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

by Laura Dodsworth

  I went back to two of the SPI-B advisors to discuss the ethical considerations and need for public consultation.

  SPI Two is the advisor who memorably told me that thoughts of the potential dystopia we might be entering kept them awake at night and that ‘psychology has been used for wicked ends’. I asked what we needed to do to develop a good and trusting relationship with government. They flipped it around: ‘We need the government to be honest and trust people. That’s not been the case. There is also an issue with the advisers. A lot of SPI-B are numbers driven. They look at the “R”, and they don’t see people. Humanity is missing from the discussion and decisions. We need to consider our relationship with the state. We should consider what we allow government to do to us, including mind control by governments.’

  I spoke to Gavin Morgan, the educational psychologist on SPI-B, several times in the course of researching this book. He was keen to defend his profession: ‘Psychology is a much misunderstood and often maligned discipline. It is something that should be positive, and act as a force for good in people’s lives and across the whole of society. When I was invited to join SPI-B I thought this was a great opportunity to demonstrate how psychology can do this. The public perception of a psychological role in SPI-B may be to see this as something like manipulation and how to coerce the public to behave in certain ways and in ways that they do not want to. This is not how I saw the opportunity that came my way.’

  Fair enough, but SPI-B did suggest tactics that are manipulative and coercive. ‘I would hope to think that all psychologists are guided by high moral principles and would use their knowledge, experience and expertise for the cause of good – which is why perhaps recommendations are often at odds with what the government is hoping to hear,’ he told me. ‘Clearly, using fear as a means of control is not ethical. What you do as a psychologist is co-construction. Using fear smacks of totalitarianism. It’s not an ethical stance for any modern government.’ So why did SPI-B suggest it? ‘The government were frightened people wouldn’t obey instructions. To some extent it’s why they held off in locking us down. I don’t know if using fear was even a conscious decision by the government. But by some sleight of hand the public clamoured for lockdown, so it became inevitable we would lock down,’ Morgan said.

  Was it ethical to use fear, I asked? ‘Well, I didn’t suggest we use fear.’ But your colleagues did. What do you think of that? He paused. ‘Oh God.’ Another reluctant pause. ‘It’s not ethical,’ he said.

  Finally, I was curious what Morgan had learnt during the epidemic and his role on SPI-B: ‘By nature I am an optimistic person, but all this has given me a more pessimistic view of people. People are passive and biddable. A lot of people don’t question, their thinking is shaped by other people, especially the media and social media and that is a dangerous thing. As a society we are set up to encourage a passive and biddable population.’

  When MPs questioned David Halpern and Stephen Reicher during a Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee on 19 January 2021,12 not one MP asked about the ethics.

  We mustn’t let the calls for consultation about the ethics and acceptability of the use of behavioural science, especially about something as profound as fear, drift into a pre-pandemic past. Good ethics must never be behind us if we want to fulfil the potential ‘force for good’ that psychology can offer government.

  First, the public must understand how behavioural psychology is used on them. This book is a start. An independent third party must inquire into the use of behavioural psychology during the Covid-19 pandemic. Of course, behavioural psychology didn’t start during the pandemic. It also isn’t the preserve of the psychologists anymore: we witnessed many clumsy attempts at nudge from ministers ‘having a go’. Rather, the pandemic response has revealed the psychocratic influence deeply embedded in various government departments, the NHS and Public Health England. So, an inquiry should start with a historical literature review of behavioural psychology and the use of it by government to understand its trajectory and to contextualise its use during the pandemic. There should be a full analysis of the tactics used and their impacts, by experts including psychologists, behavioural scientists, mental health specialists, politicians, political scientists, sociologists, civil liberties organisations and lawyers, as well as representatives of the public. The results must be shared and debated and consensus reached on the acceptable and ethical use of nudge in the future.

  20. THE END, OR IS IT A PREQUEL?

  As I finish A State of Fear, it is one year since Fright Night, when our prime minister, Boris Johnson, told us that ‘the coronavirus is the biggest threat this country has faced for decades. All over the world we are seeing the devastating impact of this invisible killer… From this evening I must give the British people a very simple instruction – you must stay at home.’

  The past year will have meant many different things to many different people. Your experience will have coloured your view of an extraordinary year. It was a year of death and illness, from Covid and also illnesses which lost out in priority, one way or another, to Covid. It was a year of more contentment for some, as they evaded the rat race, life became simpler, they spent more time with family. It was a year of separation, loneliness and hardship for others. It was a year of liberties lost. It was a year of fear.

  Some fears we relish and return to: the scariest rollercoaster or the made-you-jump-the-most-times horror film. I think once this debacle is over, people will want to forget the worst and romanticise the best, to storify the saga into a bearable memory. But that would be dangerous. We must use the emotional distance and space to critically assess which rubicons were crossed.

