Former UK Supreme Court Justice Lord Sumption referenced the Nazis’ Nuremberg Race laws during a discussion on GB News about the Covid-19 restrictions.
Speaking on the channel’s first day of broadcasting on Sunday, Lord Sumption, a critic of the lockdown rules, told viewers that laws set by the government to reduce Covid infections were "wicked".
He said: "To make it a criminal offence to associate with other human beings is a proudly wicked thing to do.”
He went on to say that he did not consider those in the UK government behind the rules to be “wicked men” but that a continued lockdown was a “wicked thing to do.”
During a discussion about whether had a moral obligation to comply with the law, he said: “I think most people would accept there was no moral obligation for Germans to comply with the Nazi race laws.”
He added however that he did “not begin to compare” what happened in Nazi Germany with what has happened in the pandemic.
The former justice told GB News presenter Dan Wootton he thought lockdown easing on June 21 should continue as planned.
Anti-lockdown demonstrations across the UK have seen some participants wearing yellow stars as a way of comparing the rules to the discrimination against Jews in Nazi Germany.
Board of Deputies President Marie van der Zyl said Lord Sumption’s referencing of the Nazis’ Nuremberg Race Laws "was deeply inappropriate and will have been upsetting to Jews who lost family in the Holocaust.
"There have been a few similar unfortunate comparisons of late; we would ask public figures to think hard about what they compare the Holocaust too, and to generally desist from doing so in any case of doubt.”
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