to a rather poor start, but I dare say things will improve.

Billy Bob
Billy Bob
11 months ago

But if Israel doesn’t hold itself to a higher standard than Hamas they’re no better than the terrorists are they? You can’t label one group animals for using women as human shields if you’re happy to murder those human shields in order to hit your original target

John Williams
John Williams
11 months ago

Asking if it’s too much for Israelis from Persia, Morocco, Yemen, Turkey to play the white man is simply slimy racism.

Jews/Israelis aren’t all white.

Charles Stanhope
Charles Stanhope
11 months ago
Reply to  John Williams

That is a rather feeble excuse for barbarism!

If Israel wishes the respect and support of the ‘West’ it will have to behave accordingly. So far it hasn’t done too badly, but as always there is room for improvement .

I would have thought reoccupation of GAZA was the answer, expensive as that will obviously turn out to be in both ‘blood and treasure’.

ps: Slimy is rather an odd adjective? Are you by chance an American?

Last edited 11 months ago by Charles Stanhope
Miriam Shalom
Miriam Shalom
11 months ago

There is no risk of Israel descending to the barbarism of a death cult. It is beyond insulting to suggesting the possibility of any similarity.

Billy Bob
Billy Bob
11 months ago
Reply to  Miriam Shalom

I don’t know, the civilian death count is currently massively in their favour

Louise Durnford
Louise Durnford
11 months ago
Reply to  John Williams

I completely agree with you, along with the fact that because Israel has a modern army, it should be more circumspect, under international law, than Hamas.
I always fail to understand why great luminaries such as Jonathan Sumption have such a blind spot when it comes to Israel.
The immutable fact in all of this is that Hamas wants the total destruction of Israel and the Jews.
Why on earth should Israel just lie down and accept this?

Last edited 11 months ago by Louise Durnford
John Williams
John Williams
11 months ago

Thank you Louise.
Hamas are openly anti-Semitic, unlike many of their friends who pretend to be impartial.

Miriam Shalom
Miriam Shalom
11 months ago
Reply to  John Williams

He doesn’t have any solutions only aloof misguided analysis that ignores the very real difference between the Islamic death cult that Hamas is part of and the modern democratic state. He seems sanguine about use of medieval morality amongst 21st century Islamists. Would he be so indifferent if and when Britain is a battle ground.

Steve Murray
Steve Murray
11 months ago

Added to which, the death of one of the greatest footballers these islands have produced.

Our rugby team performed admirably; as for our cricketers – bring ’em home now.

Last edited 11 months ago by Steve Murray
Daniel Lee
Daniel Lee
11 months ago

Wonderful interview. “I think that the proportion of people who think lockdowns were a good idea has diminished, but a majority still think that.” I don’t know about Britain, but in America the conservative areas realized the illness, while serious, was being melodramatically overstated as an weapon to, at first, attack Trump, and then to expand government power by – surprise – the very same people who always attacked Trump and always sought to expand government power. It was the same song the Left and the media and its pet experts were always singing, just a new verse.

Charles Stanhope
Charles Stanhope
11 months ago
Reply to  Daniel Lee

“I think that the proportion of people who think lockdowns were a good idea has diminished, but a majority still think that.”

What a terrifying yet apposite conclusion. For those who think ‘Adolph’ couldn’t happen here, think again. Say 7 million unemployed, destruction of middle class savings, depravity of all kinds been daily practiced, and it would very soon be a case of “TOMORROW BELONGS TO ME”.

ps. Describing Former President Trump as “monstrous “ was both unnecessary and OTT.

Last edited 11 months ago by Charles Stanhope
Cathy Carron
Cathy Carron
11 months ago
Reply to  Daniel Lee

Many Trump supporters especially blue collar workers couldn’t afford to be ‘locked down’. I was even able to get an aluminum trough from a farm supply company shipped to me from the Midwest in no time, whereas obtaining groceries locally was an exercise in perseverance. These people need to work everyday for survival unlike city workers who went home, donned their sweats and have yet to fully show up for work in many places. There’s a reason why Trump supporters were and are more sensible and pragmatic about the so-called lockdown. These are the two Americas.

Last edited 11 months ago by Cathy Carron
Charles Stanhope
Charles Stanhope
11 months ago

“WAR IS THE FATHER OF ALL AND KING OF ALL.”*

Who ever doubted it?

