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

are able. Fortunately, previous work must have spoken of my genuine willingness to embrace a story and all its nuance, because several agreed, during this very busy time, to speak with me.

I asked all my interviewees if they had been commissioned to think about helping people manage their fear and the ending of lockdown. A SPI-B paper put forward the idea of elevating fear, so I assumed that they would have considered the exit plan. Fear impacts us mentally and physically and it would then impede the reopening of society – surely that would make an exit plan essential? They all seemed surprised to be asked. The idea was obviously not on the table yet. Perhaps they had been too busy fighting one fire at a time. Stott said to me that he couldn’t speculate because he was ‘far too busy in the here and now’. That is understandable. But if this was an experiment in a lab, researchers wanting to scare you would need a plan for how to manage your emotions afterwards. At the end of the experiment, they would probably show you a happy film and give you a slice of chocolate cake, at the very least. You would not leave the lab scared and unhappy. The psychologists running the experiment would have been through a very rigorous ethics process. We would have signed consent forms to agree to be frightened. I know I didn’t sign a consent form. It would seem that this live experiment has no ethics committee and no exit plan. (Actually, I doubt it would get past the ethics committee.)

Stott was careful to point out that his answers were personal reflections, but that’s partly why I was worried. I had a breakthrough – it seems very obvious in retrospect – when I realised this group of experts were bringing their own personalities, biases and beliefs to the table. In effect, they were fully-fleshed out humans, not faceless experts. In the early days of the epidemic, SAGE and SPI-B members were anonymous. The summaries of meetings were published, but they were fairly ‘clean’; you don’t know who said what, how easily they reached consensus or when they disagreed. You’ll never know which informal conversations ‘outside the room’ gave the biggest policy decisions dynamite.

Because of that infamous SPI-B document, some people have assumed that SPI-B advisors are powerful, caricature villains. They are well-thought of in their fields, and highly qualified. The power is harder to ascertain, because their role is to provide answers and proposals in response to COBRA and SAGE requests. In the papers, you can sometimes discern the political persuasions and biases of the SPI-B team. For instance, right-wing libertarians would be unlikely to reach towards ‘collectivism’ as often as SPI-B does. The papers read like proposals from mainly left-wing academics. In the questions behind the papers you can read the political intent of the policymakers. In the obvious example of Options for increasing adherence to social distancing measures, SPI-B has been asked how to make people adhere to the rules. One answer is obviously to legislate. The advisors are telling the politicians what they want to know, as well as giving behavioural insight about how to achieve that. It would be remarkable indeed if the advisors went in a completely different direction. It is well known in advisory circles that scientific advice is inherently political. Where the SPI-B advisors have sometimes wielded an additional and weighty power is speaking to the press and from their own social media pulpits.

A very consistent source of discontent among the SPI-B team is that the government often ignores their advice, which means that they aren’t quite as powerful as people on the outside might think. As Stott said to me, ‘It’s self-evident that government policy is at odds with the advice they are given.’

It was apparent to me from the SPI-B documents that one of the government’s biggest fears was social unrest, even riots, and Stott would have the experience to anticipate and advise. ‘One of the first concerns was that there could be protests or riots in response to lockdown,’ he said. ‘The idea in February of ending football matches, shutting pubs, making people not go to work for months on end, closing schools seemed unprecedented. Unthinkable. Our advice revolved around inequality and not doing things to amplify perceptions of illegitimacy. Within all of this the people who suffer the most are the poor and where they suffer harm as a result of control measures, the potential for police to exacerbate social conflict would be quite profound.’

There have been protests, but not the dreaded riots. I commented to Stott that there was a strange pivot in the country’s attitude to protest in the summer. One day, the general attitude was that we needed to protect the elderly and vulnerable by staying inside, ‘old lives matter’, and the next, people were protesting ‘Black Lives Matter’, and the world took to the streets. Stott retorted it was simply about ‘priorities’ but he obviously disapproved of inhibiting the right to protest: ‘The right to assemble is a basic human right. It’s protected under the European Convention of Human Rights. Any government that takes the right away is taking massive steps in what we think of as democracy.’

He was excoriating on the emergency legislation to prohibit protest and the fines for organising and attending. ‘It’s a very pernicious piece of legislation,’ he told me, ‘and it has massive and negative implications for the reach of government.’ He was also disapproving of the large fines for breaking self-isolation. A common theme from the SPI-B advisors was that encouragement is more effective than punishment.

The conversation took a frosty turn when I asked him about the effect of groupthink within SPI-B. This is a phenomenon where the natural desire for harmony within a group means that people will set aside their personal beliefs and adopt (at least outwardly) the beliefs of the group. The SPI-B papers only reflect consensus and I wondered