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

by Laura Dodsworth

  I’d put the news on as soon as I got up in the morning. I don’t know if the media peddle the bad news because they think it attracts us, but I watched every day hoping for good news, something that would make me feel a little less bleak. It never came. I don’t put the news on in the morning any more.

  Every single feed said we were going to die. Sky News was the worst. There were so many gruesome headlines that came at you thick and fast. There were Ferguson’s predictions that 500,000 would die. Graphs have completely lost their meaning. I watched every Downing Street briefing. There was one press briefing when they talked about a vaccine, and the one about dexamethasone. They were the only two things that I can remember. All the dreadful ones have just merged.

  I can’t understand why no one talks about how many people have recovered? People would have loved headlines about recovery.

  A tipping point for me was Boris Johnson’s first unlocking speech. I thought, ‘Jesus, he doesn’t know what’s going to happen.’ After that, I could feel my mood going down.

  One morning I woke up with my whole body in a state of shock. I was trembling from head to foot and I had a shushing noise in my ears. My whole body felt in a state of agitation. I was dizzy when I got up, I nearly fainted. My pulse was regularly over 100 and my blood pressure was high. I thought I must have Parkinson’s or MS or something, but it was anxiety. It’s hard to believe anxiety made me feel so terrible.

  For weeks, I was like this every morning. Most symptoms would begin to resolve by the evening and I’d hope I would be OK the next day, but the following morning there they all were again. I would stay in bed or on the sofa all day.

  I grew up in the Cold War. We had ads on TV showing houses being blown away. But it wasn’t as constant as Covid, we weren’t talking about it all the time. Now we have adverts about the virus and the news in your face every hour, every day.

  I don’t know if I will listen to the government again if there is another epidemic. We don’t have the types of statesman that we had in the past. I don’t have confidence in our government’s strategy and intentions.

  There has never been a medical end to a pandemic. The only illness we have ever eradicated is smallpox. We haven’t got rid of bubonic plague or Spanish flu. Societies end pandemics, not science. I think we are in Covid phobia phase and next we’ll go into Covid fatigue phase and then it will end because people will want to go to the shops or whatever and we’ll get our herd immunity anyway.

  The whole of society is riven with fear. We’ve all become each other’s enemy. For the first time, everyone has become a threat to everyone else. Will we look back and say it was collective hysteria? There was a dancing plague in the 1500s. I think we are passing hysteria between us more effectively than a virus.

  I feel depressed about the winter ahead. It feels incredibly bleak.

  6. THE SPI-B ADVISORS

  ‘The way we have used fear is dystopian.’

  SPI-B advisor

  ‘The idea of going back to so-called-normal is a major area of consideration. There’s a climate crisis coming and that’s going to have to be dealt with. The way we have gone about adapting to the virus has been quite beneficial in terms of working patterns and reducing carbon – all the things we are going to have to go through to adjust to the new future. As the New Zealand prime minister put it, we need to “build back better”. There are challenging times ahead of us for the next 20 or 30 years, God help us. The most major crisis of humanity is starting. I see the weather patterns changing around me. I believe in climate change. It’s already getting bad. These will have major impacts on the nature of the world around us.’

  ‘The new future’? My blood chilled. I’d asked Clifford Stott if SPI-B had been tasked with thinking about how to bring the population out of lockdown, climb down from fear and back towards a normal society.

  Clifford Stott is a Professor of Social Psychology and an expert in collective violence and riots, policing issues and management of crowds. He is one of the four members of SPI-B who agreed to speak with me. Another nominated her colleague who produces work which is fed into SPI-B. A SAGE advisor also agreed to be interviewed and, as before, the anonymous scientist who advises at Whitehall had plenty to say.

  I hadn’t imagined that a SPI-B advisor would mentally segue from Covid to climate change when asked how to end lockdown. I silently wondered if he envisaged future lockdowns to reduce CO2 emissions. Boris Johnson made some drastic environment promises during the epidemic, pledging to ‘build back better’, including commitments to wind power and switching to electric vehicles.1 And this is where we tap into my fears.

