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

grandparents, and placed a jaw-slackening burden on the others. I felt a visceral maternal need to reassure my children that they were not responsible for the deaths of the elderly. One son told me in response that a teacher at school had shouted at non-mask-wearers in the corridor that they were ‘killing people’. Killing people would warrant calling the police, would it not? In fact, teenagers were merely making their way from one lesson to the next. Has this kind of hysterical and accusatory attitude towards our children been fuelled by government-initiated campaigns?

I contacted Professor Ellen Townsend, who heads up the Self-Harm Research Group within the School of Psychology at the University of Nottingham about the granny-killing catchphrase. After a long pause – I sensed she had a lot to say and was composing herself – she responded: ‘It is an unethical and morally repugnant slogan that compassionate, holistic public health researchers would never endorse. Using fear to psychologically manipulate people, especially children, is unlikely to engender trust in science or future public health messaging.’

To maximise the impact of scary slogans, the posters displaying dire warnings have often been accompanied by images of emergency personnel wearing medical masks and visors, stark black and white imagery and bold typefaces. The use of red and especially yellow and black have been typical of the scary advertising, as they suggest danger and threat. Yellow and black chevron-edged images remind us of painful wasp stings as well as disaster area cordons. Beware, do not cross (the rules), for on the other side of this chevron lies pain.

Patrick Fagan observed that some of the language used in the slogans might also be intended to bamboozle us. The term ‘social distancing’ is oxymoronic; distance is not social. In Australia, the advice was even more Orwellian: ‘Staying apart keeps us together’. The confusion aroused by this type of bamboozlement means you are more likely to be compliant to the command.

CAUTIONARY TALES AND CASE STUDIES

The media focused on case studies which serve as cautionary tales: stray from the rules and all will not go well.

‘Patient in Wales makes coronavirus plea – “I didn’t believe it was this bad”’ Sky News, 26 January 2020

‘Man who believed virus was hoax loses wife to Covid-19’ BBC, 24 August 2020

‘Mum who didn’t believe in Covid-19 struggles to breathe after 22 days in hospital’ Mirror, 20 October 2020

Clapping your hands and shouting you believe in Tinkerbell doesn’t keep fairies alive, and simply believing Covid is a dangerous respiratory disease doesn’t keep you alive either. Of course, people needed to take sensible precautions and follow the law and guidance, but if being frightened enough to follow all the rules was enough to keep people safe, far fewer would have died. These lurid headlines and cautionary tales are designed to frighten people into following the rules – look at what happens to those who didn’t believe hard enough.

But do the media do this at the express bidding of the government? In Chapter 2, ‘Fear spread in the media like an airborne virus’, I explored the complex and inter-connected relationship between the media and the government. In addition, do the behavioural scientists have a direct line to some journalists?

During a Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee on 19 January 2021,13 MPs put questions to David Halpern of BIT and Stephen Reicher, Professor of Social Psychology, both of whom sit on SPI-B. Reicher referenced a relationship with the media a few times. He mentioned a specific and early case in the media: ‘a nurse crying in distress in the first wave was immensely important in getting us to understand the realities on the front line… I have been arguing for the need for more of these, including stories of compliance.’ He reiterated later that he wanted ‘more stories of their [the public’s] compliance’. He said he had argued on Radio 4’s Today programme that they needed more such stories and ‘to be fair to the Today programme over the next few days they had stories of everyday heroic compliance’. Reicher seems to exert some influence.

FINES

We can’t credit the nudgers with the invention of punitive fines. We’ve always had them. Although, without exaggeration, the Covid fines are the worst this country has seen since the Weregild or ‘blood money’ of the Dark Ages.14 In fact, the behavioural scientists seem to prefer carrot to stick, although fines would fall under the heading of ‘coercion’15 in the recommendations from SPI-B. The problem is that laws to compel compliance must of necessity involve punishments for non-compliance. And Halpern believes that ‘it does matter that egregious examples are enforced’.

32,32916 FPNs (fixed penalty notice fines) were issued under the Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) Regulations, England and Wales and handed out by police between 27 March and 21 December 2020.

SEEDING, THE OVERTON WINDOW, A FOOT IN THE DOOR AND BOILING FROGS

Seeding is the art of planting an idea like a seed, to let it grow – later your audience is ready for the sale, or the next Covid restrictions, as the case may be. Leading on from that is the foot in the door technique: once someone has agreed to one request it is harder to refuse the next bigger request, as a precedent for acquiescence and acceptance has been established. Both seeding and foot in the door are tools which can manipulate what is known as the Overton window. This is the model for a framework which can shift and expand the policies that a government can follow without alienating their electorate.

Once the idea is seeded, and the foot is in the door, it means you can be boiled like frogs. The boiling frog metaphor was famously used in The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood: ‘Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it.’

In the biggest example of how these terms have played out in the Covid epidemic, we started with a single lockdown for three weeks to ‘flatten the curve’, which itself transformed into