A State of Fear: How the UK government weaponised fear during the Covid-19 pandemic

by Laura Dodsworth

  The focus switched from deaths, to ‘R’ (the reproduction number), to cases, to hospitalisations, to vaccine rollout. The goalposts also moved: flatten the curve was followed by slowing the spread, then we dabbled with suppression, the notion of zero Covid was floated, there were fears about a second wave, then we were in it (or at least a bad winter surge), then waiting for a vaccine, the vaccine arrived, then we were told that wouldn’t mean restrictions could be lifted, the inevitable third wave was mentioned, and fears raised about a new transmissible variant – Covid-21 next perhaps? – then there are variants or ‘scariants’ as they were termed by cynics. We seemed to be caught in an endless bait and switch.

  The virus narrative makes us enemies of each other, which is used to justify impositions on our freedoms and the manipulation of our fears. History shows that people in wars, or considered dangerous, have been imprisoned, put in concentration camps, tortured and suffered the loss of human rights. War and terror justify a security state. The virus justifies a biosecurity state. Is the average person to consider themselves lethally infectious, unless proven otherwise using an enabling test?9 Are we bio-terrorists? On 26 March 2021, Dr Sarah Jarvis said ‘Breathing is an offensive weapon if you are infected with Covid’ on Channel 5’s Jeremy Vine on 5 show. Even allowing for a bit of dramatic licence on telly, it is impossible to imagine someone saying that pre-Covid.

  On 18 August 2020, Matt Hancock, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, announced that the new National Institute for Health Protection’s ‘single and relentless mission’ would be ‘protecting people from external threats to this country’s health.’And what are these threats? Apparently they are ‘biological weapons, pandemics, and of course infectious diseases of all kinds.’ Is it the state’s role to protect us from infectious diseases of all kinds?

  Notice how many governments and organisations, including the UK government, started referring to the ‘new normal’ in the spring of 2020. Lockdown legally started on 26 March 2020, and as early as 26 April Dominic Raab, the Foreign Secretary, said that Britain would be moving to a ‘new normal’. That term framed our expectations for the future, because it implied that ‘normal’, our old normal, real normal, was gone and to be replaced by something new. It signalled a move from one type of society to another.

  A comparison with the Nazis might invite frustration in the sceptical reader, but consider the name ‘Das Dritte Reich’. The Third Reich, was a clever title, because it planted the idea in the minds of the German people that Hitler’s style of government wasn’t for a term, it wasn’t a fad, it was their present and their future.

  How did we move so fast from an emergency situation to a term which seeds the idea the future will be forever different? We were supposed to lock down for three weeks to flatten the curve – why would that necessitate a ‘new normal’? A three-week intervention and a ‘new normal’ cannot logically coexist. What made governments think that Covid-19 would be different from every infectious respiratory disease the world has ever known? Respiratory diseases follow a bell curve: they come and then they go. Why would normal have to be permanently altered for this respiratory disease, and why would that be proclaimed so early?

  A biosecurity state, where we are advised to follow directives to wash hands, socially distance and remember ‘hands, face, space’ is one thing. A legally directed biosecurity state which mandates staying at home is another. We have never before quarantined the healthy and impeded so many human rights in one fell swoop. Our rights to liberty, protest, worship, education and maintaining relationships were all impacted. And these are not trifling privileges, but basic liberties: our human rights as established in law.

  I experienced the curtailment of the right to protest personally, and I realised that the attitude towards protest in the UK this year has been indicative of a government that wanted to control more than infection.

  ‘Go home now or you’ll be arrested!’ an aggressive policeman shouted in my face. He barked orders and questions at me. I had attended an anti-lockdown protest in London on 28 November in my capacity as a journalist and press photographer, and witnessed the police using excessive force. I had just been photographing an arrest on a fairly empty stretch of pavement on Oxford Street, a long way behind the protest which had moved on. I showed the police officer my press pass. He wasn’t satisfied and demanded my ‘password’ to check it was real. His intimidating manner flummoxed me and instead of asking what I had done which was unlawful (nothing), I set about retrieving my personal password to my press association. If he didn’t believe me he should have just called the number on the back of the press card; it was unorthodox and inappropriate to ask for my personal password. I can’t believe I even started looking, but fear clouds your judgement.

