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

by Laura Dodsworth

  Many people would have been discharged before receiving a diagnosis (I anecdotally heard of a number through interviews with nurses and doctors) who would then have spread Covid among their families and the community. We don’t know the scale of nosocomial and the respective secondary infections, but the NHS’s withholding of the data most likely speaks to the volume of it.

  In January 2021, Keir Starmer called for tougher measures including the closure of zoos.16 All the animals in the zoos, the visitors, the staff, the very notion of fun itself, were scapegoated while hospital-acquired infections were ignored, to save the hallowed NHS from being criticised. Of course, if you believe that legally mandated restrictions and lockdowns are the way to go, you might as well throw in zoos, I’m not making a special point about them, except that the idea they are a big problem is farcical. But still, none of this addresses hospital-acquired infections, about which we heard very little from the Minister of Health, NHS spokespeople, or the media.

  Nosocomial infections are higher when community prevalence is higher, probably because of increased ‘traffic’ in hospitals,17 so lockdowns do make some sense in helping to suppress hospital-acquired infections. But otherwise, creating fear in the population and locking everyone down did nothing about the problem of nosocomial infection. There also wasn’t enough PPE (personal protective equipment) at the outset of the epidemic. Did we all have to carry the sins of an inadequately prepared government and ill-equipped NHS? Instead of being ‘cast out’ into the desert, did our scapegoating take the form of restrictions and confinement?

  The ultimate scapegoats in the Covid epidemic and lockdown might have been children and the young. As Ellen Townsend told me, ‘Their needs were subjugated. The legacy that we are creating for the young people of this country is horrendous. There are austere times ahead for them. They lived through a time when they were virtually ignored. In all actions people in power should be doing things for the benefit of children. Why are we not putting them first in everything?’

  Scapegoating is an enduring human practice. Imagine trying to explain to the Mayans that they did not need to throw live children to their watery graves in Cenotes in order to ensure the rain fell? Perhaps our children were Covid’s sacrificial lambs.

  JIMMY, 32, BY HIS MOTHER

  I found my son after he tried to kill himself.

  We normally message a lot as a family. One day he left a message saying ‘I bloody love you lot.’ He told us he’d changed his phone number and then he left the group. Twenty-four hours later I still hadn’t heard anything else, which is not like him. I messaged his girlfriend and she said she thought he was with us because he’d said he needed a few days away. So I knew something was wrong. We found him at a hotel. His voice was very flat when I spoke to him. Then I got a very strange message saying ‘Don’t ring me.’

  We rushed there and the hotel had to help us break into his room because the chain was on the door. He’d tried to kill himself. We called an ambulance.

  We’ve talked a lot since he’s been at home. Before lockdown I think we could have helped before things got this bad because we’d have been seeing him in person. Life’s been harder without the normal things you can do in life like going out, going to the gym, even just sitting on a bench if you take a walk with someone. There’s no joy in life anymore and there’s nothing to look forward to. There’s no end point to this lockdown.

  When he first came round he didn’t know where he was or why he was there. He said all he could see was people in masks and it looked like they were all angry. Normally you’d have seen the nurse’s face and they would probably say everything will be OK, but he said they looked like robots and he couldn’t see any kindness or concern. He said it freaked him out. You’d have thought they would know when he came round he would be like that.

  He has said he’s sorry, but the last thing I want is for him to feel guilt. I don’t want anyone who has thought about killing themselves to feel guilty if they read this. People can’t help it. A lot of us are feeling very bleak.

  I have a rage bubbling away. I am so angry about the way we have had this fear-mongering going on for such a long time. People think the BBC would never lie and the government wouldn’t be trying to frighten us, but it’s all about trying to scare people and all the time they are doing this, it is impacting people’s stress and health.

  14. CULTS, CONSPIRACY AND PSYCHIC EPIDEMICS

  ‘I want to touch you, move you and inspire you’ said a friend to me during an out-of-the-blue phone call, over a decade ago. He told me about an incredible self-development course he was taking and asked me to come along and see what it was about for myself. Inquisitive, I asked questions about why he thought this course would be good for me. Was he telling everyone about it or just me? If just me, then why? How would it move and inspire me? Although he raved about it, he couldn’t actually describe the course content clearly or explain why it would benefit me. It wasn’t enough to convince me to part with a few hundred pounds and risk falling into this brand of inarticulate euphoria. My then-husband decided to sign up for it though.

  ‘I want to touch you, move you and inspire you,’ said my husband when he came home, late, the first evening of the course. Oh dear. Same words. Same euphoria. Same inability to describe why it was so good and why I should do it. Extremely unnerved, I was now absolutely certain I should not do the course, but research it instead.

  In the end, my husband and a few friends all took the Landmark Forum ‘human potential’ course. It’s a ‘Large Group Awareness Training’ programme which has polarised people around the world. Some claim it has miraculously changed their lives. Some warn it is both a pyramid-selling scheme and a dangerous cult.

