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

themes and a consistency in approach among SPI-B. They liked terms like ‘co-creation’, ‘co-design’, ‘co-production’, ‘collectivism’, ‘in it together’ and ‘solidarity’ – words which are strewn throughout the SPI-B documents on the government website. Depending on your ideological perspective, these might be seen as admirable qualities, but I can see how they could accompany a dislike for ‘dissent’. They must also have in common a belief in the appropriateness of a behavioural science approach to an epidemic, or they wouldn’t be on the team. And I detected politicisation in their approaches and advice, which is arguably inevitable, but could be skewing their advice disadvantageously.

My chat with Dr Daisy Fancourt was very pleasant. I think she would have been OK with Rosa Parkes. She is an Associate Professor in Behavioural Science and Health at UCL and runs The Covid Social Study, a longitudinal social and psychological study into the impact of the epidemic and lockdowns. She feeds research into the advising panels including SPI-B. She was recommended to me by Susan Michie, Professor of Health Psychology & Director of the Centre for Behaviour Change at UCL. Michie didn’t have time for an interview, which is not surprising as she sits on SAGE, SPI-B and ‘Independent SAGE’.

Fancourt told me that one of the strengths early on in the pandemic was that we were ‘all in this together’. She believed that had encouraged compliance and social cohesion. My impression from some of the interviewees was that they liked collectivism for itself, but also because it breeds adherence to the rules.

I asked her about the use of fear as a tactic to encourage adherence. ‘One of the things that was effective was increasing the idea that you shouldn’t pass it to others,’ she said, ‘as people are concerned about spreading the virus to neighbours and families. Some of the less effective policies are on the threat to yourself. Appeals to collective conscience are more effective.’ That made sense, but then she uncritically mentioned one of my personal bête noires, ‘don’t kill granny’, which was ‘good for compliance’. For one thing, some young people will have lost grandparents during the epidemic, making this quite an insensitive catchphrase. Back in March 2020, Neil Ferguson said that two-thirds of the people who would go on to die from Covid might die anyway during the year because ‘these are people at the end of their lives or have underlying conditions’.3 Given that, should children and young people be burdened with this level of responsibility in order to encourage compliance?

Fancourt told me about the ‘huge role’ of psychology and behavioural science as the epidemic continues. She thinks they can be used to heal trauma and grief, ease mental health problems, treat frontline healthcare workers experiencing trauma and heal the divisions sown by the epidemic. In her opinion, behavioural science would be needed to ‘encourage people to use vaccines. We won’t get out of this unless people have vaccines.’

She expanded: ‘Most people are worried that because the vaccines have been developed quickly, safety stages have been missed out, and they have not. We need to make sure the information about vaccines comes from different sources, it mustn’t look like it’s propaganda. It needs to come from faith leaders, influencers, local leaders. “Anti-vaxxers” aren’t bad people they just have concerns that need addressing. We need to make people want to have the vaccine, not feel like they must have it.’ Wouldn’t simply seeing the full data from trials and post-launch convince people? Wouldn’t longer-term safety data be part of that, because despite Fancourt’s assurances that safety stages have not been missed out, people will be aware that medium and longer-term side-effects won’t have emerged? And was she basically saying that propaganda is acceptable as long as it doesn’t look like it’s propaganda?

On 22 October 2020 SPI-B published a paper entitled Role of Community Champions networks to increase engagement in context of COVID-19: evidence and best practice,4 which is ostensibly about ‘Test and Trace’ but puts forward the general idea that ‘community champions are volunteers who, with training and support, help improve the health and wellbeing of their families, communities or workplaces.’ While the document pushes the idea of ‘co-creation’ often mentioned by the SPI-B advisors, it’s about how to use champions to influence, rather than genuinely ‘co-create’. The question came from government, the strategy comes from SPI-B, and the next step is lining up the champions, who presumably will tailor the messaging, but not the objectives. The term ‘community champions’ also has a slight ring of the block policing that has been, and still is, widely used in Communist regimes, where individuals are asked to report anti-social behaviour and promote pro-social acts by their neighbours.

Two of the SPI-B advisors who agreed to talk to me were adamant they could only be fully honest if they were anonymous, to protect their reputations and future careers. I’m going to call them SPI One and SPI Two. (I know, this is not ideal.)

SPI One is high up in their professional body and, as such, I was very keen to talk to them. Like Fancourt, they also brought up the vaccine, telling me, ‘Without a vaccine, psychology is your main weapon. You have to restrict ways in which people mix and the virus can spread. Psychology has had a really good epidemic actually.’

I asked them which psychologists had particularly stood out. They mentioned Susan Michie, who had been unable to speak with me, and told me that she is ‘particularly fantastic on the messaging’. This brought me on to the intersection of scientific advice and politics. Michie is a member of the Communist Party of Britain,5 which wants a ‘revolutionary transformation of society’ to end capitalism and create a socialist state of Britain. I had been surprised that a Communist Party member was advising the government through two important advisory panels. Might such revolutionary views influence her advice? She praised China’s response on Twitter on 14 March: ‘China has a socialist, collective system (whatever criticisms