  When I started investigating this book, the idea that our fear had been weaponised against us was not popular currency, but is now starting to circulate. At the time of this strange anniversary, a Guardian front page headline read ‘Covid checks at pubs “could nudge young people to get vaccine”’1 [italics my emphasis], explicitly noting the blatant use of behavioural psychology. In the same week, Professor Tim Spector told Times Radio that the prime minister’s warnings of a third wave were designed to ‘keep the population fearful’.2 Variants are now often referred to as ‘scariants’ in an acknowledgement of increasingly obvious attempts to scare the British public into complying with the rules.

  Although the vaccine programme has been successful in its aims, and cases, hospitalisations and deaths are falling, the campaign of fear continues. More punitive fines are dangled like threatening bombs, most lately a £5,000 fine should you dare to take an overseas holiday. We have been warned that restrictions will not be eased if we break the rules. A government minister urged the public to ‘call out’ friends and family for hugging.3 In the spring of 2021, a poster in a park in Bromley proclaimed ‘Covid-19 is in this park and is now easier to catch!’ in black, yellow and red fonts and chevrons, which warn of danger. And the doom-mongering headlines continue at home and abroad. Bloomberg proclaimed, ‘We must start planning for a permanent pandemic – with coronavirus mutations pitted against vaccinations in a global arms race, we may never go back to normal.’4

  Yet there are also cracks in the campaign of fear. Young people didn’t seem frightened as they crowded into parks around the country on 29 March 2021 when restrictions eased, basking in sunshine and the sociality of groups of six. Spring worked its magic on a seasonal virus and on the soul.

  Despite the best efforts of the fear machine, I have some hope. Fear is not sustainable. And, as it wears thin, it is revealed to be in an inverse relationship with the growing awareness of how it was weaponised. As fear finally melts away we will be able to confront our frailties and strengths, as citizens, scientists, journalists and politicians.

  US president Franklin D. Roosevelt said in his inaugural address in 1933 that the ‘only thing we have to fear is fear itself’. He had a positive vision of a future where fear would be put in its place by a society that believed in itself. These day
s, politicians are far more likely to advise the public to fear everything, including fear itself. But we can ask for better: from them, the media, the unelected psychocrats and from ourselves. People do not want to live in a state of fear and they do not want to be manipulated. I think the handling of the epidemic should teach us to be wary, if not frightened, of Bernays’ ‘invisible government’ which nudges and forces behaviour change through manipulating our emotions.

  It is the duty of us all to think about what type of society we want to live in, which values we treasure, the styles of governance we approve of and reject, and what constitutional protections we may wish to introduce.

  It is ironic that in recent years, governments around the world have started to consider frameworks of ‘wellbeing’, yet they launched campaigns to frighten their populations to implement lockdowns. (Although one sounds friendlier than the other, be aware that both frameworks see our emotions as the province of the state.) When I spoke to Steve Baker MP in the summer of 2020 he offered some thought-provoking comments about how to envisage society: ‘I think we need a deep conversation about values and how we want to become. At the moment authoritarian collectivist values are being used. I would dearly love to see politicians of all parties learn from what has gone on during this crisis and say, let us not return to that dystopia, let us choose to be greater and commit to liberal and tolerant values. Normally everyone would say they subscribe to that.’

  Gavin Morgan pragmatically told me ‘we are always being manipulated whether we are aware of it or not. Politicians try to be good at this manipulation and often have the media on their side to promote a certain narrative – this then becomes how we think and respond. It goes unchallenged – which is why ethical psychology needs to be a positive influence in society. We have a moral imperative and a responsibility to say when we know something is wrong and damage is being done. There is a responsibility for psychology to take a lead role in shaping a better future. We don’t know what this will look like, it needs to be shaped by us all. Co-constructed by the nation.’ It is hopeful that there are psychologists who want to co-construct. That is a far cry from the psychocrats who see themselves as the architects of our emotions and behaviour.

  Some advisors close to government have held our emotional happiness and freedoms a little less dearly than we do ourselves. When he described the inception of the UK’s lockdown and the comparison with China, Professor Neil Ferguson said ‘It’s a communist one-party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought. And then Italy did it. And we realised we could’.5 We could ‘get away with it’ is a very revealing way to put it. Having got away with it once, is the government likely to inflict an authoritarian measure like lockdown again? And would they rely on our learned obedience, our muscle memory, or would they use fear again? Without the strongest objections from all of us, an inquiry and resistance against these tools, I think their future and repeated use inevitable.

  The Covid-19 epidemic may prove to be the biggest campaign of fear the UK, and the world, has ever seen. I’m not sure we even needed it. Fear was an open door – naturally, because we were in an epidemic. The government didn’t need to so much as knock on the door. It didn’t have to open it for us, and politely say, after you. It certainly didn’t need to use a battering ram.

  The almost imperceptible stripping away of rights and freedoms, as the people and their government gradually separate, is an old story repeated throughout history, but avoidable if we choose to learn from it. A German professor recounted the process, movingly, in They Thought They Were Free, by Milton Mayer:

  ‘To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it – please try to believe me – unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, “regretted”, that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.’

