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

by Laura Dodsworth

  How is fear confected? How exactly have our minds been nudged to influence our behaviour? Here are some examples from the myriad UK government mind-control campaigns.

  FRIGHT NIGHT

  The behavioural psychologists advised that the sense of personal threat had to be ramped up at the end of March. The prime minister’s doomsday speech was scripted to do just that, by inducing fear and evoking war and authoritarianism. Chapter 1, ‘Fright night’, details this. From that point onwards, the risk of death was energetically amplified, particularly during the 6pm and 10pm news broadcasts and on newspaper front pages. The Downing Street briefings were characterised by authority figures in suits on raised podiums and yellow and black chevroned signage warning danger, danger, danger.

  While the number of deaths in the UK to date is sobering, the British people have vastly over-estimated the risk to themselves from Covid-19, the country has been locked down or under restrictions one way or another for most of a year, and it was Boris Johnson’s speech that first set the framework for that miscalculation.

  HEROES, COVIDIOTS AND SLOGANS

  The media resounded with a dialectical theme of ‘heroes’ and ‘covidiots’ during the epidemic. ‘Heroes’ was used repeatedly to praise people following the rules, inspiring community activists, and frontline workers. Praising heroes is laudable, but what is determined to be heroism is key, and heroism consisted mainly of following the rules and following a nascent creed of safetyism and collectivism. A BBC film on 25 December celebrated ‘London’s 2020 pandemic heroes’.11

  Slogans on government and NHS advertising appealed to heroic altruism:

  ‘Stay home, protect the NHS, save lives’

  ‘Protect your loved ones’

  ‘I wash my hands to protect my Nan’

  ‘I wash my hands to protect my family’

  ‘I wear a face covering to protect my mates’

  ‘I make space to protect you’

  Heroism and altruism appeal to ‘norms’, as we all want to be in the right crowd. ‘Ego’ is affected as the terms and framing equate compliance with virtue. The slogans themselves work through ‘salience’ as they are simple and catchy. We’re hardwired to notice what is distinctive. Roadside signs commanded us to ‘Stay Alert’. This was distinctive for a while. To start with I noticed my local illuminated ‘Stay Alert’ sign each time I drove past it, although I’m sure I wasn’t alone in wondering what I was supposed to be alert to exactly while driving my car. After a couple of months I felt irritated by the relentlessly glowing ‘Stay Alert’ signage. After another couple of months it was no more than roadside wallpaper. It had lost salience.

  Instructional slogans also came in triadic structures, because of the ‘power of three’. Rhyme and repetition are proven to increase believability. They ‘afford statements an enhancement in processing fluency that can be misattributed to heightened conviction about their truthfulness’.12

  The term ‘covidiot’ emerged early on to describe people behaving ‘stupidly’ or irresponsibly. Or you can swap ‘covidiot’ for ‘selfish moron’, or ‘granny killer’. The Urban Dictionary website has a selection of definitions, including this dour piety: ‘an individual who in the face of dire circumstances for all, acts selfishly toward others instead of in solidarity and with generosity.’ Through ‘affect’ people will not want to be in the disliked deviant group. The negative labelling ensures that the altruistic majority who are openly conforming with the rules will blame any subsequent increase in coronavirus cases or deaths on those who didn’t comply, while themselves taking the credit for any positive change in the statistics. The covidiots and ‘lockdown sceptics’ become responsible for the virus being a hard-to-control virus, or the ineffectiveness of unproven non-pharmaceutical interventions. Scapegoating is ‘convenient’.

  As I explained in Chapter 4, ‘Fear is a page of the government playbook’, the use of ‘othering’ and dehumanising language can go on to have tragic consequences. Patrick Fagan told me that in an analysis of the Rwandan genocide, one of the first linguistic predictors was the tendency to look backwards, to blame, and to focus on past wrongs and injustices, and he had noticed similar precursors in the language of blame during the Covid epidemic. This sounds extreme, but it’s important to at least be aware of these linguistic signposts – they have always led us down the ugliest roads in human history.

