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

by Laura Dodsworth

  26 MAY – BANK HOLIDAY

  Tourism bosses and local authorities, panicked by the beautiful weather forecasts, warned people to stay at home for the bank holiday. Merseyside employed a charming ‘Wish You Weren’t Here!’ campaign. Perhaps the high temperatures and fresh air weren’t conducive to disease transmission; no spike in deaths followed.

  16 MAY ONWARDS – ANTI-LOCKDOWN PROTESTS

  Anti-lockdown protests inspired outrage. People who attended were labelled ‘idiots’ and ‘selfish anti-lockdown morons’ who would ‘put everyone at risk’. The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, branded anti-lockdown protests ‘unacceptable’. There was no discernible impact on deaths.

  31 MAY ONWARDS – ‘BLACK LIVES MATTER’ PROTESTS

  Many thousands took to the streets in a series of protests over the death of George Floyd and in support of Black Lives Matter. This time, politicians, the police and media were fairly quiet about the risk of spreading Covid. Sadiq Khan said, ‘To the thousands of Londoners who protested peacefully today: I stand with you.’ An article in The Guardian claimed that the mobility of crowds and mask-wearing reduced risk. One study, reported in The Independent, went further and said the protests helped increase social distancing behaviours. However, the science must have changed, as Priti Patel, Home Secretary, said in November that she would like to ban protests of more than two people.

  25 JUNE – BOURNEMOUTH BEACH

  A ‘major incident’ was declared at Bournemouth beach on 25 June. There were half a million visitors in Dorset, roads were gridlocked and the beaches were full. Local MP Tobias Ellwood said that people were ‘being selfish and also acting dangerously’. Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty responded to the beach scenes by saying that Covid cases would ‘rise again’. They didn’t. Eventually, by mid-February 2021, Mark Woolhouse, Professor of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh, told the Science and Technology Committee in the House of Commons1 that no outbreaks of Covid had been linked to a beach so far.

  4 JULY – ‘SUPER SATURDAY’

  Dubbed ‘UK’s Independence Day’ or ‘Super Saturday’, 4 July was the day that pubs reopened in Britain. Places of worship opened too, but people seemed more cross about the pubs. Predictably, news stories on 5 July contained photographs of crowded streets of ‘drunken idiots’. While most of Britain probably celebrated sensibly, one police officer claimed to have dealt with ‘naked men, happy drunks, angry drunks, fights and more drunks’. Saturday night then. ‘Welcome to the second wave’ one furious commentator said. There was no impact on cases or deaths associated with ‘Super Saturday’.

  SEPTEMBER – BACK TO SCHOOL AND UNIVERSITY

  Academics and unions warned that students preparing to return to university were risking a ‘public health crisis’ and that we were ‘weeks away’ from ‘sleepwalking into a disaster’. They also grumbled that plans to make schools ‘Covid secure’ were ‘unviable’. In line with fresher’s flu and back to school sniffles, cases of Covid undeniably rose in September although deaths remained low.

  CHRISTMAS

  Neil Ferguson of Imperial College warned that households mixing ‘risks some transmission and there will be consequences of that. Some people will die because of getting infected on that day.’ Happy Christmas to you too, Neil. Susan Michie said, ‘If we really want to keep our loved ones safe, the best thing is not to see them.’ And Anouchka Grose wrote in The Guardian that, ‘Anybody with any kind of conscience is beating their brain, calculating all eventualities that may result from showing up for lunch in a week’s time – one of which involves inadvertently killing your aged parents.’