(* Heraclitus.)

Last edited 11 months ago by Charles Stanhope
Katharine Eyre
Katharine Eyre
11 months ago

Can’t listen to this right now (kitchen tiles to scrub, laundry to hang up…) but many thanks to Unherd for getting Jonathan Sumption in to talk, I always hugely enjoy his contributions and I shall be returning to the video later.
But now…to the tiles!

Steve Murray
Steve Murray
11 months ago
Reply to  Katharine Eyre

Come on Katherine, you’ve had a night on the tiles, haven’t you, and need recovery time.

Last edited 11 months ago by Steve Murray
Katharine Eyre
Katharine Eyre
11 months ago
Reply to  Steve Murray

I wish! Cannot cope with more than one bevvie these days and spent last night watching old episodes of the X Files. The only tiles I’m on these days really are the kitchen and the shower tiles…with a brush and lots of elbow grease. Rock’n’roll.

Last edited 11 months ago by Katharine Eyre
Charles Stanhope
Charles Stanhope
11 months ago

“It was not felt that the duty of the state extended to relieving poverty or to promoting human happiness.”

Had LJS been a Classicist he would NOT have made that statement, because he would have known that that is precisely what Ancient Rome did.

Just look at Pompeii, a medium sized town of no great importance yet it provided its citizens with a numerous Public Baths, an Amphitheatre, a large Palaestra, a Theatre, an Odeon, clean running water etc etc. If it followed the example of Rome herself it will have provided a ‘food and wine’ dole! The only delight Pompeii seems to be missing is a Circus for Chariot Racing.

As one Roman wag* put it so beautifully the whole purpose of the Pax Romana was :- “Venari, Lavari, Ludere, Ridere, Occ est vivere”!_
‘To hunt, to bathe, to play, to laugh, that is TOO live!

(* From TIMGAD, high in the Aurès Mts, Algeria.)

Guy Pigache
Guy Pigache
11 months ago

Oh and slaves. Happy in their poverty I suppose.

Charles Stanhope
Charles Stanhope
11 months ago
Reply to  Guy Pigache

What a puerile response Pigache! Surely you can do better?

Andrew Holmes
Andrew Holmes
11 months ago

Fascinating, brilliant discussion. Though I have no pretentions of any comparison with Lord Sumption’s knowledge and analytical acumen, I have one disagreement.
The US Constitution is supposed to be the rules. However, for decades, the judiciary applied the notion of a “living Constitution.” Effectively large numbers of US citizens had and have the same objections to the course of the Supreme Court prior to the present conservative majority that Lord Sumption expressed respecting the ECHR. Since Obama, the progressive believers have broadened their campaign of bypassing the legislative process with Executive Branch decisions. It is the same problem that Lord Sumption identified with Roe v. Wade – moral decisions imposed without input.
The hope I see in this situation is that the majority of citizens say that they are Independents, not acolytes of either major party. The authoritarian proposals from right and left may soon be marginalized.

P N
P N
11 months ago

Disappointed FS didn’t push JS on the chants of, “From the River to the Sea.” JS fudged his answer with ludicrous accusations against the Home Secretary who has rightfully stated that support for Hamas is support for a terrorist organisation and is illegal. She has not said supporting Palestine is illegal. JS has created a straw man.

Israel has not blockaded Gaza. People living in Gaza have been able to work in Israel but even so, Israel has not shut the border with Egypt. That is Egypt. Closing the border is not the same as blockading; Israel is no more blockading Gaza that Egypt is.

If Roe v Wade was bad law it follows that the decision to overturn Roe v Wade was the correct one.

Charles Stanhope
Charles Stanhope
11 months ago

Hurry up chaps!
Liam will be out of bed soon!

El Uro
El Uro
11 months ago

The biggest problem of those discussing here and especially the author of this post is that they extend the basic norms of their society to those who stand on the side of Gaza.
Therefore, freedom of speech has different meanings for you and for your opponents. If for you this is an opportunity to express your point of view, then for them, including the left, it is the freedom to lie without restrictions.
I don’t really understand how you expect to find a common language or any kind of mutual understanding with them, being on such different platforms. Good luck though!