  When pubs reopened in the summer, 4 July 2020 was characterised as ‘Independence Day’, implying an entitlement to excess and conveying disapproval. Pubgoers were derided in the media as wanton and selfish – the classic covidiots. Even if no rules had been broken, the sight of people enjoying a convivial drink was heavily criticised by pious ‘lockdown zealots’.

  It’s worth noting that when we are influenced by ‘norms’ and coalesce into a group – a herd – we are easier to govern. It isn’t a stated aim of the behavioural psychologists but it’s an undeniable effect. And it makes spotting the dissenters all the easier.

  Scary slogans also used the effects of ‘incentives’ and ‘affect’ to deter rule-breaking:

  ‘If you go out you can spread it. People will die’

  ‘Don’t kill granny’

  ‘Coronavirus. Anyone can get it. Anyone can spread it’

  ‘Don’t let a coffee cost lives’

  I felt a whiplash of shock when I first saw the ‘Don’t kill granny’ campaign. It was simultaneously insensitive to the youngsters who have lost grandparents, and placed a jaw-slackening burden on the others. I felt a visceral maternal need to reassure my children that they were not responsible for the deaths of the elderly. One son told me in response that a teacher at school had shouted at non-mask-wearers in the corridor that they were ‘killing people’. Killing people would warrant calling the police, would it not? In fact, teenagers were merely making their way from one lesson to the next. Has this kind of hysterical and accusatory attitude towards our children been fuelled by government-initiated campaigns?

  I contacted Professor Ellen Townsend, who heads up the Self-Harm Research Group within the School of Psychology at the University of Nottingham about the granny-killing catchphrase. After a long pause – I sensed she had a lot to say and was composing herself – she responded: ‘It is an unethical and morally repugnant slogan that compassionate, holistic public health researchers would never endorse. Using fear to psychologically manipulate people, especially children, is unlikely to engender trust in science or future public health messaging.’

  To maximise the impact of scary slogans, the posters displaying dire warnings have often been accompanied by images of emergency personnel wearing medical masks and visors, stark black and white imagery and bold typefaces. The use of red and especially yellow and black have been typical of the scary advertising, as they suggest danger and threat. Yellow and black chevron-edged images remind us of painful wasp stings as well as disaster area cordons. Beware, do not cross (the rules), for on the other side of this chevron lies pain.

  Patrick Fagan observed that some of the language used in the slogans might also be intended to bamboozle us. The term ‘social distancing’ is oxymoronic; distance is not social. In Australia, the advice was even more Orwellian: ‘Staying apart keeps us together’. The confusion aroused by this type of bamboozlement means you are more likely to be compliant to the command.

  CAUTIONARY TALES AND CASE STUDIES

  The media focused on case studies which serve as cautionary tales: stray from the rules and all will not go well.

  ‘Patient in Wales makes coronavirus plea – “I didn’t believe it was this bad”’ Sky News, 26 January 2020

  ‘Man who believed virus was hoax loses wife to Covid-19’ BBC, 24 August 2020

  ‘Mum who didn’t believe in Covid-19 struggles to breathe after 22 days in hospital’ Mirror, 20 October 2020

  Clapping your hands and shouting you believe in Tinkerbell doesn’t keep fairies alive, and simply believing Covid is a dangerous respiratory disease doesn’t k
eep you alive either. Of course, people needed to take sensible precautions and follow the law and guidance, but if being frightened enough to follow all the rules was enough to keep people safe, far fewer would have died. These lurid headlines and cautionary tales are designed to frighten people into following the rules – look at what happens to those who didn’t believe hard enough.

  But do the media do this at the express bidding of the government? In Chapter 2, ‘Fear spread in the media like an airborne virus’, I explored the complex and inter-connected relationship between the media and the government. In addition, do the behavioural scientists have a direct line to some journalists?