  If you ultimately concede that lockdown is a useful tool, you must concede that the tool may be used again. The government, wielding the tool, develops muscle memory. So do we. Covid-19 is not the last novel virus. It’s not the last crisis. Would you accept another lockdown for a future epidemic? Could we do another lockdown without laying waste to our economy and society? Would you go along with another lockdown for a run on the banks, an act of terror, or a food shortage? How about regular lockdowns to reduce CO2 emissions? How about every winter to reduce deaths from flu? Would our fear be deliberately elevated again to make us comply? Welcome to my raw nerve, strummed by Stott’s answer.

  If you think this is an exaggeration, Speaker Lindsay Hoyle demonstrated an appetite for a ‘lockdown’ or restrictions of some sort, for the environment. At the G7 Speakers’ Meeting in September he said, ‘If one lesson from the pandemic is that taking serious action in a timely manner is key – then shouldn’t this also be true in terms of climate change? With Covid, what surprised many of us in the UK was how engaged most of the population became once the seriousness of the situation was made clear. People were prepared to accept limitations on personal choice and lifestyle – for the good of their own family and friends. No one could ever imagine that we would be wearing masks so readily and that we would all be so compliant. Perhaps we ought not to underestimate the ability of people and communities to work together for the common good, if there is united and clear leadership.’ They never imagined we would be so ‘compliant’.

  It’s widely accepted that the government uses polling company YouGov to ‘test the waters’ before announcing new policies. In mid-January 2021, YouGov started probing how lockdowns might have affected public concern for the environment. The survey tested agreement with attitudes such as ‘The short-term positive impact Coronavirus has had on wildlife and ecosystems has encouraged me to make better environmental and sustainable decisions’ and the importance of reducing your carbon footprint since the beginning of the Covid pandemic.

  To understand how our fear had been leveraged against us in the UK, I needed to get to know the people who suggested frightening us. I approached most of the advisors on SPI-B for an interview. Nearly all of them ignored me or turned me down. They probably fielded many media requests alongside their advisory work and regular jobs, but it wasn’t necessarily wise to nail my lockdown sceptical colours to the mast in a series of articles and tweets in 2020 before writing this documentary book – my contributors might have thought me biased because I clearly wasn’t a lockdown supporter. The fact is, we are all biased: it is unavoidable. The point is to be clear about it to yourself and in your work, as far as you are able. Fortunately, previous work must have spoken of my genuine willingness to embrace a story and all its nuance, because several agreed, during this very busy time, to speak with me.

  I asked all my interviewees if they had been commissioned to think about helping people manage their fear and the ending of lockdown. A SPI-B paper put forward the idea of elevating fear, so I assumed that they would have considered the exit plan. Fear impacts us mentally and physically and it would then impede the reopening of society – surely that would make an exit plan essential? They all seemed surprised to be asked. The idea was obviously not on the table yet. Perhaps they had been too busy fighting one fire at a time. Stott said to me that he couldn’t
speculate because he was ‘far too busy in the here and now’. That is understandable. But if this was an experiment in a lab, researchers wanting to scare you would need a plan for how to manage your emotions afterwards. At the end of the experiment, they would probably show you a happy film and give you a slice of chocolate cake, at the very least. You would not leave the lab scared and unhappy. The psychologists running the experiment would have been through a very rigorous ethics process. We would have signed consent forms to agree to be frightened. I know I didn’t sign a consent form. It would seem that this live experiment has no ethics committee and no exit plan. (Actually, I doubt it would get past the ethics committee.)