  I learnt that Landmark Forum used some very particular techniques: the training room had no natural daylight or clocks so participants felt disorientated, and therefore more suggestible; specific vocabulary that needs explaining to the outside world, such as ‘racket’, which is your state of being; very specific and limited break times so participants were hungry, thirsty, and needed the loo, making them feel physically uncomfortable but also infantilised and disempowered; emotional manipulation; hard selling to get new members; long hours and homework, so the rest of life is just crowded out, making the experience more intense. I became interested in how cults work in general.

  When I told my husband I thought he had been ‘brainwashed’ he was shocked and deflated. There was a feeling I had ruined this for him. He completed the course but, to my relief, didn’t take the next level.

  When we locked down in March 2020, I noticed that aspects of the situation, how we were ‘managed’ by our leaders, and people’s responses matched elements of cult programming. I wasn’t alone. In July, Peter Hitchens wrote in his Mail on Sunday blog:

  ‘When this madness began, I behaved as if a new and fanatical religion was spreading among us. Be polite and tolerant, I thought. It may be crazy and damaging but in time it will go away. Now it is clear that a new faith, based on fear of the invisible and quite immune to reason, has all but taken over the country. And it turns out to be one of those faiths that doesn’t have much tolerance for those who don’t share it.’1

  There are close parallels between cult induction, religious conversion and political propaganda. The similarity in techniques is the subject of Battle for the Mind, by William Sargant. As he said, ‘Religious conversion techniques… often approximate so closely to modern political techniques of brain-washing and thought control that each throws light on the mechanics of the others.’ He noticed that Chinese Communist Party experiments on mass excitation and reconditioning of groups were comparable not just with religious conversion, but also group psychotherapeutic treatments. The politician, priest, police officer and psychologist all have much to learn from each other.

  As with the Landmark Forum, we all had to learn a new language at the outset of the Covid epidemic: social distancing; flatten the curve; self-isolate; build back better. We
were captive indoors and although our curtains could open, the days soon blended and we lost sense of time. Extreme emotional manipulation was standard fare from politicians and through the media. We were denied relationships, dating, to go out to work, to decide the minutiae of our lives – we were infantilised and disempowered. People gleamed with the heady fervour of cult novitiates.

  I am not suggesting that an overarching sinister cabal deliberately inducted us into a cult, or that Boris Johnson is a cult leader. But there are some parallels with cult leadership and induction. Perhaps it is simply the case that these techniques are naturally employed by particular types of leader who wish to command their subjects.

  Dr Margaret Thaler Singer, author of Cults in Our Midst: The Continuing Fight Against Their Hidden Menace was an expert in the steps required to ‘brainwash’ people into joining cults. She described a thought reform programme, whereby a person or an organisation puts into place a coordinated programme of coercive influence and behaviour control. The novitiate puts their old value system aside and makes decisions based on what the cult leader wants and will reward, and stopping the behaviour that will get them in trouble.

  Cults tend to be totalitarian. The leader has the power and decision-making. Our government ruled via ministerial diktat from March 2020. Questioning, doubt and dissent are discouraged in the cult, and cult leaders use feelings of shame and guilt in order to influence members. Often this is done through peer pressure and subtle forms of persuasion below the level of consciousness. This book has explored the tactics that were used on the British public.

  Contrary to popular opinion, you don’t have to be a vulnerable or damaged person to be recruited to a cult. Anyone can join a cult! The recruiter will narrow your attention in a controlled situation and create an experience which leaves you panicky or disorientated. Remember Fright Night? That’s when it began with a big bang, but it really began with little fizzles when you read doom-mongering headlines or watched China’s ‘Stunt Covid’ videos. You are most susceptible to the cult when you are stressed and emotionally vulnerable.

  Next comes the love-bombing. While you are emotionally vulnerable you are flooded with affection and validation. A mere four days after Fright Night, most of the nation was clapping appreciatively in common purpose for the NHS. We flicked in a flash from fear to adulation. The media covered stories of death and the dangers of Covid (creating fear and vulnerability) as well as Covid heroes (love-bombing, feel-good stories and aspirational behaviour).

  Cults need to get hold of a good deal of a person’s time, especially their thinking time, so they don’t dwell on what’s happening and don’t think too critically about it – so they are split off from their friends and dependency is encouraged. The media and government press briefings took care of that. We have never been so socially atomised.

  Cults also use dependency and dread, creating a sense of powerlessness, anxiety and fear. Natural events are reframed to encourage obedience in members. Cult leaders almost always say that if you follow their rules it will help change the world and make it perfect. If followers leave the cult, they are told terrible disasters will befall them, they will die, or they won’t have good karma, or some such flannel. The outside world, and the people in it, are presented as very dangerous. Does any of this sound familiar? In the case of the ‘Covid Cult’, the ultimate consequence is death, because if you don’t comply the virus will get you, or you’ll be fined or shamed if you go out without a reasonable excuse.

  The novitiate’s conscience is dimmed to accommodate new cult behaviour and attitudes. Desensitisation is important in cults, through seeing things done to other people. We became desensitised to things that would have been unacceptable to our conscience before. During the epidemic we were encouraged to snitch on neighbours, we grew nonchalant about the idea of life-destroying fines for breaches of rules (remember that two students were fined £10,000 each for arranging a snowball fight!) and we tolerated the transfer of infected elderly patients in hospital to care homes where they were like a spark to dry tinder, to give just a few examples of a relaxation of conscience.