  After a couple of minutes with the ‘bad cop’ a relatively ‘good cop’ took over and was satisfied by my press pass. I had not done anything unlawful after all. After being subjected to several rounds of Kafka-esque questioning, the four police officers who had surrounded me moved on.

  Shockingly, another press photographer I spoke to was shoved twice by the police. One time, his camera was grabbed by a police officer who pushed it in his face to move him on.

  Allowing press photographers and journalists to do their work is essential to a free press and democracy. The attitude towards us was obstructive and intimidating. Unfortunately, what we experienced was typical of the force and intimidation which was turned on the protestors that day.

  There seemed to be a deliberate strategy of making lots of arrests in order to create a politicised media story. Hundreds of police officers picked off protestors from the edges and back of the protest, like sharks feeding off a shoal of fish, and put them in vans which were lining the streets. The peaceful protest saw violence later in the day, which I’d suggest was at least partially caused by the brute and excessive policing.

  On the same day there were crowds of people at Borough Market and Chelsea Farmers’ Market, to give just two London examples. Two weeks later there were crowds of people on Oxford Street Christmas shopping. Why are some crowds tolerated, but peaceful political marches and protests clamped down on hard? Does the virus behave differently in different types of crowds? Of course not. We have to conclude that the government and the Met Police seemed to be more concerned about political contagion than viral contagion.

  Georgio Agamben, the Italian philosopher, has written about the reduction of life to biopolitics. To simply reduce the theory, he says that the man who is ‘accursed’ can be set apart from normal society, and must live a ‘bare life’ – life reduced to the barest form.

  In the worst examples, the ‘accursed’ are put in concentration camps, where a state of exception becomes the rule, and normal laws and morals are forgotten. Guantanamo is a modern example. The ‘bare life’ of the prisoners was such that the only protest left to them, hunger strike, was also dominated by the brutal policy of the wardens, and they were force fed and anally rehydrated as a form of torture. The prisoner’s geopolitical border of the body was destroyed by the captor. This is a disturbing example of a government taking away rights and creating fear.

  The UK government has said many times that healthy people can still be infectious, therefore we can all be the ‘accursed’ to a degree. (This is despite numerous studies showing that asymptomatic transmission is not a serious risk,10 and Dr Fauci proclaiming in 2020 on US television that ‘an epidemic is not driven by asymptomatic carriers’.) Has much of the world been turned, without our understanding or noticing, into a ‘state of exception’? The camp can also be metaphorical. We don’t need to be relocated, we can be locked down at home too. Home is clearly not a concentration camp, there are no barbed wires or machine-gun towers, and I do not want to stretch this metaphor into melodrama, but nonetheless it is a confinement. For those in cramped and inadequate homes, the confinement is more serious. We were presumed infectious rather than healthy, our geopolitical borders were determined to
be unreliable, thus our normal rights were restricted, and for some self-isolation felt like a form of torture.

  Beyond the metaphorical, China forced 800,000 people into quarantine, and its use of stadiums as mass isolation areas was chillingly reminiscent of concentration camps. In Israel, the publication Haaretz described ultra-Orthodox Jews who do not follow the state’s rules as ‘Covid insurgents’ and ‘terrorists’11 in starkly obvious biopolitical language. In a particularly hyperbolic description, ‘maskless individuals’ are accused of setting off ‘epidemiological time bombs’.