  UK deaths within 28 days of positive test by date of death2

  Just a couple of weeks after Ferguson’s predictions, the UK government changed its plans to relax social restrictions for Christmas due to a new infectious and rapid-spreading strain which was ‘was out of control’.3

  According to the Office for National Statistics,4 around half of the people who were allowed to meet for Christmas did so. There was a spike in infections at Christmas, but unrelated to Christmas itself. Paul Hunter, a professor at the University of East Anglia’s medical school, said, ‘I actually can’t see any convincing evidence that Christmas actually did anything to make things worse at all,’ in an analysis for the BBC.5

  BACK TO SCHOOL AGAIN

  By now you know the script. Some experts were worried that when pupils returned to school, Covid cases would go up. It was almost as though all their previous predictions had been true rather than false, such was the confidence. Also, it was as though the UK had not rolled out a successful vaccination programme, and that spring was in the air. Professor John Edmunds of SAGE warned that ‘it looks as if it would be touch and go’ and that ‘if we opened secondary schools and primary schools both at the same time, I suspect we would be lucky to keep the reproduction number below one’.6 There was a slowdown in the fall in cases attributed to the return to school, although this was thought to be due to the increased mass LFT testing in schools. Once again, there was no catastrophic effect on cases, deaths or R.

  In a twist on the game ‘pin the tail on the donkey’, see if you can locate the super-spreader events on the graph of Covid deaths and discern any impact. Then see if you can pinpoint the following interventions: lockdown 1.0, masks on transport, masks in shops, rule of 6, lockdown 2.0, tier restrictions or lockdown 3.0.

  Has the illusion of control exaggerated our belief that we can control the course of a virus?

  The attitudes towards people who would gather and mingle are definitely not illusory. Journalists, politicians and the public condemned and sneered at ordinary people they described as ‘Covidiots’ and ‘selfish’. This created social division, shame, anger and more fear. People are more likely to assume responsibility when things go right, and less responsibility when things go wrong, so perhaps they simply need scapegoats lined up for the crisis around the corner.

  MARK, 44

  I did feel a sigh of relief when the second lockdown was announced. We’ve been having a trial thing of going back to the office one week out of every three. I felt really uncomfortable leaving the house and my village. I found it very peculiar. So to be honest, I am looking forward to the next four weeks.

  Even though the journey time is only half an hour by car I didn’t enjoy the commute and found it difficult. I feel like I have lost driving and navigating skills, and I felt very tired when I got there. I’d arrive and wonder why I was there. The sanitised environment of the workplace, the smell of bleach, wearing masks in the corridors, it all felt so unnatural. Being inside my village and especially inside the house feels more normal, welcoming and calming than being outside.

  I have genuinely wondered if I am developing agoraphobia. On the few occasions when I have been to the supermarket, I have not enjoyed being around other people. I find being around masked people really odd. You can’t smile at people any more so I’d rather not go out.

  I’m most worried now about social cohesion. The regionalised lockdowns have almost been finger-pointing at the people of Leicester or Manchester. I think we could end up in a position where the mask-wearers and the non-mask-wearers and the lockdowners and the anti-lockdowners feel very different to each other. On a smaller level I have seen it in my village. On our village Facebook group some people have said they won’t do this lockdown, and they don’t see why our pub has to close.

  I don’t like not being aware of society, not meeting people, not really knowing how people are feeling. I haven’t met anybody in the last six months who I didn’t already know. I am becoming more introverted.

  It’s a paradox that I am developing agoraphobia, but I am also frightened of being cut off from the world.

  13. THE CLIMATE OF FEAR

  ‘Scapegoating worked in practice while it still had religious powers behind it. You loaded the sins of the city on to the goat’s back and drove it out, and the city was cleansed. It worked because every
one knew how to read the ritual, including the gods. Then the gods died, and all of a sudden you had to cleanse the city without divine help. Real actions were demanded instead of symbolism. The censor was born, in the Roman sense. Watchfulness became the watchword: the watchfulness of all over all. Purgation was replaced by the purge.’

  From Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee

  The scapegoat is an ancient religious and ritualistic practice and, these days, a metaphor for social exclusion. In the Bible, the scapegoat was one of two kid goats. One would be sacrificed, and the living one, the ‘scapegoat’, was sent into the wilderness, symbolically carrying sins and impurities with it. Scapegoating is not just to be found in the Bible though; it is one of the enduring human archetypes found across cultures and times.

