Lord Sumption:

When I said that, I was referring to the fact that the lockdown had originally been justified on the grounds that it was necessary in order to enable the intensive care capacity of the National Health Service, NHS, to catch up. Although I disagreed with it, I thought it was at least a serious justification and defensible proposition. By the end of April and in early May, the position was reached where the NHS intensive care capacity had caught up but, nonetheless, the Government, at a very critical moment, decided it would continue with the regulations, although, in light of the epidemiological advice it was receiving, it was very difficult to identify any legitimate purpose for it.

There comes a point when the moral force of the law disappears and that point had been reached by then. Of course, anybody who decides not to comply with the law must be prepared to take the consequences, but the reality is that coercion only works if a sufficient number of people accept the moral force of what the government is doing, and we have reached the stage in the United Kingdom where the level of acceptance of what the government is doing is at a fairly low level.