  Stott was careful to point out that his answers were personal reflections, but that’s partly why I was worried. I had a breakthrough – it seems very obvious in retrospect – when I realised this group of experts were bringing their own personalities, biases and beliefs to the table. In effect, they were fully-fleshed out humans, not faceless experts. In the early days of the epidemic, SAGE and SPI-B members were anonymous. The summaries of meetings were published, but they were fairly ‘clean’; you don’t know who said what, how easily they reached consensus or when they disagreed. You’ll never know which informal conversations ‘outside the room’ gave the biggest policy decisions dynamite.

  Because of that infamous SPI-B document, some people have assumed that SPI-B advisors are powerful, caricature villains. They are well-thought of in their fields, and highly qualified. The power is harder to ascertain, because their role is to provide answers and proposals in response to COBRA and SAGE requests. In the papers, you can sometimes discern the political persuasions and biases of the SPI-B team. For instance, right-wing libertarians would be unlikely to reach towards ‘collectivism’ as often as SPI-B does. The papers read like proposals from mainly left-wing academics. In the questions behind the papers you can read the political intent of the policymakers. In the obvious example of Options for increasing adherence to social distancing measures, SPI-B has been asked how to make people adhere to the rules. One answer is obviously to legislate. The advisors are telling the politicians what they want to know, as well as giving behavioural insight about how to achieve that. It would be remarkable indeed if the advisors went in a completely different direction. It is well known in advisory circles that scientific advice is inherently political. Where the SPI-B advisors have sometimes wielded an additional and weighty power is speaking to the press and from their own social media pulpits.

  A very consistent source of discontent among the SPI-B team is that the government often ignores their advice, which means that they aren’t quite as powerful as people on the outside might think. As Stott said to me, ‘It’s self-evident that government policy is at odds with the advice they are given.’

  It was apparent to me from the SPI-B documents that one of the government’s biggest fears was social unrest, even riots, and Stott would have the experience to anticipate and advise. ‘One of the first concerns was that there could be protests or riots in response to lockdown,’ he said. ‘The idea in February of ending football matches, shutting pubs, making people not go to work for months on end, closing schools seemed unprecedented. Unthinkable. Our advice revolved around inequality and not doing things to amplify perceptions of illegitimacy. Within all of this the people who suffer the most are the poor and where they suffer harm as a result of control measures, the potential for police to exacerbate social conflict would be quite profound.’

  There have been protests, but not the dreaded riots. I commented to Stott that there was a strange pivot in the country’s attitude to protest in the summer. One day, the general attitude was that we needed to protect the elderly and vulnerable by staying inside, ‘old lives matter’, and the next, people were protesting ‘Black Lives Matter’, and the world took to the streets. Stott retorted it was simply about ‘priorities’ but he obviously disapproved of inhibiting the right to protest: ‘The right to assemble is a basic human right. It’s protected under the European Convention of Human Rights. Any government that takes the right away is taking massive steps in what we think of as democracy.’

  He was excoriating on the emergency legislation to prohibit protest and the fines for organising and attending. ‘It’s a very pernicious piece of legislation,’ he told me, ‘and it has massive and negative implications for the reach of government.’ He was also disapproving of the large fines for breaking self-isolation. A common theme from the SPI-B advisors was that encouragement is more effective than punishment.

  The conversation took a frosty turn when I asked him about the effect of groupthink within SPI-B. This is a phenomenon where the natural desire for harmony within a group means that people will set aside their personal beliefs and adopt (at least outwardly) the beliefs of the group. The SPI-B papers only reflect consensus and I wondered if they always achieved that in their meetings. He threw me when he said, ‘Groupthink is a completely flawed concept, developed around the inherent pathology of the group that undermines rationality and critical thinking. That is not what is going on. Groups don’t have a tendency towards conformity, and I can absolutely guarantee you that groupthink is a myth.’ I told him I’d look this up.

  Indeed, I checked with a couple of psychologists who were surprised at the idea that groupthink had been so confidently ‘debunked’. Naomi Murphy, clinical and forensic psychologist, told me that within the NHS, teams try and guard against groupthink as they are aware of the dangers. She made an additional interesting point that video calls will be affecting group dynamics in ways we can’t fully understand yet. These behavioural insight ‘war room’ meetings are not happening in a room, they are happening in disparate studies and sitting rooms around the country – how does that affect communication and consensus?

