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

by Laura Dodsworth

  The anonymous scientist characterised a homogeneity of thinking and groupthink among the SPI-B team: ‘SPI-B interpret dissent as bad. Rosa Parkes didn’t get off the bus. SPI-B would not have liked Rosa. The behavioural psychologists are arrogant and they have no rebellion in them.’

  I certainly got a sense from all my interviewees (admittedly this is only through several conversations with several advisors) of common themes and a consistency in approach among SPI-B. They liked terms like ‘co-creation’, ‘co-design’, ‘co-production’, ‘collectivism’, ‘in it together’ and ‘solidarity’ – words which are strewn throughout the SPI-B documents on the government website. Depending on your ideological perspective, these might be seen as admirable qualities, but I can see how they could accompany a dislike for ‘dissent’. They must also have in common a belief in the appropriateness of a behavioural science approach to an epidemic, or they wouldn’t be on the team. And I detected politicisation in their approaches and advice, which is arguably inevitable, but could be skewing their advice disadvantageously.

  My chat with Dr Daisy Fancourt was very pleasant. I think she would have been OK with Rosa Parkes. She is an Associate Professor in Behavioural Science and Health at UCL and runs The Covid Social Study, a longitudinal social and psychological study into the impact of the epidemic and lockdowns. She feeds research into the advising panels including SPI-B. She was recommended to me by Susan Michie, Professor of Health Psychology & Director of the Centre for Behaviour Change at UCL. Michie didn’t have time for an interview, which is not surprising as she sits on SAGE, SPI-B and ‘Independent SAGE’.

  Fancourt told me that one of the strengths early on in the pandemic was that we were ‘all in this together’. She believed that had encouraged compliance and social cohesion. My impression from some of the interviewees was that they liked collectivism for itself, but also because it breeds adherence to the rules.

  I asked her about the use of fear as a tactic to encourage adherence. ‘One of the things that was effective was increasing the idea that you shouldn’t pass it to others,’ she said, ‘as people are concerned about spreading the virus to neighbours and families. Some of the less effective policies are on the threat to yourself. Appeals to collective conscience are more effective.’ That made sense, but then she uncritically mentioned one of my personal bête noires, ‘don’t kill granny’, which was ‘good for compliance’. For one thing, some young people will have lost grandparents during the epidemic, making this quite an insensitive catchphrase. Back in March 2020, Neil Ferguson said that two-thirds of the people who would go on to die from Covid might die anyway during the year because ‘these are people at the end of their lives or have underlying conditions’.3 Given that, should children and young people be burdened with this level of responsibility in order to encourage compliance?

  Fancourt told me about the ‘huge role’ of psychology and behavioural science as the epidemic continues. She thinks they can be used to heal trauma and grief, ease mental health problems, treat frontline healthcare workers experiencing trauma and heal the divisions sown by the epidemic. In her opinion, behavioural science would be needed to ‘encourage people to use vaccines. We won’t get out of this unless people have vaccines.’

  She expanded: ‘Most people are worried that because the vaccines have been developed quickly, safety stages have been missed out, and they have not. We need to make sure the information about vaccines comes from different sources, it mustn’t look like it’s propaganda. It needs to come from faith leaders, influencers, local leaders. “Anti-vaxxers” aren’t bad people they just have concerns that need addressing. We need to make people want to have the vaccine, not feel like they must have it.’ Wouldn’t simply seeing the full data from trials and post-launch convince people? Wouldn’t longer-term safety data be part of that, because despite Fancourt’s assurances that safety stages have not been missed out, people will be aware that medium and longer-term side-effects won’t have emerged? And was she basically saying that propaganda is acceptable as long as it doesn’t look like it’s propaganda?

  On 22 October 2020 SPI-B published a paper entitled Role of Community Champions networks to increase engagement in context of COVID-19: evidence and best practice,4 which is ostensibly about ‘Test and Trace’ but puts forward the general idea that ‘community champions are volunteers who, with training and support, help improve the health and wellbeing of their families, communities or workplaces.’ While the document pushes the idea of ‘co-creation’ often mentioned by the SPI-B advisors, it’s about how to use champions to influence, rather than genuinely ‘co-create’. The question came from government, the strategy comes from SPI-B, and the next step is lining up the champions, who presumably will tailor the messaging, but not the objectives. The term ‘community champions’ also has a slight ring of the block policing that has been, and still is, widely used in Communist regimes, where individuals are asked to report anti-social behaviour and promote pro-social acts by their neighbours.

  Two of the SPI-B advisors who agreed to talk to me were adamant they could only be fully honest if they were anonymous, to protect their reputations and future careers. I’m going to call them SPI One and SPI Two. (I know, this is not ideal.)

  SPI One is high up in their professional body and, as such, I was very keen to talk to them. Like Fancourt, they also brought up the vaccine, telling me, ‘Without a vaccine, psychology is your main weapon. You have to restrict ways in which people mix and the virus can spread. Psychology has had a really good epidemic actually.’