Simon Lait
Simon Lait
11 months ago

Thoughtful articulacy founded on deep learning. Rare indeed. We’ll done UnHerd. My subscription repaid one hundred fold by this item alone.

Shrunken Genepool
Shrunken Genepool
11 months ago

He’s rejoined the establishment. And like them, he can’t spot the Rubicon even when he’s up to his neck and swimming. There is such a thing as a tipping point Israel has reached a tipping point . European countries are approaching it. The conservative party in the UK will recognize it only after the next election. There will be a Brexit moment within the Tory party. And in the words of this American Israeli, that can be no de-escalation. https://youtu.be/7Or1zT4I-Q0?si=U98wYuNtwuaKi8-X

Steve Hall
Steve Hall
11 months ago

Military action in the Late Middle Ages wasn’t ‘disorganised’. Before the advent of gunpowder, militarism was focused on fortification and defence, which demanded large civil engineering, agricultural and weapons-manufacturing projects. Sumption is a lightweight pop historian with a simplistic evolutionary view of history, relevant in some aspects but less than useful in others. His view of the fixity of human sensibilities over time is culturally and psychologically illiterate. He needs to read Norbert Elias’s ‘Civilizing Process’. Public intellectual? Hmm… at the moment I’m hanging onto Unherd by a thread.

Charles Stanhope
Charles Stanhope
11 months ago
Reply to  Steve Hall

That sounds a bit ‘Chippy’.
He was a King’s Scholar at Eton, got a First from Magdalen, and a subsequent Fellowship.
Can you do better Hall old chap? If so PROVE it.

Steve Hall
Steve Hall
11 months ago

Significantly better. I’m averse to showing off, but you forced my hand. Here’s but one example. Read it and you would have to agree. And by the way, to my friends I’m Steve, but to you I’m Professor Hall. “A remarkable intellectual achievement” Prof Robert Reiner, LSE https://www.amazon.co.uk/Theorizing-Crime-Deviance-Steve-Hall/dp/1848606729

Charles Stanhope
Charles Stanhope
11 months ago
Reply to  Steve Hall

Oh Christ NOT this Steve Hall I trust?:-

In the 1970s Steve worked as a professional musician and general labourer, and in the 1980s he worked in the field of rehabilitation and youth offending.
After graduating from university in 1991 with first class honours in sociology, he worked as a lecturer at Teesside from 1993, a member of the team that established the country’s first single-honours criminology degree. After spells as a senior research fellow at the University of Durham and a researcher and teacher at Northumbria University, he re-joined Teesside in 2010.

Emeritus Professor of Criminology at some red brick Northern University! Precisely what is wrong with our universities, dishing out degrees for such ephemeral rubbish, and you have the confounded cheek to castigate a renowned Oxford Scholar. God help us!

You say you are “hanging onto UnHerd by a thread”, then be off you, with you old bluffer.

ps. I would tend to agree with you that Tom Holland Esq and Simon Sebag Montefiore Esq are POP historians but not LJS.

Last edited 11 months ago by Charles Stanhope
Steve Hall
Steve Hall
11 months ago

Charles Stanhope, that’s just a username, isn’t it? You’re not that 120th Duke of Earl or whatever, are you, the one who ponces off inherited property in London?
Anyway, read the book! You’ll get a big shock. It’s in the Oxford, Cambridge and most other RG libraries, regarded as a ‘major intervention’. Are you suggesting that an individual from a working-class background can’t be clever? ‘Northern’? I love the North East, it’s my home. Charles, you can’t be one of these stupid peri-senile snobs, can you? You’re better than that!

Last edited 11 months ago by Steve Hall
Charles Stanhope
Charles Stanhope
11 months ago
Reply to  Steve Hall

No, I find your criticism of LJS to be ill informed, petty and somewhat coarse.

I challenged you and what do I find but a very conceited ‘sociologist’, who seems to have never heard of the adage ‘self praise is NO recommendation’,

The fact that you are both working class and come from the North East bothers me not one iota. What does bother me is that you have wasted your life on such drivel as Norbet Elias & Co churned out.I surprised you didn’t chuck in Harold Laski.

Incidentally “militarism before the advent of gunpowder was fairly chaotic by comparison with Ancient Rome or even Ancient Greece, as I’m sure you will agree.

