A State of Fear: How the UK government weaponised fear during the Covid-19 pandemic - Laura Dodsworth (the first e reader .txt) 📗

I had envisaged an arc of fear from the Cold War to the present day, Carlo noted how the state had exploited that fear: ‘There were warnings from congressmen during the Cold War when fear was whipped up about ‘reds under the bed’ that we could take surveillance so far that it would prohibit the possibility for resistance to form. The big change we were left with was the massive internalisation of fear and suspicion. There is a hyper focus on security. It’s moved our dial on the preservation of democracy. Fear justifies actions which are purely performative. Someone seizes your tweezers at the airport for safety. And you tolerate it. That is the end of rationality.’

Tony Blair used the threat of terrorism to give him a new moral authority. Fear of the enemy is how politicians maintain power and advance agendas. The Labour government’s military intervention in Iraq is believed to have motivated and strengthened terrorist groups and led to terrorist actions in the UK, from the 7/7 London bombings in 2005 to the London Bridge attack in 2017. Those acts of terrorism were in turn used to justify restrictions on liberty.

In The Power of Nightmares, Adam Curtis says that politicians will eventually have to concede that some threats are exaggerated and others have no foundation in reality, that ‘in an age when all the grand ideas have lost credibility, fear of a phantom enemy is all the politicians have left to maintain their power.’ Are viruses and variants to be the phantom enemy?

At the outset of the epidemic, politicians, journalists and even scientists may have over-estimated its deadliness. This is due to lack of knowledge (common early on in an epidemic), caution and even fear. But as the year wore on, it became clear that Covid was less lethal than feared. Globally, the average Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) is 0.15%7 and the median IFR for under 70 year olds is 0.05%.8 Yet the UK government pursued lockdowns and strategies which created other impacts on mortality from other causes, cancelled GP appointments, led to businesses closing and jobs lost, children missing school, local elections cancelled, and many basic liberties curtailed.

The focus switched from deaths, to ‘R’ (the reproduction number), to cases, to hospitalisations, to vaccine rollout. The goalposts also moved: flatten the curve was followed by slowing the spread, then we dabbled with suppression, the notion of zero Covid was floated, there were fears about a second wave, then we were in it (or at least a bad winter surge), then waiting for a vaccine, the vaccine arrived, then we were told that wouldn’t mean restrictions could be lifted, the inevitable third wave was mentioned, and fears raised about a new transmissible variant – Covid-21 next perhaps? – then there are variants or ‘scariants’ as they were termed by cynics. We seemed to be caught in an endless bait and switch.

The virus narrative makes us enemies of each other, which is used to justify impositions on our freedoms and the manipulation of our fears. History shows that people in wars, or considered dangerous, have been imprisoned, put in concentration camps, tortured and suffered the loss of human rights. War and terror justify a security state. The virus justifies a biosecurity state. Is the average person to consider themselves lethally infectious, unless proven otherwise using an enabling test?9 Are we bio-terrorists? On 26 March 2021, Dr Sarah Jarvis said ‘Breathing is an offensive weapon if you are infected with Covid’ on Channel 5’s Jeremy Vine on 5 show. Even allowing for a bit of dramatic licence on telly, it is impossible to imagine someone saying that pre-Covid.

On 18 August 2020, Matt Hancock, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, announced that the new National Institute for Health Protection’s ‘single and relentless mission’ would be ‘protecting people from external threats to this country’s health.’And what are these threats? Apparently they are ‘biological weapons, pandemics, and of course infectious diseases of all kinds.’ Is it the state’s role to protect us from infectious diseases of all kinds?

Notice how many governments and organisations, including the UK government, started referring to the ‘new normal’ in the spring of 2020. Lockdown legally started on 26 March 2020, and as early as 26 April Dominic Raab, the Foreign Secretary, said that Britain would be moving to a ‘new normal’. That term framed our expectations for the future, because it implied that ‘normal’, our old normal, real normal, was gone and to be replaced by something new. It signalled a move from one type of society to another.

A comparison with the Nazis might invite frustration in the sceptical reader, but consider the name ‘Das Dritte Reich’. The Third Reich, was a clever title, because it planted the idea in the minds of the German people that Hitler’s style of government wasn’t for a term, it wasn’t a fad, it was their present and their future.

How did we move so fast from an emergency situation to a term which seeds the idea the future will be forever different? We were supposed to lock down for three weeks to flatten the curve – why would that necessitate a ‘new normal’? A three-week intervention and a ‘new normal’ cannot logically coexist. What made governments think that Covid-19 would be different from every infectious respiratory disease the world has ever known? Respiratory diseases follow a bell curve: they come and then they go. Why would normal have to be permanently altered for this respiratory disease, and why would that be proclaimed so early?

A biosecurity state, where we are advised to follow directives to wash hands, socially distance and remember ‘hands, face, space’ is one thing. A legally directed biosecurity state which mandates staying at home is another. We have never before quarantined the healthy and impeded so many human rights in one fell swoop. Our rights to liberty, protest, worship, education and maintaining relationships were all impacted. And these are not trifling privileges, but basic liberties: our human rights