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

by Laura Dodsworth

  The World Economic Forum published an article by Ida Auken, one of their Young Global Leaders and a Danish Member of Parliament, entitled ‘Welcome to 2030: I own nothing, have no privacy and life has never been better’.13 It’s supposed to be a provocative enticement to consider the sort of future the WEF imagines, but I would retitle it ‘Welcome To 2030: I am a serf and have never been so gullible’. It’s an incredibly unpalatable imagining of the future. Every Englishman’s home is his castle, and I think that owning nothing and squatting in a communal living space is going to be a very hard sell in this country indeed.

  In February 2020 a World Economic Forum tweet stated ‘Lockdowns are quietly improving cities around the world’ and celebrated the closures of factories and the deserted streets while earthquake scientists can work more effectively. This is by no means evidence of a ‘conspiracy’ but does suggest an incredibly out-of-touch technocratic approach to life. The tweet did not hit the right note and they deleted it.

  Maybe influential international organisations, world leaders and business are conspiring to bring about certain changes in the world. That would be for another book, it strays too far from my remit, and there are thousands of digital rabbit holes for you to explore. Or maybe the answers lie in cock-ups? Of course governments, international organisations and individual scientists make mistakes. Fear clouds rational judgement. Then they might try to hide their mistakes. Maybe between conspiracy and cock-up are conflicts of interest and convergent agendas. Less over-arching than a grand ‘conspiracy theory’, they could account for lobbying, sympathetic media exposure and high-level handshakes and contracts.

  News about conflicts of interest seeped out slowly during the epidemic. SAGE members’ financial interests have still not been published at the time of writing. The BMJ reported in December 202014 that the government was withholding SAGE and other advisory bodies’ competing interests, such as whether they had financial interests in pharmaceutical companies receiving government contracts.

  The BMJ reported that ‘Throughout the pandemic, allegations of financial conflicts of interest have circled many public and private actors in many jurisdictions. In the UK the government’s Chief Scientific Adviser, Patrick Vallance, made headlines when he was shown to have financial ties to the drug company GlaxoSmithKline.’15 The journal also reported on the the Wellcome Trust’s conflicts of interest; its pharmaceutical investments overlap with its research efforts. Both Wellcome and the Gates Foundation are ‘positioned to potentially benefit financially from its leading role in the pandemic response’. And the ‘UK government acted unlawfully in failing to publish details of dozens of contracts awarded without competition for goods and services such as personal protective equipment’.16

  Governments enact controversial policies and businesses profit from the exploitation of natural disasters, while a population is understandably distracted and looking at danger. This is ‘disaster capitalism’ as described by Naomi Klein in her book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. This is cashing in on chaos rather than shadowy conspiracy theory. When people panic, they are pliable. When people are pliable, there is profit to be made.

  Is it any wonder that once the initial impact of fear has receded, some minds race? Government leaders emulated cult leaders (albeit unintentionally, one hopes), manipulating our emotions, weaponising our fear against us, wreaking havoc on the economy, culture and mental health of the nation, and behaving in eerie unison with other countries, even parroting the same slogans (‘Build back better’, for instance). This creates the perfect crucible for ‘conspiracy theories’. If the inevitable inquiry is halfway decent, no doubt it will uncover some uncomfortable truths. These may ultimately reveal an alchemy of careful consideration, conspiracy and cock-up.

  It is tempting to blame the whole mess on a malevolent cult, a cabal or an evil leader. After all we could then find them, expose them and take them down. They can’t hide in the shadows forever. While I don’t think we will find anything so simple, convenient and predictably evil lurking in the shadows, I think we should look to our own shadows for the answers.

  Carl Jung wrote about the ‘shadow’ and the danger of psychological projection. Our shadow is the instinctive and irrational side of ourselves. Essentially, it is more comfortable to remain ignorant of our failings, so we project them onto other people, or mythic figures: ‘baddies’. The devil is the ultimate projection of our shadow. Jung recognised that there is a tendency within collectivist movements to project elements from the shadow onto others. The vast scale of the global fear response to Covid and the shocking social re-engineering it has instigated leads me to intuit that there are deep, collective unconscious forces at work.

  Although Covid is a real disease and SARS-CoV-2 is a real virus, some of the response felt ‘unreal’ if you were not caught up in the cult-like response. We have not just endured and tolerated but even demanded the curtailment of our freedoms, for a disease which has a median Infection Fatality Rate of 0.05%17 for under 70-year-olds globally. Our response felt unmoored from the gravity of the threat – why?

  I spoke to Jungian psychotherapist, James Caspian, about mass delusions. He pointed out that Jung lived through the striking and destructive collective movements of the world wars and the Cold War. What he said then about mass movements, the shadow and projection can be applied to what is happening in the world now. ‘In times of distress people turn to visions of Utopian or Apocalyptic scenarios,’ Caspian said. ‘Jung said the really dangerous point is when insight and reflection are crushed by the mass movement and the state succumbs to a fit of weakness in that scenario. I think that’s happening. The state is afraid of some of the mass movements, such as political correctness. Rational argument is only possible if the emotionality of a situation does not exceed a critical degree. In that case reason will be supplanted by slogans and fantasies. A collective possession develops which turns into a psychic epidemic.’