  The National Association of Scholars (NAS) in the US published a report in 2018 entitled The Irreproducibility Crisis of Modern Science.2 Sadly, I don’t think the UK government, civil service or the advising scientists appear to have read it. The NAS and the report’s authors are concerned with the use and abuse of statistics, irreproducibility of results and political groupthink in science, saying that the intersection between these issues is very much what is ‘wrong with modern science’. They summarise that ‘an entire academic discipline can succumb to groupthink, and create a professional consensus with a strong tendency to reinforce itself, reject results that question its foundations, and dismiss dissenters as troublemakers and cranks’ and that this ‘particularly affects those fields with obvious policy implications, such as social psychology and climate science.’ The problem is, the scientists in the midst of this don’t see it.

  My video call with Stott ended swiftly after my next question, which was about the use of fear. I asked him what he thought of the ethics of fear being used to influence people. He said: ‘At the time it was about what might be necessary going into lockdown. We’d have been asked to consider what level of behavioural changes might be needed.’ I tried again, specifically querying the trade off in making people more frightened if it is ‘for the greater good’. He responded that it was ‘a reflection on people who might not think Covid will affect them.’ Again I probed, pointing out that statistically most people won’t be much affected, that Covid will not be serious or lethal for the majority – therefore is it acceptable on that basis to make people think they are more at risk than they are? He said, ‘There you go then,’ and our video call dropped from frosty to arctic and we wound up.

  SPI-B’s remit does not involve questioning the data, the government-provided ‘facts’ that they work with, and Stott didn’t like my train of questioning. If your SPI-B advisor, or civil service behavioural psychologist thinks the country is facing the apocalypse to end all apocalypses (and presumably they were told to treat the Imperial College London modelling as de facto) then they might think the ends utterly justify the means. Although you would hope they would still be constrained by the ethics of their professional bodies an
d training.

  Robert Dingwall, a Professor of Sociology who sits on various government advisory panels, was far more open on the subject of fear. In his view, fear ‘passed its sell-by date by the end of April’, although he took a nuanced view that ‘fear might have been an appropriate tool at the beginning when we thought the virus might be an existential threat.’

  His concern was that since then, there had not been a wider debate about alternative strategies and that ‘the narrow base of advice given to the government was following a very narrow sub-set of science’. A struggle is happening within government between those who think the policies are disproportionate and the medics who have ‘colonised the expert panels’. While I have postulated in this book that aspects of our government resemble a technocracy, or a ‘psychocracy’, Dingwall worries that the upper echelons of government and advisors are leaning towards ‘iatrocracy’, a system whereby the doctors and scientists are in charge.

  It is understandable for doctors and scientists to be dedicated to the pursuit of health, but Dingwall sees the problem as ‘a lack of challenge and diversity’. Ultimately he believes we ‘need to learn to live with Covid. We have never thought it necessary to inflict social distancing and mask-wearing for influenza even though that can carry off 50,000 people in a bad year. We live with the threat of infectious disease at a minor level every day.’

  The anonymous scientific advisor deeply embedded in Whitehall I interviewed in Chapter 5, ‘The business of fear and the unelected psychocrats’, believes the ‘narrow base of advice’ Dingwall talked about has been deliberately cultivated for years: ‘There used to be rebels, and that was good, because you can learn from the rebels. Labour liked the rebels. During the coalition under Cameron, rebels became a little less popular. Then they disappeared.’ They think the teams of experts have been recruited for their unified approaches and in order to align with political intent. Once the panel is assembled, they ‘are given the injects as facts’. In the first instance in this epidemic it was that ‘500,000 would die’ and it was not their job to consider whether the facts were correct or not. Quite simply, questions are not welcomed. ‘You aren’t allowed to fight the information,’ they said.