  We should be alert to similar, albeit less extreme, moves in Europe. The Times headline ‘Hunt for mystery person who tested positive for Brazilian Covid-19 variant then vanished’12 evoked a slightly aggressive image of a hunt for a person carrying a new Covid variant, as though a bio-terrorist was dangerously on the loose with a weapon. Four states in Germany announced plans to create detention centres for those who violate lockdown measures, using specially built facilities, a refugee camp and a juvenile detention centre guarded by police. Public health mutated into crime and punishment, all made possible by emergency laws. Some people will believe that if you break the rules you should accept the consequences, tough. But we must remember that these rule-breakers were healthy, not necessarily infectious, people.

  The PCR test used to determine ‘infectiousness’ is not actually a good indication of infectiousness, believe it or not. The management of the epidemic rested strongly on the use of the PCR test. As the Public Heath England document Understanding cycle threshold (Ct) in SARS-CoV-2 RT-PCR: a guide for health protection teams says, ‘A single Ct value in the absence of clinical context cannot be relied upon for decision making about a person’s infectivity.’13 And as the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at Oxford University said, ‘PCR detection of viruses is helpful so long as its accuracy can be understood: it offers the capacity to detect RNA in minute quantities, but whether that RNA represents infectious virus may not be clear.’14

  In guidelines for NHS staff,15 the government wrote that staff who had already had Covid should be exempted from mass screening tests because ‘fragments of inactive virus can be persistently detected by PCR in respiratory tract samples following infection – long after a person has completed their isolation period and is no longer infectious.’ Think of all the people who tested positive and did self-isolate when they may no longer have been infectious. Of those, how many broke self-isolation and were punished? In November 2020, the Portuguese High Court ruled that PCR test results alone could not be used to enforce self-isolation; they must be accompanied by clinical diagnosis.16

  The legal detention of healthy people is permitted by emergency laws but enabled by a narrative of dehumanisation. People who break the rules are ‘dangerous’ (they might be infectious), ‘stupid’, and ‘socially irresponsible’.

  People have been instructed not to work, have relationships or touch other people. These are rules which would have sounded outlandish, cruel and impossible not long ago. The number of people attending funerals was restricted, the elderly were left unvisited in care homes, and women birthed without their partners, to give just a few examples of exceptions to the normal moral and human rights which were impeded or suspended.

  Lockdown itself is prison terminology. Only wrongdoers are locked down. At least in law you are innocent until proven guilty. In our biosecurity state we are assumed infectious until proven healthy.

  How do you leave the camp, the world of confinement, social distancing rules and restrictions? In time, when the government determines the epidemic has run its course? Or perhaps the answer lies in a vaccine, to be delivered en masse in 2021? The choice to take a vaccine is a marvellous modern medical blessing, as long as resuming sovereignty of your life does not mean forgoing sovereignty of your body. Beyond choice, we should be vigilant about the danger of mandation and the more subtle, but no less powerful, threat of coercion, for example by offering a return to normal civic and social life with a ‘vaccine passport’ or ‘Covid status certificate’, or double-speak ‘freedom app’.

  The worst threat, mandation, would signal loss of bodily sovereignty, in the same way as a prisoner in Guantanamo Bay tube-fed against his will. Coercion is more nuanced, but over time would it create a two-tier society of vaccinated ‘safe’ people and unvaccinated ‘unsafe’ people? Would the unvaccinated be considered reckless, socially irresponsible or stupid? These are values which push them further into a ‘less than’ status. Note that Matt Hancock linked ‘personal responsibility’17 with the 2021 vaccine rollout, the implication being that the choice not to vaccinate is irresponsible.

  Nick Cohen wrote in The Guardian: ‘it is only a matter of time before we turn on the unvaccinated’.18 A German doctor19 called for people who refuse the vaccination to be refused hospital treatment if they become sick with Covid. This is not how national healthcare has been provided in Germany or the UK. It is available to all. Obesity is one of the key indicators of ICU treatment and death from Covid. It would be equally monstrous to propose that the overweight may not be treated in ICU, because they did not show ‘personal responsibility’ for their health.