  The looming collective shadow has resulted in mass delusions and mass hysteria before. Humans do this, more often than you would think. Here is a collection of eclectic examples. During the Salem witch trials in 1692–93 there were hundreds of accusations of witchcraft and ultimately 19 executions. A laughter epidemic in a girls boarding school in Tanganyika in 1962 saw up to 159 girls laugh continuously for days in an outbreak of mass hysteria. The ‘glass delusion’ was a mental illness particularly affecting the noble classes most common in the 16th and 17th centuries, whereby aristocrats believed they were made of glass and could literally shatter to death. The 1528 ‘dancing plague of Strasbourg’ was an inexplicable instance of mass delusion, with hundreds of people compelled to dance, some to the death.

  In other examples of mass hysteria, if not psychic epidemics, The War of the Worlds radio broadcast caused panic among listeners in the United States who thought the Martians really had invaded. And James Thurber wrote in My Life and Hard Times about the day when everybody in his town, Columbus, thought the nearby dam had broken and ran miles to escape, shouting ‘Go East!’. The dam hadn’t burst and, regardless, the water never could have reached the town anyway. It was a fascinating insight into the contagion of fear and its ability to affect the rational mind. No one had questioned where the rumour started, or noticed the reassuring lack of water, and they hadn’t even got on their horses or started their cars. They just ran, like lemmings.

  I asked Caspian how people can protect themselves, and how can societies protect themselves, from psychic epidemics? ‘Jung wrote a book called The Undiscovered Self,’ Caspian told me, ‘and he talked about the plight of the modern individual. To become truly individual that person would need to mis-identify from the collective. Most people are caught up in the collective and in movements and live out their life like that. It’s easier and more comfortable to be swept along. To individuate means in practice that we say there is a collective movement but we think critically about it and we are not prepared to be swept along by it.’ Jung said that
it is not microbes, not cancer, but man himself who is the greatest danger to man.

  If the UK, and maybe much of the world, is suffering a psychic epidemic, how do we learn from this experience and recover now, but importantly protect against the next one? A psychic epidemic has the potential to be far more devastating than the worst of natural catastrophes. The supreme danger which threatens individuals as well as whole nations is a psychic epidemic, not a viral epidemic.

  After Hitler’s defeat, Jung concluded, ‘The phenomenon we have witnessed in Germany was nothing less than the first outbreak of epidemic insanity, an eruption of the unconscious into what seemed to be a tolerably well-ordered world.’ The role of the government should be to moderate and contain a psychic epidemic and mass delusion, not to exaggerate and multiply it. If fear was an open door in spring 2020, the UK government did not allow us to walk through it, but used a battering ram to knock it down.

  JOSEPH, 60, COUNSELLOR

  I am working with a lot of clients who are struggling with guilt and fear.

  One client feels guilty about not getting into an ambulance with their loved one who later died. They tried to get in the ambulance but were told the police could be involved if they carried on. They feel guilty that they didn’t try hard enough. The deep sense of letting people down creates a serious trauma. If you are grieving normally, someone would hug you or hold your hand. There is less of that now. We aren’t dealing with grief in the normal ways, and the grief and trauma are greater.

  I also have clients who have felt marginalised and ignored, when their relatives died and the diagnosis switched from something to Covid. Some have relatives with dementia in care homes who are frightened and confused about the changes and not seeing their families.

  This is a time of judgement. People are frightened to break rules and hug people and do all the things that are normal.

  A lady who lives locally to me has a lot of co-morbidities. I went to see if she was alright. She was terrified to come out of the house and spoke to me through the window.

  The problems she already had were compounded by terror, because she would religiously watch the Number 10 press briefings. The politicians on podiums told us to be terrified – so it’s not any wonder that some people were terrified!

  When the rules relaxed and the time came to leave her front door, she couldn’t do it. It was like Stockholm syndrome. I started going round to help her by walking with her, but staying 20 feet away, just to keep her company. These were not therapeutic exchanges, she was a neighbour who needed help. She is much better now.

  I think the nation has been bullied and gaslit. This was supposed to be about protecting us, but it hasn’t protected us. It’s disgraceful that the government tried to frighten us. This is a crime against the people. I can’t understand why the official bodies like the British Psychological Society aren’t talking about the ethics of what has happened. It’s like people are turning a blind eye to what’s happening.

  15. TYRANNY

  ‘When tyrannies take over it is because people volunteer their liberty voluntarily.’

  Lord Sumption

  A bold pronouncement, but what we came to expect from Lord Sumption, former Supreme Court judge, in his campaign to defend civil liberties under lockdown.

  What could persuade people to volunteer their liberty? Fear, in a word. Emergency situations called for emergency measures. The government responded swiftly and the emergency regulations were nodded through Parliament to applause rather than opposition. But were the UK’s emergency laws and regulations proportionate, the least intrusive available, strictly necessary and based on scientific evidence?