Yes I am a SNOB about people such you good self who entered this conversation in such a vulgar manner. You only have yourself to blame if you find my response has been ever so slightly acerbic.

May I wish all the best on you return to Twitter or whatever it is now called.

Steve Hall
Steve Hall
11 months ago

Ah, so you’re a fake upper-class twit, not a real one. Anyway, you demanded that I ‘prove’ myself, so I simply complied. The vulgarity is yours. I criticised pop historian Sumption’s comment about militarism in the MA being ‘disorganised’ – it wasn’t, and you don’t know enough to come back at me. Elias was a celebrated German-Jewish intellectual with a sophisticated grasp of history and a foundation in his name http://norbert-elias.com/. His friends were killed by Friekorps in the early 1920s, so he’s also see more of life than you’ll ever see. You’ve never read his work, and should you choose to do so you would need someone to walk you through it. He was a very bright chap. This comment section is just a bit of a giggle for me, but it seems to be a significant part of your life. I’m off – I have intellectual matters to attend to, and you’ve just lost Unherd a customer, you vacuous old blowhard….

P N
P N
11 months ago
Reply to  Steve Hall

You’re flouncing off because Unherd interviewed someone you don’t like and he said something you disagree with? I don’t think Unherd is for anyway. Better to just stick to the Guardian and your staff room echo chamber.

Last edited 11 months ago by P N
Charles Stanhope
Charles Stanhope
11 months ago
Reply to  Steve Hall

I must say rise perfectly to the ‘bait’! Thank you.

You are also a very good example of what an absolute disaster John Majors’s policy of turning Polytechnics into Universities was.

It quite unjustifiably allowed people such as you good self to “rise above their station” as we used say. Let’s face it you would have been far happier as a panel beater in South Shields, as a Communist shop steward, and NOT posing as an academic.

I am sorry, but as your EGO so obviously far exceeds your INTELLECT further discourse is pointless. However a word of advice “manners maketh man”.

P N
P N
11 months ago
Reply to  Steve Hall

“ Charles Stanhope, that’s just a username, isn’t it? You’re not that 120th Duke of Earl or whatever, are you, the one who ponces off inherited property in London?”

The mask slips with that ad hominem. For someone with such academic pretensions, your abandoning of logic and your descending to slurs undermines your credibility.

Last edited 11 months ago by P N
Steve Hall
Steve Hall
11 months ago
Reply to  P N

This is an obscure comment section on a fringe journal. Nobody comes here to gain ‘credibility’ and there’s no one here with the authority to give it out. People no longer give a damn what the English middle class think – you lost credibility 40 years ago, and that’s not a bad thing.

P N
P N
11 months ago
Reply to  Steve Hall

This is a very odd comment. You’re trashing the very comments section you’re writing in. Even in a private conversation with a single person, I still aspire to credibility. In a public forum where I’ve identified exactly who I am and even posted a link to a pamphlet I once wrote, I really wouldn’t want to sabotage my reputation.

“ People no longer give a damn what the English middle class think – you lost credibility 40 years ago, and that’s not a bad thing.”

What on earth are you on about? Who is “you”? You have no idea who I am? Is this some dig at Thatcher or the end of the Cold War or something? Very bizarre.

My respect for academia at obscure universities and former polytechnics has never plummeted to new depths. I sincerely hope you’re no longer in a position of influence over the nation’s young.

Martin Butler
Martin Butler
11 months ago

What an intelligent thoughtful guy. And a remainer of course!

0 0
0 0
11 months ago

Finally something worth reading on Unherd.

John Riordan
John Riordan
11 months ago
Reply to  0 0

If you have a problem with this, have you considered reducing or eliminating your own contributions to the comment sections?

Allison Barrows
Allison Barrows
11 months ago
Reply to  John Riordan

Isn’t it curious that a subscriber who claims there is nothing worth reading here won’t spare us his own opinions?

0 0
0 0
11 months ago

What a copy cat. Are you seriously pretending you are monitoring my contributions. Bless.

0 0
0 0
11 months ago
Reply to  John Riordan

I joined Unherd drawn to it be frustration with the authoritarian left calling those who disagree with them fascitist and have found the authoritarian right calling anyone who has a difference of opinion anti-semetic. You too sound like you don’t value free speech and discussion! So dont worry, I have cancelled my subscription!