  The leaders maintain a closed system of logic and restricting criticism. Management is always right, you are always wrong. Failed prophecies are reframed to maintain the authority of the cult leader, no matter what. If the prophecy did not come true, it’s because the followers didn’t follow the rules. Then the prophecy date gets moved forward. The UK’s lockdowns couldn’t offer a more apt example. We were told we must obey the rules for them to work. ‘Covidiots’ were derided and blamed for failures in the media and social media. The finger was never pointed at hospital-acquired infections, for example, or the seasonality of the virus: it was our fault and we were easy scapegoats. And so, the lockdowns were extended and repeated. The ‘prophecy date’ for ending lockdown ever-shifting.

  The book When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That Predicted the Destruction of the World, is the true story of a cult which believed in the coming apocalypse and that the cult followers would be rescued by aliens in a flying saucer. Several rescue dates were announced, but each passed without disaster or spacecraft. Through the medium of ‘automatic writing’ one of the members was told that earth’s apocalypse had been cancelled because the cult had waited patiently all night. The disappointments didn’t shake their faith. Cult followers can double-down on their beliefs to resolve the intense discomfort cognitive dissonance creates. Sometimes it just feels easier to stay wedded to false beliefs than to face the truth.

  The book’s authors concluded that if someone was to remain a fervent believer in the face of such disappointment then they must truly commit themselves firstly by taking difficult actions, and also by being part of a social group who are all committed. It is easy to draw a comparison with supporters of tough Covid restrictions, despite the lack of convincing evidence that they work. The commitment to the lockdown, our ‘new normal’, has been life-changing and immense for the country.

  People have held strong convictions during the epidemic. They have over-estimated danger, placed enormous faith in un-evidenced measures, and accepted vast social and personal changes. In a time of huge uncertainty it has felt more comforting to cling to conviction. I expect I am guilty too. We will need more distance to understand the social experiment we have endured and where convictions were misplaced. How will people de-programme from ‘cult’ thinking? This might be especially difficult for those who stand to lose professionally, such as scientists, journalists and politicians who expressed convictions and enacted policies publicly. By March 2021, Boris Johnson said ‘lockdown came too late’,2 furthering the narrative that lockdown should have been earlier, harder, longer, sounding more like his ‘opposition’ in the House of Commons, rather than acknowledging the empirical evidence against lockdowns. The ‘confession’ served to endorse the role of lockdowns, therefore diverting attention from the collateral damage they caused and their ineffectiveness.

  I felt discombobulated by the early strong convictions held by others about Covid and lockdown. It was as though everyone had gone on a Large Group Awareness Training Course for Covid and I’d missed the invite. I perceived a gap between rationality and reality. There were people who solely relied on the BBC and Number 10 press briefings, and then others who had ferreted around for alternative perspectives, such as the interview with Dr Knut Wittkowski which was removed from YouTube, or read one of Dr John Ioannidis’s articles. A broad range of media offered balance, allowed room for doubt and nuance and, in so doing, calmed the fear.

  Regardless, there was a certain amount of fear in the air and it was catching. With messages designed to elevate your sense of threat, if you weren’t frightened of the virus, did your fear switch direction? I was frightened of authoritarianism and the consequences of lockdown for our country. I observed the fear around me, I felt my own, and it led me to research and write this book.

  What do people do when they perceive a gap be
tween reality and rationality? When their fear roams away from the path laid out by the state? If your rational mind looks at the evidence and says, well, this might be really bad, but it isn’t going to be the plague, or even Spanish flu, and yet you are told it is the greatest threat in peacetime, what do you make of the panic? If you are told it is best for everyone to quarantine, including the sick, the potentially infectious and the healthy, even though that has never happened before, and you foresee economic devastation, what are you to make of the government using such a destructive policy without precedent or evidence?

  What if it feels like everyone around you is being inducted into a cult, using brand new language you don’t relate to, the emotions flicking disorientatingly between fear and love-bombing, and punishments for dissent are mandated, rewards for compliance seep into society, but you were impervious to the programming?

  People look for answers. Some people grow ‘conspiracy theory’ in this gap between rationality and reality. A conspiracy theory is a theory about a plot which is carried out in secret, with a sinister end goal. The term has a negative connotation, the implication being that the conspiracy is based on insufficient evidence, or prejudice, or stupidity. Generally, it’s considered that decent journalism, state-sponsored inquiries, whistleblowers and Freedom of Information requests are the bedrock of uncovering conspiracies. Until they are proven, they are ‘conspiracy theories’. State-sponsored inquiries are slow. Whistleblowers don’t always come forward. And when they do, the media don’t always want to go near them. It was Middle East Eye, not the broadsheets, which reported the extraordinary stories of government propaganda through RICU and external agencies employed by the unit. And Freedom of Information requests are sadly not a reliable way to extract information. In my own experience they go unanswered or responses can be avoidant.