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

conspiracy theorist and ‘prepper’ I think his beliefs were more nuanced. He would have predicted digital ID, a destabilised world economy and a wealth grab by elites at the beginning of the pandemic, and he would have been right. On the other hand, he thought aliens could be the masterminds of it all.

Steve’s Land Rover was a cornucopia of useful items. He had freeze-dried food, water canisters, spare fuel, tools, spare clothes. He told me he could drive into the woods and survive for days. I asked why? What did he think might be coming? ‘I’ve been ready this year to pack my bags and go. My wife believes in all this reluctantly. She doesn’t want to believe something else is going on, but she does. I’m always prepared because you never know.’ He told me they had bought some woodland and were building a cabin, so that if the time came, they could live off-grid. He described them as being in a ‘transitional period’ as they prepared for the worst-case scenario. They had a ready supply of fuel, a log burner and a year’s supply of rice. He had been buying small pieces of gold for years and had a good supply of carbon arrows. Arrows? That sounded apocalyptic! Would we be shooting each other with bows and arrows? ‘I practise archery. I like it, it’s a hobby. That doesn’t detract from the fact that it’s a post-apocalyptic survival skill.’

I asked Steve what was next? ‘Tier Three or full lockdown around Christmas. I think worse is coming. 2021 something will happen. There could be riots when people come off furlough. We can’t go on like this forever.’

I talked to Alex over Zoom. Although we could have met during the dizzying freedom granted by the government during the summer of 2020, he’d already moved to Sweden. He told me that he’d ‘had enough of England, the government and the media’. He had been shocked at how quickly the British public acquiesced to the restrictions on their lives, and said he and his family decided not ‘to play the game’ but to try life somewhere else.

‘The public health and political systems are somewhat uncoupled, so it’s less crazy here. You don’t read about Covid on signs everywhere, it’s not in the media 24/7. Sweden didn’t turn Covid into a political game,’ he told me. ‘Despite what you see in the media in the UK, the Swedes are quite proud of the way they responded. No one here thinks they could or should have done a lockdown.’

I asked how he had felt when the pandemic started, and he told me that Fright Night had a profound effect on him – just as it had on me. ‘It was weird, like the Queen’s speech on Christmas Day. The whole family was together. I was in the moment. I get chills when I think about it. It was like a show. Boris came out with buffoon hair. They hadn’t brushed it, which seemed a bit odd.’

I was impressed by the swift escape to Sweden. I think it was an enviable move. In truth, most people would have enjoyed life in Sweden better during 2020. No-lockdown Sweden is an awkward counter-factual to locked-down UK. The country followed existing pandemic protocol and didn’t try the brand new lockdown experiment. The Swedes have largely been entrusted with government guidance rather than law and, as a result, life has carried on more normally and the economy saw a much milder downturn than the UK, with a 2.9% contraction in GDP,8 rather than the UK’s 11.3%.9 Lockdown fanatics think Sweden pursued a reckless strategy and fared less well than its Scandinavian neighbours, while lockdown critics praise the gods that a control exists to show how a pandemic can be managed without putting people under virtual house arrest. When Sweden did not lock down, gloomy modellers predicted 100,000 deaths10 by 1 July. In fact, there were only 5,490 deaths.

I asked how they managed to travel there. ‘It was easy,’ Alex laughed, ‘Travel wasn’t as restricted then as it is now. We packed up and drove here! We barely even needed masks on the way. We knew we had a window to travel and then the restrictions would get worse in the UK.’

Curiously, he was right – travelling did become harder. So, what were his theories about why this was happening? ‘This isn’t about Covid. This is an excuse to crash the economy. I’ve known it’s coming for years. I just didn’t know it would be a virus,’ he told me. ‘Governments are printing the shit out of money. Wealth is shifting upwards more, and the rich are using this “new” money in a wealth grab to buy resources, like land. We’re playing a massive game of monopoly. I don’t think we ordinary people can win anymore. We can’t throw the board over and say we’re not playing the game anymore. It’s too late for that.’

And so he moved to Sweden because the economy will be stronger? ‘No. I think we’re about to see the collapse of the Western world. A lot of people will die. You have to be prepared to be one of them. I don’t think Sweden will escape from this. All countries will get there in the end. I’m not under any illusion that coming here is a permanent escape. But there are 10 million people here and a lot of land. There are 70 million in the UK. I think it’s going to be messy and I’ll do what I can to keep me and my family out of it.’

Well, we are quantitative-easing the ‘shit out of money’. Hmm, this was a bit frightening (fear is contagious!) because his theory echoed my own early fears. Knowing that the government was pursuing such an economically harmful policy had frightened me. However, I had tried to remain observant about concerns and emotions, and I’d talked to a variety of friends about their interpretations of events in order to