  The ancient Greeks practised scapegoating rituals during ‘extraordinary circumstances such as famine, drought, or plague’1 in order to save the whole community. While the Israelites and the Hittites used animals, the ancient Greeks used humans. Being ‘civilised’ does not necessarily mean being more humane.

  Death was not essential, but expulsion from the community was key, one way or another. The scapegoat might be banished, or stoned or burned to death – there is a comparison with the hysterical ‘burning times’, during the centuries when witches were tried and executed, accused of all the ‘sins’ and troubles of their communities.

  Who is scapegoated in the time of Covid and who are the high priests and inquisitors? We might like to believe we are above such superstitious and archaic behaviour, but where is the evidence that human beings have changed? In fact, can we observe the early warning behavioural signs and symbols of a nascent religion?

  It looks like the NHS co-opted the rainbow from the Pride movement, but it’s also an ancient religious symbol, integral to the Bible’s flood story and in Graeco-Roman mythology it was a path between earth and heaven. Fans of the Avengers films will remember the rainbow Bifrost, which links Midgard and Asgard. Rainbows in windows ostensibly honour the NHS and its workers but, because they represent our health service, perhaps at an unconscious level they also serve a talismanic role in warding away disease and bad luck, just like other amulets and home adornments such as the Hamsa, the Green Man, the Nazar, a lucky horseshoe or the Romans’ flying pottery penises. There is mixed evidence that community mask-wearing protects us from viruses, but we wear masks anyway, as the vestiture of the faithful and the obedient. Hand-sanitising baptises us daily into the new religion of health and safetyism. As valued government advisors, the priest caste has been replaced by a scientist caste. Churches closed their doors at the behest of modellers and behavioural scientists with scarcely a murmur of resistance. Vaccines are modern medical miracles, but they also evoke a modern biosecurity incarnation of transubstantiation – especially when delivered in cathedrals with organ music playing, in an intersection of the old religion and the new religion. In this new creed, what is to be done with the impious and the heretics? As always, they are scapegoated.

  As Coetzee wrote in Disgrace, in modern times scapegoating has transmogrified into censorship. There is a discernible blend of scapegoating and censorship among the self-appointed keepers-of-truth during the Covid epidemic. These days, no one is to be burnt at the stake or ritually sacrificed, just metaphorically cast into a desert, professionally shamed, no-platformed, unpublished, removed from the modern-day public fora of Twitter and YouTube. Silenced and banished. In this way the scapegoat can take on the sins of society, as well as serve as a warning to other potential dissenters. Speak up, and you are next. The media, Big Tech social media giants, politicians, scientists and perhaps all of us, the ‘mob’, have enforced a climate of fear through scapegoating.

  MP Neil O’Brien appointed himself inquisitor of ‘covid sceptics’. Alongside other volunteers, he created a fact-checking website as well as regularly denouncing dissenters in Twitter threads. He was praised for his efforts by fellow MP Jacob Rees-Mogg, who said he was doing ‘a fantastic job’,2 leading some to believe that O’Brien was acting unofficially on the government’s behalf. The website contained ‘lists’ of people as well as general claims that he deemed wrong and misleading. Some saw this as an important service in combatting ‘disinformation’, such as Rees-Mogg. Some were troubled that an MP, both a public servant and someone holding a position of authority, created lists of British citizens in order to pillory them and digitally ‘cast them out’.

  The lists are also one-sided. They only include people who have made mistakes that go against the government narrative. The government, its ministers and SAGE advisors have also made mistakes during the epidemic but they are not included on the lists. A one-sided presentation of mistakes betrays the intention to silence particular voices and views. Mistakes will be made, and they should be accounted for. We all make mistakes. The danger is when mistakes are weaponised to intimidate and stifle debate.