  How far has the corn grown? It is known that fear induces a desire for authoritarian control.6 Here in the UK, one of the cradles of democracy, fear has created the right emotional temperature for the toleration, even enthusiastic welcome, of increased surveillance, reduced rights to protest, and breaches of human rights.

  The policies of the last year affected our daily lives, weakened our social bonds, and also disrupted the most intimate human rites of birth, marriage and death. We need to be cautious about policies of fear which invade our humanity. We mustn’t let a medical crisis strip us of our freedoms or our ideals.

  In the introduction I said I wanted to invite you to write the end of the story. The textbook of tyrants is written in the language of coercion and cajolement. And sadly there is no mythic Happy Ever After. But you know that. The truth is that we live in a permanent prequel, as the story always goes on. The way to change the story is simply to believe in our power to change it.

  We seem to have forgotten that no one is safe. You have never been safe and you never will be. Nor will I. In the blind global panic of an epidemic we have forgotten how to analyse risk. If you don’t accept that you will die one day, that you can never be safe, then you are a sitting duck for authoritarian policies which purport to be for your safety. If too many individuals immolate their liberty for safety, we risk a bonfire of freedoms.

  Nudge undermines free will; it removes our choices without us even knowing. If we continue to allow ourselves to be nudged towards a greater good, we have given up on determining what ‘good’ looks like. The weaponisation of fear undermines democracy, liberty and humanity. Nudge is not ‘fair play’.

  The use of behavioural psychology and specifically the weaponisation of fear were symptoms of a government that had given up on trust and transparency. If we truly believe in freedom we must also believe we deserve it. Personal responsibility is not a conduit to danger. Let us reject living in a state of fear. As we recover from an epidemic, we must also recover the trust and transparency that we deserve.

  APPENDIX 1

  DATA

  The UK Government began its attempts to increase and generalise fear at the end of March 2020. Although risk was highly patterned, the public health messaging was designed to expand risks so the entire population felt threatened. The risk of dying from Covid might be smaller and also more age-specific than you imagined.

  US CENTRES FOR DISEASE CONTROL

  ‘Current best estimates’ of the infection fatality rate (IFR)1

  0-17 years

  0.002%

  18-49 years

  0.05%

  50-64 years

  0.6%

  65+ years

  9%

  IMPERIAL COLLEGE LONDON

  Report 34 - COVID-19 infection fatality ratio estimates from seroprevalence2 from Imperial College London concluded that ‘We find that age-specific IFRs follow an approximately log-linear pattern, with the risk of death doubling approximately every eight years of age.’

  0-4 years

  0.00%

  5-9 years

  0.01%

  10-14 years

  0.01%

  15-19 years

  0.02%

  20-24 years

  0.03%

  25-29 years

  0.04%

  30-34 years

  0.06%

  35-39 years

  0.10%

  40-44 years

  0.16%

  45-49 years

  0.24%

  50-54 years

  0.38%

  55-59 years

  0.60%

  60-64 years

  0.94%

  65-69 years

  1.47%

  70-74 years

  2.31%

  75-79 yearsr />
  3.61%

  80-84 years

  5.66%

  85-89 years

  8.86%

  90+ years

  17.37%

  WORLD HEATH ORGANIZATION

  The WHO published Infection fatality rate of COVID-19 inferred from seroprevalence data3 by Professor John P.A. Ioannidis. The report says that:

  ‘Covid-19 has a very steep age gradient for risk of death. Moreover, in European countries that have had large numbers of cases and deaths, and in the USA, many, and in some cases most, deaths occurred in nursing homes.

  Locations with many nursing home deaths may have high estimates of the infection fatality rate, but the infection fatality rate would still be low among non-elderly, non-debilitated people… The median infection fatality rate across all 51 locations was 0.27% (corrected 0.23%)… For people younger than 70 years old, the infection fatality rate of COVID-19 across 40 locations with available data ranged from 0.00% to 0.31% (median 0.05%); the corrected values were similar.’

  APPENDIX 2

  LOCKDOWNS DON’T WORK

  This is a book about fear, not about the efficacy of non-pharmaceutical interventions, namely lockdowns. But lockdowns would probably not have been accepted in the first place, nor tolerated for so long, without the weaponisation of fear. You have to be more frightened of a virus and the consequences of ignoring the mandate to stay at home, than you do of losing your livelihood, income, or real-life human connections.

  You might think all the UK government’s policies were worth it if they worked. Of course, you might not, and I would argue that the consideration of how we became a state of fear can be and should be separate to whether lockdowns work or not. These are extricable issues. The use of fear to encourage adherence to lockdown rules has its own merits and demerits. Your attitude towards a strong state, the use of behavioural psychology and the leveraging of fear will be ideological to some degree. Sadly, I would also argue that belief in the success or failure of lockdown is also ideological to some degree, because belief in the effectiveness of lockdowns does not seem to be based in firm, unequivocal empirical evidence, as I will demonstrate here.