  The ‘accursed’ are less than their fellow humans. This is why it is important to always be aware of language and policy which ‘others’ and dehumanises. The media and social media have reverberated with language like ‘covidiots’, ‘selfish morons’ and ‘granny killers’. I can personally attest that peaceful protestors were wrongly characterised as ‘violent anti-lockdowners’. A study20 claimed that non-mask wearers were more likely to be psychopaths. History reverberates with examples of deliberate attempts to dehumanise and divide people and it has never ended well.

  So, why do governments use fear? Simply, it encourages compliance. A meta-analysis has found that messages with fear are nearly twice as effective as messages without fear.21 At a time when there is political disengagement, fear cuts through. How do you get your population to take heed? Scare them. Fear suppresses rational thinking and they are more likely to do what they are told.

  I spoke to political scientist, Piers Robinson, about fear. He was the chair in Politics, Society and Political Journalism at Sheffield University, leaving in 2019 to focus on his work as co-director at the Organisation for Propaganda Studies. Piers has been ‘smeared’ for disputing the use of chemical weapons in Syria. So he has studied propaganda and also – depending on your viewpoint – been at the other end of it.

  I asked if he thought governments were leveraging fear as a form of social control. He said: ‘If something very big is going on in the world, you should always ask if it can be exploited for reasons that are entirely separate from what the primary concerns appear to be. Covid is an event of such scale that there is the potential for actors to exploit it for various agendas. Never let a good crisis go to waste, and so on. You can be open-minded about both the severity of the disease and the potential for exploitation. 9/11 is an example. That event led to 20 years of warfare which wasn’t about fighting terrorism but was enabled by the ‘war on terror’ narrative. When the Chilcot report published communications between Tony Blair and George Bush and they were talking about 9/11 and attacking various countries, it was obvious that the war on terror was to be used as propaganda to fight different wars for other reasons.’

  I put it to him that our anxieties have developed in a trajectory from Cold War, to the war on terror to a ‘war on viruses’. He agreed, but shot back, ‘We destroyed other countries in the war on terror. This time we’re destroying our own.’

  I asked Robinson how and why a government would destroy its own country. He was keen to clarify he didn’t mean ‘a caricature of conspiracy theory’ but rather ‘vested interests and agendas which coalesce. No social scientist would dispute we live in a world where there exist powerful actors with agendas. One of the ways through which agendas are pushed is propaganda. I would call this a major propaganda opportunity.’

  Propaganda is Robi
nson’s speciality so I asked how he observed it at play. He was cautious, explaining that this was such a large event it would take months to research fully, but that censorship had raised a red flag: ‘Very early on it was clear that eminent scientists were questioning the approach. It’s likely the threat was being overplayed because some dissenting and credible scientists were being censored. The utility of lockdown, for example, has been extremely difficult to debate in public. Bad decision-making and groupthink could also be behind this, but there is manipulation of the narrative through propaganda going on as well.’

  Censorship is one of the tools of propaganda. Others are false flags – the use of covert operations that appear to be carried out by other states – repetition, manipulation of the facts (lying), and the manipulation of emotions, notably fear.

  ‘People have been gripped by fear in an obsessive way, and to a degree far worse than occurred with fear of terrorism,’ said Robinson. ‘Propaganda is all about behavioural psychology, manipulation essentially, getting people to do what they wouldn’t otherwise do, through coercion, or incentive or deception. Not all persuasion is propaganda, but propaganda is manipulation and it is not democratic. The way some behavioural scientists have acted during the Covid-19 response runs the risk of unethical conduct. I think we should investigate and hold to account the professionals complicit in this. We in academia need to think about the ethics of this more. When I research and write I do not try and manipulate people, I am trying to get to the truth and inform people.’

  When will political scientists and historians have a clear perspective on the motives and tactics used in the government’s Covid policies, if it took 20 years to understand the war on terror? ‘In the fullness of time it will become clearer,’ Robinson said, ‘as long we don’t lose democracy, because it’s not inconceivable that we are walking into an absolute nightmare in which freedom of speech and debate become significantly curtailed.’