  The website Anti-Virus: The Covid-19 FAQ may even make mistakes of its own. After all, how can all the Covid science be definitely settled? How can the website creators be confident that they arbitrate the absolute truth? One of the refutations caught my eye. The website asserts that ‘suicide rates have not risen during lockdowns, either in the UK or worldwide’. A report3 from the University of Manchester looked at ‘real-time surveillance’ and claimed there was no evidence of a rise of post-lockdown suicides. As I explained in Chapter 11, ‘Counting the dead’, it is too soon to be certain about UK suicides, and I expect the same is true internationally.

  Neil O’Brien’s Twitter attacks felt dogged and personal. Journalists with strong personalities were better able to weather the slings and arrows. The distinguished scientists were probably more discomfited by their placement on the lists, including two from the UK’s Oxford University: Professor Sunetra Gupta, a highly regarded Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology, and Dr Carl Heneghan, a GP, clinical epidemiologist and a Fellow of Kellogg College, the director of the University of Oxford’s Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine and Editor-in-Chief of BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine. Dr Clare Craig, a diagnostic pathologist, also came under fire for asking controversial questions about the PCR testing. She described the attacks by O’Brien as ‘bullying’ and responded on Twitter: ‘Almost none of Neil O’Brien’s tweets about me offered evidence to prove me wrong. I believe his intention is to deter me and other people from speaking out. I am concerned that a Government representative would behave this way about good faith scientific discussion.’4

  Public execration has a silencing effect. When dissent is framed as mistaken, irresponsible and ‘dangerous’5 it creates serious personal, public and professional consequences for the individuals and beyond. Speaking out during the epidemic felt akin to questioning the Church, rather than contributing to an ongoing scientific debate or discussing the political decisions made in a democracy. That is not a healthy situation for journalism, science or public debate. Democracy requires a free press and free speech.

  But is scapegoating simply driven by individuals, such as O’Brien, or do we have to accept something about human nature? It might be a natural human tendency to scapegoat from a position of assumed moral high ground. A study, Moralisation of Covid-19 health response: Asymmetry in tolerance for human costs,6 found that during Covid ‘health-minded approaches have been moralised, even to the point of a sacred value’ and that ‘merely questioning sacred values led to moral cleansing’. Defending lockdowns and restrictions was seen as moral, and questioning them seen as immoral. As a consequence, the human costs of the restrictions were under-acknowledged, de-prioritised and granted less moral weight. The report warned this could lead to ‘deaths of despair’ among those human costs. As we have seen, proponents of lockdowns might wish (even unconsciously) to underplay these in order to remain comfortable on the moral high ground.

  The Behavioural Government series by the Behavioural Insights Team talked about how we reject ideas from another group, even if they are good ideas: ‘If another party does not th
ink the same way, then our preferred reaction is not to reassess our own opinions. Instead, we try to come up with ways of denigrating the opposition. This happens because we find it hard to maintain both a positive image of ourselves and a positive image of someone who disagrees with us… we decide that those who think differently are biased, through ideology, self-interest, malice or stubbornness. While we have considered the issue carefully, they are just proceeding from dogma. This perception of bias makes conflict and division escalate further… This process happens most clearly between competing interest groups, where it has been called the ‘devil shift’: seeing your opponents as more extreme and more ‘evil’ than they actually are.’7

  This goes some way towards explaining the viciousness towards opposite views in the Covid epidemic. Someone can happily justify their ‘inquisitor’ status when the ‘devil shift’ has occurred. You would think that, as this explanation emanated from behavioural scientists embedded in government, the government would learn from it, rather than permit or encourage an MP to denigrate people with opposing views. This perspective from BIT could also explain why people on the left did not oppose lockdown even though it disproportionately harmed the poor and vulnerable, because they did not think it was possible that they could share the same perspective as those on the right, or libertarian, side. Oppositional group thinking creates tribalism and closes minds to different points of view. Response to lockdown was hyper-partisan.