  During a Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee on 19 January 2021,13 MPs put questions to David Halpern of BIT and Stephen Reicher, Professor of Social Psychology, both of whom sit on SPI-B. Reicher referenced a relationship with the media a few times. He mentioned a specific and early case in the media: ‘a nurse crying in distress in the first wave was immensely important in getting us to understand the realities on the front line… I have been arguing for the need for more of these, including stories of compliance.’ He reiterated later that he wanted ‘more stories of their [the public’s] compliance’. He said he had argued on Radio 4’s Today programme that they needed more such stories and ‘to be fair to the Today programme over the next few days they had stories of everyday heroic compliance’. Reicher seems to exert some influence.

  FINES

  We can’t credit the nudgers with the invention of punitive fines. We’ve always had them. Although, without exaggeration, the Covid fines are the worst this country has seen since the Weregild or ‘blood money’ of the Dark Ages.14 In fact, the behavioural scientists seem to prefer carrot to stick, although fines would fall under the heading of ‘coercion’15 in the recommendations from SPI-B. The problem is that laws to compel compliance must of necessity involve punishments for non-compliance. And Halpern believes that ‘it does matter that egregious examples are enforced’.

  32,32916 FPNs (fixed penalty notice fines) were issued under the Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) Regulations, England and Wales and handed out by police between 27 March and 21 December 2020.

  SEEDING, THE OVERTON WINDOW, A FOOT IN THE DOOR AND BOILING FROGS

  Seeding is the art of planting an idea like a seed, to let it grow – later your audience is ready for the sale, or the next Covid restrictions, as the case may be. Leading on from that is the foot in the door technique: once someone has agreed to one request it is harder to refuse the next bigger request, as a precedent for acquiescence and acceptance has been established. Both seeding and foot in the door are tools which can manipulate what is known as the Overton window. This is the model for a framework which can shift and expand the policies that a government can follow without alienating their electorate.

  Once the idea is seeded, and the foot is in the door, it means you can be boiled like frogs. The boiling frog metaphor was famously used in The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood: ‘Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it.’

  In the biggest example of how these terms have played out in the Covid epidemic, we started with a single lockdown for three weeks to ‘flatten the curve’, which itself transformed into many weeks and, one way or another, we lived under restrictions for over a year by the time of publication. Currently we are in a lockdown which has no guaranteed end date or exit strategy. Whether through bumbling incompetence and lack of planning, or through a covert foot in the door agenda, or combination of all of it, the fact is that a three-week lockdown was the seed for a much longer-term and more drastic arrangement.

  We were told that masks didn’t work, and that they were even a bad idea, because you ‘trap’ the virus and breathe it in, and that they can also increase transmission.17 We were told they would not be introduced. But even saying that we wouldn’t have to wear masks planted the seed of an idea about mask-wearing. Then, despite no new conclusive evidence in their favour, masks were mandated on public transport, then in shops. Just before this mandate there were seemingly coordinated (or oddly coincidental?) calls from politicians and scientists. The Royal Society issued a report18 and press release urging the adoption of masks, although it concentrated on behavioural psychology and messaging rather than hard evidence. In fact, it had to note that uptake had been depressed by a lack of evidence-based medicine in favour of masks. Sadiq Khan asked for masks to be legally required. Once mandated, Matt Hancock said the mask policy would be rolled out ‘in chunks’.19 This was a rare explicit glimpse of the government’s considered foot in the door strategising.

  The prospect of vaccine passports was also floated, withdrawn, and mentioned again. On 12 January 2021, the Vaccine Minister, Nadhim Zahawi, pledged that there were no plans to introduce vaccine passports. Yet on 24 January the Daily Mail20 reported that eight companies were in receipt of government funding to develop vaccine passports. Has a seed been planted? What will happen to the ministerial promise? Let’s see what grows.