  I asked them which psychologists had particularly stood out. They mentioned Susan Michie, who had been unable to speak with me, and told me that she is ‘particularly fantastic on the messaging’. This brought me on to the intersection of scientific advice and politics. Michie is a member of the Communist Party of Britain,5 which wants a ‘revolutionary transformation of society’ to end capitalism and create a socialist state of Britain. I had been surprised that a Communist Party member was advising the government through two important advisory panels. Might such revolutionary views influence her advice? She praised China’s response on Twitter on 14 March: ‘China has a socialist, collective system (whatever criticisms people may have) not an individualistic, consumer-oriented, profit-driven society badly damaged by 20 years of failed neoliberal economic policies. #LearnLessons’

  I’m not sure the people who were welded into their apartments in China would agree with this rose-tinted view of collectivism, or the Uygurs, or those who are blacklisted (‘once discredited, everywhere restricted’) using China’s government surveillance social credit system.

  ‘It’s interesting how people’s personal politics sit with this,’ said SPI One. ‘Susan Michie, who I think’s been outstanding, is a member of the Communist Party, yes. I’m not sure how helpful her criticisms of the government are. The attack on neo-liberalism and the whole culture of individuality is rooted in the collective, the ‘we’, group identity – this is powerful psychology at the moment. In general, the pandemic hasn’t exactly always brought the best out in people and the science/politics interface is both very interesting and problematic.’ I asked if personal politics interfere with the quality of advice. SPI One turned it round, saying that they believed the more right-wing and populist governments had not managed the epidemic as well.

  As The Irreproducibility Crisis of Modern Science notes, ‘Some of the groupthink afflicting scientific research is political. Numerous studies have shown that the majority of academics are liberals and progressives, with relatively few moderates and scarcely any conservatives among their ranks’. Politicised groupthink can bias scientific and social-scientific research in any field that acquires a political coloration.

  SPI One warned me that ‘people use the pandemic to grab power and drive through things that wouldn’t happen otherwise.’ They were concerned about some of the policies the government were enacting, possibly using Covid as a proxy: ‘We have to be very care
ful about the authoritarianism that is creeping in.’

  They told me that there was a more pressing problem with science and politics. The advice might depend on who pays the advisors. (Frankly, I was surprised there was not more of a clamour to understand the financial interests and funding behind the various advisors to government during the epidemic.) More interestingly, they observed that ‘psychologists tend to be more on the neurotic end of the spectrum. I personally have been taking Covid very seriously. I go in shops, but I don’t go in cafes. There is a madness in psychology at the moment. Suddenly every psychologist and undergraduate in the country is at looking this. And that is partly an anxiety management thing.’ Perhaps the strategy to frighten the country was ignited in the crucible of the psychologists’ own anxieties.

  I asked my standard question: had it been ethical to frighten people ‘for the greater good’? ‘You need to frighten people,’ they affirmed, ‘there is something frightening about pandemics. The number of deaths in Italy meant it was responsible for the public to be informed about how dangerous it was, for their own safety. Young people, particularly people under 55, seem to be quite safe. How do you alert people to the fact there is a serious life-threatening illness they can get without putting the fear of God into them? We live with the knowledge we are going to die but we don’t normally think the person we are going to shake hands with could kill us.’

  This seemed at the heart of the issue ethically – is it acceptable to implement a campaign of fear when the threat does not apply equally to everyone? One SPI-B paper spelled out clearly that ‘the messaging should be transparent about uncertainty where present, in order to earn trust,’6 but this had not been reflected in ministers’ speeches, or in scientific briefings, or in advertising. As an example, one government advertisement, targeted at the young, showed teenage lads sitting in a park, with the message, ‘Don’t meet up with mates. Hanging out in parks could kill.’ Providing tabulations of relative risk in advertisements wouldn’t work, obviously, but does over-stating risk to people who are clearly not in the risk category engender trust? It doesn’t take long for young people to suss out they aren’t at risk, so what was to be gained long term by pretending they were? The government tried to democratise the risk of Covid, when in fact it was highly patterned and age-stratified. I thought of how Jane (p76) said she wouldn’t trust the government again if there was another epidemic. She was just one example of how simple messaging – which may have the best intentions – can backfire if not honest.

  I mentioned Jane to SPI One and said she suffered panic attacks every morning for weeks, and scoured the news for stories of hope. Had SPI-B ever been commissioned to give people hope? Apparently not.

  Another call for transparency came from SPI-B member Gavin Morgan, an educational psychologist. With his educational focus, he worried about the impact of school closures on children’s mental health and learning, especially ‘the more needy kids’ with mental health issues and behavioural problems. He said that the longer lockdown went on, ‘the more kids will be affected. The more broken pieces there will be to pick up.’

  He did a lot of work with SPI-B to get schools in a position where they could reopen in the summer, but he found the willingness was not there. The government had created so much fear that there was ‘a lot of misplaced concern’ from parents and teachers about the risk level. In his view, ‘This stems from the government’s concern that people wouldn’t follow lockdown rules. They went overboard with the scary message to get compliance. They were pushing at an open door, because there was already fear. Effectively, locking down schools was easy and unlocking was very difficult because of fear. The government’s campaign was too effective.’

