A State of Fear: How the UK government weaponised fear during the Covid-19 pandemic, Laura Dodsworth [the two towers ebook .txt] 📗

I don’t know if I will listen to the government again if there is another epidemic. We don’t have the types of statesman that we had in the past. I don’t have confidence in our government’s strategy and intentions.

There has never been a medical end to a pandemic. The only illness we have ever eradicated is smallpox. We haven’t got rid of bubonic plague or Spanish flu. Societies end pandemics, not science. I think we are in Covid phobia phase and next we’ll go into Covid fatigue phase and then it will end because people will want to go to the shops or whatever and we’ll get our herd immunity anyway.

The whole of society is riven with fear. We’ve all become each other’s enemy. For the first time, everyone has become a threat to everyone else. Will we look back and say it was collective hysteria? There was a dancing plague in the 1500s. I think we are passing hysteria between us more effectively than a virus.

I feel depressed about the winter ahead. It feels incredibly bleak.

6. THE SPI-B ADVISORS

‘The way we have used fear is dystopian.’

SPI-B advisor

‘The idea of going back to so-called-normal is a major area of consideration. There’s a climate crisis coming and that’s going to have to be dealt with. The way we have gone about adapting to the virus has been quite beneficial in terms of working patterns and reducing carbon – all the things we are going to have to go through to adjust to the new future. As the New Zealand prime minister put it, we need to “build back better”. There are challenging times ahead of us for the next 20 or 30 years, God help us. The most major crisis of humanity is starting. I see the weather patterns changing around me. I believe in climate change. It’s already getting bad. These will have major impacts on the nature of the world around us.’

‘The new future’? My blood chilled. I’d asked Clifford Stott if SPI-B had been tasked with thinking about how to bring the population out of lockdown, climb down from fear and back towards a normal society.

Clifford Stott is a Professor of Social Psychology and an expert in collective violence and riots, policing issues and management of crowds. He is one of the four members of SPI-B who agreed to speak with me. Another nominated her colleague who produces work which is fed into SPI-B. A SAGE advisor also agreed to be interviewed and, as before, the anonymous scientist who advises at Whitehall had plenty to say.

I hadn’t imagined that a SPI-B advisor would mentally segue from Covid to climate change when asked how to end lockdown. I silently wondered if he envisaged future lockdowns to reduce CO2 emissions. Boris Johnson made some drastic environment promises during the epidemic, pledging to ‘build back better’, including commitments to wind power and switching to electric vehicles.1 And this is where we tap into my fears.

If you ultimately concede that lockdown is a useful tool, you must concede that the tool may be used again. The government, wielding the tool, develops muscle memory. So do we. Covid-19 is not the last novel virus. It’s not the last crisis. Would you accept another lockdown for a future epidemic? Could we do another lockdown without laying waste to our economy and society? Would you go along with another lockdown for a run on the banks, an act of terror, or a food shortage? How about regular lockdowns to reduce CO2 emissions? How about every winter to reduce deaths from flu? Would our fear be deliberately elevated again to make us comply? Welcome to my raw nerve, strummed by Stott’s answer.

If you think this is an exaggeration, Speaker Lindsay Hoyle demonstrated an appetite for a ‘lockdown’ or restrictions of some sort, for the environment. At the G7 Speakers’ Meeting in September he said, ‘If one lesson from the pandemic is that taking serious action in a timely manner is key – then shouldn’t this also be true in terms of climate change? With Covid, what surprised many of us in the UK was how engaged most of the population became once the seriousness of the situation was made clear. People were prepared to accept limitations on personal choice and lifestyle – for the good of their own family and friends. No one could ever imagine that we would be wearing masks so readily and that we would all be so compliant. Perhaps we ought not to underestimate the ability of people and communities to work together for the common good, if there is united and clear leadership.’ They never imagined we would be so ‘compliant’.

It’s widely accepted that the government uses polling company YouGov to ‘test the waters’ before announcing new policies. In mid-January 2021, YouGov started probing how lockdowns might have affected public concern for the environment. The survey tested agreement with attitudes such as ‘The short-term positive impact Coronavirus has had on wildlife and ecosystems has encouraged me to make better environmental and sustainable decisions’ and the importance of reducing your carbon footprint since the beginning of the Covid pandemic.

To understand how our fear had been leveraged against us in the UK, I needed to get to know the people who suggested frightening us. I approached most of the advisors on SPI-B for an interview. Nearly all of them ignored me or turned me down. They probably fielded many media requests alongside their advisory work and regular jobs, but it wasn’t necessarily wise to nail my lockdown sceptical colours to the mast in a series of articles and tweets in 2020 before writing this documentary book – my contributors might have thought me biased because I clearly wasn’t a lockdown supporter. The fact is, we are all biased: it is unavoidable. The point is to be clear about it to yourself and in your work, as far as you