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

to me honestly if I agreed to conceal their identity. They had grave concerns about the use of fear: ‘In March, the government was very worried about compliance and they thought people wouldn’t want to be locked down. There were discussions about fear being needed to encourage compliance and decisions were made about how to ramp up the fear. The way we have used fear is dystopian. We have a totalitarian government in respect to propaganda. But all governments engage with propaganda. The use of fear has definitely been ethically questionable. It’s been like a weird experiment. Ultimately, it backfired because people became too scared.’

We talked about propaganda during the Covid epidemic, which SPI Two felt had reached ‘sinister’ levels, and they shared their suspicions with me about ‘Clap for Carers’. ‘I never joined in with Clap for Carers. I was relieved when it was over. I would say it was “created”, invented, I don’t think it was grassroots,’ they confided. ‘We never discussed it in SPI-B, it wasn’t our policy or recommendation, I just think someone, somewhere dreamt it up. It was ready to go. Something about it struck me as artificial. I bristled at the rainbows in people’s windows. It felt more like a clap for Boris rather than a clap for the NHS. I think the government used it as a shield.’

I felt goosebumps. I had interviewed the ‘founder’ of Clap for Carers, Annemarie Plas, for an article I wanted to write, and had felt a strange hunch. Instead of pitching the story and portrait to a magazine as planned, I had felt stuck, unable to confirm my inklings one way or the other, so I’d just dropped it. SPI Two’s conjecture echoed my hunch, and it was not the first time someone close to government had shared suspicions that Clap for Carers was not the grassroots sensation it seemed.

It might be that Clap for Carers was invented by one of the covert propaganda units in the government. Or maybe it really did originate with Plas (she seemed genuine, I do believe her on this) but was turbo-charged to become a visible nationwide campaign with government help. It injected the early days of the lockdown with a feeling of hope and humanity. It encouraged the collectivism so beloved of the behavioural scientists. But something felt off, ‘artificial’, as SPI Two said. The government has form for manipulating emotion this way, which I explore in Chapter 7, ‘The tools of the trade’ and Chapter 8, ‘Controlled spontaneity and propaganda’.

We concluded our thought-provoking conversation. SPI Two told me they felt we had lost the balance between protecting people from a virus and protecting what makes us human. Again, this resonated deeply with my fears for the future when we first locked down. I asked how this could have happened. After a pause, SPI Two confessed: ‘I don’t want to contemplate it. We’ve allowed ourselves to be governed in this way.’ I pressed on – didn’t they want to know? They were part of the propaganda engine, so didn’t they want to know where we were being driven and why? ‘It’s in the name of the unit I am in – it’s behaviour. You could call psychology ‘mind control’. That’s what we do,’ they said. ‘Clearly we try and go about it in a positive way, but it has been used nefariously in the past. Psychology has been used for wicked ends. I don’t want to get too into this because it’s dystopian and it’s what wakes me up at 3am.’

AUSTIN, 75

I am 75, overweight, diabetic and my kidneys don’t work properly. That’s four strikes against me. My wife has asthma. I am the primary carer for my 98-year-old mother who lives with us and she is housebound. She doesn’t have any underlying health conditions other than she will be 99 in December. We have to keep anointing her skin or it would get dry and cracked.

I would not find it easy to live with myself if she caught coronavirus. She’ll die at some point in the next two weeks to 10 years, but I don’t want to be the agent of that.

Between my wife and myself we do everything for her. I do all the cooking. We don’t have any carers going into the house because we don’t want to import anything. She can go to the loo on her own but she is almost double incontinent.

Our washing machine has broken down. I don’t want a new one delivered because that would mean a person coming into the house and a washing machine coming in which might have coronavirus on its shiny surfaces. We’ve been hand washing for longer than I would like. I have become very good at wringing out towels and sheets in the garden.

It’s getting a bit more oppressive now we’re seven months in, but I can continue living the lifestyle that I have set up for myself almost indefinitely. We get food delivered, we get stuff in the post, I read a lot, I can do the gardening and put the bins out.

What is hard for me is not seeing people and getting out, not having hugs. I have had lots of Zooms. My daughter and one of my sons come by every now and then and wave outside the living room window. It’s better than nothing, but it’s hard.

I feel a slump a couple of days a week, but then it gets better again. We have foxes in our garden and it’s glorious to watch them. Little things like that are moments of joy and keep you going.

I haven’t had fear and angst, but I do have high levels of concern. My fears centre around the incompetence of our government and the disinformation. They claim to be led by science, but their lack of strategy has made me concerned. I am fed up with lies and misinformation. The writing was on the wall when Cummings was not in trouble for travelling up