  I asked if a more honest and transparent communication of risk might not have reduced the difficulties with schools. He agreed, and used the term ‘co-creation’ again. In his opinion, the Department for Education, teachers and parents should have jointly developed plans, which would have led to more honesty, a better understanding of risk, and ultimately they would all have been invested in the plans and ‘owned the solution’.

  His great success with schools was preventing the use of masks in schools, at least initially. He was adamant that teachers and pupils should not wear masks in classrooms, telling me, ‘younger kids’ speech and communication needs are predicted on being able to see an adult’s mouth when they are talking. We take in so much when we interact with people: the non-verbal, eyes and mouth. It’s massive if you take away half of people’s faces. There isn’t any empirical evidence because this is all new, but we can relay theories about human development. Young people and children could be hugely affected. Masks dehumanise people.’

  Given that he thought masks dehumanise people, and that the evidence that they help prevent transmission is weak, I wondered how the SPI-B advisors felt about them? I was not surprised that he told me that the group was split. As he said, ‘they are not a panacea and the evidence is not clear cut’. But he told me that some of the group like masks because they convey a message of ‘solidarity’. In other words, there is a behavioural science ‘reason’ for wearing masks, to increase a sense of collectivism. This is a feeling favoured by the psychologists that is entirely unrelated to the scientific evidence regarding transmission. Essentially, they want us to feel like we are ‘in it together’.

  During the course of writing this book I spoke to Morgan a few times. I liked him. He was open, where others were sometimes guarded, and he enjoyed the process of our ‘interviews’ because they encouraged him to look at different perspectives. When I spoke to him again in early 2021 I got the impression his involvement had been dialled down a little.

  The government gave very strong guidance that secondary school pupils should wear masks in classrooms when schools reopened on 8 March 2021. I asked him what was behind this new policy. ‘It’s gone quiet. We’ve gone from regular meetings to just being commissioned for different projects,’ he said. ‘There was no consultation about face masks in schools.’ I asked him why. ‘I don’t know. I have raised the questions a few times with other SPI-B members and with people who also sit on SAGE. We don’t know why we weren’t consulted.’

  It seemed strange that the government had a willing educational psychologist ready and waiting to provide pro bono advice, and not to take advantage. I asked if he thought he wasn’t being consulted because he gave the ‘wrong sort’ of advice. He paused and then offered a diplomatic answer: ‘It’s becoming more streamlined which is sensible.’ Right, but he’d fought hard to prevent masks being used in classrooms before – were they weeding out the wild cards? ‘Maybe,’ he agreed.

  I wondered what he thought of this U-turn on masks in classrooms. He reiterated the same kind of points he’d made before, perhaps expressed even more strongly. He pointed out that, ‘masks aren’t even questioned any more, it’s like a seatbelt in a car.’ What the public would tolerate, accept, and even wanted, had shifted.

  At this stage, an unevaluated mass-testing programme had also started in secondary schools, with pupils taking three tests to return to school, and thereafter two per week. I asked him what he thought about the impact of this. ‘It’s one more thing that schools are being asked to do,’ he told me. ‘Fair play to teachers, they are doing it, but they do roll over without any challenge. It assuages the government; they are trying to keep parents on board and reassure people it is safe to go back to school.’ But what about the pupils? How did he think this might make them feel? ‘Anything invasive like that feels like a threat. We don’t send children to school to be prodded. And for what end really? I don’t know if mass testing will do any good.’

  Morgan was the only SPI-B advisor I spoke to who emphasised that we should have been thinking about the finish line from the beginning: ‘There was a lot of positive goodwill about wanting to lock down and we rushed into it. I cautioned that we would need an exit plan.’

  I asked if they were thinking yet about the exit plan? He sa
id no. Depressingly, he commented that, ‘We’ve seen how much people are willing to give up their freedom since March.’

  I asked him how we would alleviate fear and get back to normal. I had the feeling that he agreed with me that we should try and get back to normal, in contrast to Clifford Stott. He hoped that a vaccine and ‘track and trace’ would help, but ultimately the greatest aid to encouraging compliance and reducing fear would be ‘open, honest and truthful’ government. He didn’t seem at all convinced we’d get that.

  We talked about the fear that enabled this trading of freedom for a sense of security. Morgan admitted to me, like SPI One had, that he had feared catching Covid at the beginning. People seem to enjoy being scared – at times – and I mused that perhaps the response to Covid had revealed a craving for existential crisis that had not been met since the Second World War. Was there a deeper psychological need being expressed through this fear? He responded that ‘people like being scared. Think about rollercoasters and horror films. They are enjoyable because we know they are safe but provide a vicarious sensation of fear. We don’t have to go out hunting any more, we’re not scared of being attacked anymore.’ So perhaps the muscles of our evolutionary fears needed flexing…

  By the autumn Morgan’s fears had evolved and he worried that ‘important aspects of human society are being taken away. If this goes on much longer we will lose our culture. If that’s taken away, then what are we? My fears have changed over six months.’