  KEEPING FEAR IN OUR FACES

  Face coverings, or masks, appeal to ‘norms’ and social conformity. The behavioural psychologists love masks. They absolutely love them. They believe they promote collectivism, the feeling that we are all ‘in it together’. This attitude, clearly gleaned from my interviews with the SPI-B advisors, was confirmed when David Halpern answered MPs’ questions and said, ‘It took a long time to get people in masks. Our view early on was that masks are effective, not least because of the signal they create and of course the underlying evidence.’ So, he believed there was evidence in favour of masks, but note that ‘signal’ comes before ‘evidence’. Behavioural scientists pushed for masks because they create a ‘signal’, when in fact not a single Randomised controlled trial can demonstrate the value of mask-wearing outside clinical settings.

  How does the signal work? Normative pressure is enhanced and sustained when we wear masks in public. They are a visible indicator that there is danger present all around, in the air we breathe and in the people we meet. Masked faces prime you to think of danger. We become walking billboards for disease and danger. They keep fear in our faces. Literally. They also distinguish the compliant from the rebels, although of course there are many valid reasons, and non-exhaustive legal exemptions, for not wearing a mask.

  And what of the evidence? At the beginning of the epidemic, politicians and public health leaders around the world told us masks were not effective in the community. England’s Chief Medical Officer, Professor Chris Whitty, said, ‘In terms of wearing a mask, our advice is clear: that wearing a mask if you don’t have an infection reduces the risk almost not at all. So we do not advise that.’21 In the US, Dr Anthony Fauci was clear on 8 March 2020 that ‘People should not be walking around with masks.’22 He went on to say that a mask might make people feel better and it might even prevent ‘a droplet’, but doesn’t give the protection people think and can even increase transmission. But although there was no new hard evidence, policies changed country by country. In England, masks were legally mandated on public transport on 15 June 2020 and then on 24 July in shops, in Scotland on public transport on 22 June and in shops on 10 July, Wales on public transport on 27 July and in shops on 14 September.

  In a speech on 3 August 2020 WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said ‘the mask has come to represent solidarity’. What he did not mention was any new evidence behind the policy change. In fact, the WHO’s guide, Mask use in the context of Covid-19,23 published on 1 December 2020, said, ‘At present there is only limited and inconsistent scientific evidence to support the effectiveness of masking of healthy people in the community to prevent infection with respiratory viruses, including SARS-CoV-2.’ The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) concurs that ‘evidence regarding the effectiveness of non-medical face masks for the prevention of COVID-19 is scarce’.24 Matt Hancock said that masks ‘gi
ve people more confidence to shop safely and enhance protections for those who work in shops’.25 The UK government website does not offer the facts and figures behind the ‘science’, it just says that the ‘best available scientific evidence’ is that face coverings ‘may reduce the spread of coronavirus droplets in certain circumstances, helping to protect others’.26

  An MP told me off the record that the Health Minister had told him that masks were introduced because the economic bounce-back was not strong enough after the first lockdown in 2020. It was felt that masks would make people feel safe enough to go shopping. Masks were supposed to serve as an economic stimulus. However, once we were wearing masks it became about social control, because it turned out they reinforced a feeling of abnormal threat and stimulated fear. The reason for wearing masks became inverted.

  When I spoke to Robert Dingwall (a Professor of Sociology who advises the government) he told me he was convinced that masks had been introduced partly because they are ‘a symbolic reminder that people are dangerous, the world is dangerous, and you might feel safer at home. They create a sense of threat and danger, and that social interaction might be something to be anxious about. So mandating masks can feed the fear.’ He agreed that there was little ‘scientific basis’ for masks and that, in his view, they were designed to ‘make people compliant’. I asked about the ethics of that tactic and he retorted that ‘the ethics of it stink. The BPS [British Psychological Society] should be taking a look at it. I’m disappointed that the psychologists have not taken this up.’ Well, the problem is that at least some of the psychologists wanted us in masks precisely because of the fear signal…

  A recent large-scale randomised controlled trial in Denmark, Effectiveness of Adding a Mask Recommendation to Other Public Health Measures to Prevent SARS-CoV-2 Infection in Danish Mask Wearers,27 found no conclusive evidence that masks protect the wearer, although the study was not designed to test whether others could be protected.