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

‘All my life I have been prepping. I am always doing risk assessments in my head,’ he told me. ‘You have car insurance. Why not have a year’s supply of rice?’ I said I thought that constantly planning for the worst sounded exhausting, but he was cheerful: ‘It’s not exhausting, because it’s not happened yet. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst. I don’t think this is it. I think this is a test run. In peacetime you prepare for war.’

I was curious about when he had started prepping. ‘Back in the 1970s we had power shortages. I remember going down to the shops and not being able to buy sweets, so I started hoarding sweets. It started there. I was also in the army,’ he said. I was a child of the 70s too, and I remember the drawer always full of candles and matches, and that we needed them. I don’t have a year’s supply of rice, but I have a drawer of headlights, candles and matches, and I know that preparation for power cuts comes straight from my childhood.

We talked about why he felt suspicious. ‘I can smell a trap. What are the restrictions and the masks for? They aren’t going to affect a virus, so why are they doing it? I think we’re being trained for obedience.’ I had sympathy with this view.

It seemed very likely that the UK had performed a U-turn on masks for psychological not medical reasons. We know that behavioural scientists think masks give a ‘signal’, which would inspire obedience to the lockdown rules. In a sense, Steve’s interpretation is correct. If you perceive manipulation by the government it creates mistrust. So far, so reasonable. And as he said, ‘things are a conspiracy theory until they happen.’

Steve continued: ‘The Coronavirus Act is an Enabling Act like the Nazis had. And it’s scary that governments around the world are acting similarly. Is someone else dishing out the control?’ I could see where he was coming from. The Coronavirus Act and Public Health Act were terrifyingly draconian (see Chapter 15, ‘Tyranny’) and one could potentially draw parallels with the Nazi legislation. And why did governments around the world adopt similar policies at the same time? These policies didn’t come from existing pandemic planning literature and expertise – in fact, they were counter to it – so why? Were they copying each other, in a political version of playground psychology? We had to lock down, Sir, the other boys did it! Or were policy changes being driven by another source, a sinister cabal of globalist puppeteers?

I decided to test how ‘out there’ Steve’s beliefs might be. Did he believe aliens might be involved in controlling governments? ‘I don’t know,’ he said. He asked me if I thought there was intelligent life in the universe which might have visited earth. Yes, I thought that was possible. His satisfied face told me he could rest his case. I asked whether he thought a ‘Covid conspiracy’ was operated by the Masons or Illuminati? ‘I’m not a Mason, so I wouldn’t know.’ Fair enough. So, what was his theory?

‘I think the virus could be man-made or released,’ he asserted. At one point this definitely would have sounded conspiracy-esque, or at least highly speculative. But by the time he and I met, the WHO still hadn’t been granted access to the laboratory in Wuhan, China, and at the time of writing, British scientist Professor John Watson, who was involved in the eventual investigation, said he could not rule out a leak from the lab.3

Steve also thought that the pandemic response was ‘to destroy the economies of the world’, and said ‘we can’t service all this debt. If you can’t pay the debt you are in someone’s pocket. Are we going to be living like China with a social credit? Is this about getting us all to have digital ID?’

We had hit another inconvenient truth. Something that was seen as ‘conspiracy theory’ – that Covid was an excuse to impose a digital ID system upon us – looks more likely in 2021. A logical conclusion to a pandemic in an age of technology? Opportunism by political leaders who want to bring in digital ID anyway? Or a pre-determined plan? The UK government announced it would review a Covid certification scheme, or ‘freedom app’ or ‘vaccine passport’. The European Union put forward a legislative proposal for a ‘Digital Green Pass’ that provides proof of vaccination or test results. Israel introduced a ‘Green Pass’.

I pointed out that although he was open-minded he didn’t seem to know what was going on. ‘That’s right,’ he agreed, ‘I don’t know. All I know is you have 1% who have everything. Then a few more percent under them who control all of us. The middle classes are going now. I think we are sinking down lower and lower and those that control us want a small number of super rich and the rest super poor.’ Well, there had been a huge upshift in wealth during the epidemic, so I could see why he thought this. US billionaire wealth grew $1.3 trillion between mid-March 2020 and February 2021.4 Two thousand of the world’s wealthiest billionaires grew their collective wealth by 27.5%.5 Yet overall labour income dropped 10.7% globally,6 mainly in lower-income countries, and 150 million were expected to be pushed into extreme poverty by 20217 by the pandemic, or rather the lockdowns and restrictions.

I had a lot of sympathy with some of Steve’s views. I even shared some to an extent, although I couldn’t say whether these end results were the result of sinister secret conspiracies, opportunism, disaster capitalism, or just bad luck. Steve was sure something was going on, but also didn’t know what. His genuine curiosity about the world, plus an appetite to read and communicate with others of similar views, seemed to have combined with a childhood predilection for ‘being prepared’. While many would call him a