  Lockdown was enforced under the Public Health Act, originally designed to immobilise and treat people who are infectious, not the entire population. During a House of Lords debate on the imposition of the Regulations, several peers expressed their concern that the Regulations were ultra vires, that is exceeding the legal powers of the UK government.

  What made Covid the first disease to ever merit quarantining an entire population of the healthy? It was feared that the NHS would be overwhelmed. Other countries had already locked down under emergency legislation, setting a ‘template’. I asked Sumption about this striking authoritarian template, which surprisingly became a norm across the liberal democratic countries of Europe: ‘There is a herd instinct in governments and it gave them political cover. Sometimes the best thing is to do nothing.’ It’s an important point. The media and the public wanted government to act, when sometimes leadership in a crisis involves waiting, or less dramatic and less visible action.

  The government reviewed emergency legislation behind closed doors, leaving MPs and the public in the dark about the evidence for the emergency regulations and their proportionality. Repeated requests for a cost-benefit analysis to determine the proportionality were ignored until an attempt to quantify the impacts of lockdown and restrictions was finally published on 30 November, in the report Analysis of the health, economic and social effects of COVID-19 and the approach to tiering.1 ‘Vague’ might be a good descriptor for this report. It doesn’t even mention QALYs – quality-adjusted life years – which are the routine way that the government and NHS quantify the value of a life saved. Presumably this value was not included in the report because it would definitively show that the ‘cure’ has been worse than the disease.

  The lockdown imposed by the government to contain Covid was enforced mainly through the Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (England) Regulations 2020, known as the ‘Lockdown Regulations’, imposed under powers delegated by the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984 (‘the 1984 Act’). In addition, the Coronavirus Act 2020 contains the notorious Schedule 21 which allows for you to be forcibly detained, tested, treated and quarantined.

  The strict lockdown laws meant that various basic liberties were curtailed, including: the right to protest, worship, maintain relationships, vote (elections were cancelled), the right to education was affected as many pupils had haphazard online provision for months, and you could not leave your house except for a non-exhaustive list of exemptions. These are not trifling privileges, but basic liberties.

  On 23 March the Prime Minister ordered people to stay at home. The next day Matt Hancock underscored that these were ‘rules’, not guidance. But the law didn’t change until 26 March. ‘A huge proportion of the British population do not understand the difference between guidance and regulation,’ said Sumption. ‘The government said “you must” and people assumed that was a rule, when it was not. I think that the government knew that people did not understand the difference and exploited their confusion.’

  People might have been able to forgive and trade a three-day hiatus from law in exchange for being kept safe from the perils of a virus, but will they mind the government’s next foray into despotism? And will they even notice if it happens one statute at a time?

  Once these ‘rules’ were announced on the 23rd, police forces across the country started to enforce them. Derbyshire police tweeted that they would be breaking up groups of people in the streets the next morning, provoking Sumption’s outburst, as he described it, on the BBC’s World at One. He told me, ‘they had no business doing anything in a national crisis except enforcing the law. They are not there to give effect to their own views on what a national crisis might require and they are not there to give effect to what a Prime Minister’s views might require in a national crisis. They are citizens in uniform who should apply the law and nothing else.’

  London’s streets were eerily quiet when I visited barrister Kirsty Brimelow’s chambers in the summer. Echoing Sumption, she told me that what troubled her most about lockdown law had been the obfuscation between law and guidance by using the term ‘rules’, and the wrongful convictions that subsequently led to. I asked her if the government deliberately misled the public and the media? Perhaps, but she also blamed a ‘chaotic approach and huge incompetence’.

  She pointed o
ut that although citizens must follow the law, we are allowed to decide for ourselves whether to follow guidance and she would like the government to stop using the term ‘rules’. The confusion between guidance and law led people to be ‘wrongfully arrested, wrongfully convicted and that is not only a bad thing for the person concerned, but also for society and the rule of law in general.’ To give one example, in England there was a ‘rule’ we should be two metres apart. There may be stickers on the ground, and it might very well be sensible guidance, but it has never been law. It was and is a request that people may choose to follow, or not.

  What compelled Brimelow to speak out were the miscarriages of justice. Times journalist Fariha Karim contacted her about the conviction of Marie Dinou, who had been arrested at Newcastle train station right at the start of lockdown. She was held in cells for two nights (under no powers), ‘treated appallingly’ by the District Magistrate, given a criminal conviction under the wrong legislation and fined £660. Dinou’s case was not exceptional, BAME communities were disproportionately targeted, and every single prosecution (a staggering 246)2 under the Coronavirus Act had been overturned at the time of writing.

  ‘Criminalisation should be removed from these laws’, said Brimelow. ‘Too many people sitting together having a picnic should never be a criminal offence.’

  She hoped that there would be sensible messages from our police chiefs to regulate those police officers who might overreach. Instead ‘we had police stepping beyond their powers, fining people for sitting on park benches and police threatening to inspect people’s shopping trollies.’