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

sense-check myself. I asked Alex if he thought he was paranoid: ‘No. There is nothing new going on right now. Plenty of people have predicted this. The virus provides cover for crashing the economic system and bringing in a new system that will purport to be for the people but is not. There will be digital ID, we’ll go cashless, you won’t be able to travel anywhere without being vaccinated up to the eyeballs and there will be a grab of the tangible assets. I’ve been predicting an economic crash since 2012.’

By the time of publication more of Alex’s predictions seem to be bearing fruit. I asked how he thought this worked: how and why would our democratically-elected leaders coordinate to crash the world economy? ‘There’s insane worldwide money printing,’ he said, ‘so this is obviously a worldwide plan. Johnson and Starmer aren’t in charge. They are high-level Masons. They are working for others.’ Who? ‘Who do you think?’ I didn’t know, that was why I was asking him. Alex didn’t want to go into much more detail.

‘At no point in this so-called pandemic did I ever feel fear about it. I always knew I’d be fine. I’m healthy,’ said Alex, when I asked if he was scared. ‘What frightened me was seeing everything I’ve read about and believed would happen, come to pass at warp speed. They aren’t playing games, they are going for it. Knowing where this could go is scary.’

Theories flourish in the gap between what we know makes rational sense and our lived reality. So much of the response to the Covid epidemic did not make sense. World leaders did act similarly. They used the same language. Was this evidence of coordination behind the scenes, or was it linguistic contagion? Were they acting in sinister lockstep or were they copying each other? They pursued lockdown strategies that might save lives, although there was no evidence that they would, while knowing they would cause economic and societal harm which would cost lives. What is an intelligent and imaginative person to theorise?

Broadly, we might assume government plans were carefully considered, or that a conspiracy was driving events, or that it was all a big cock-up. The initial response looked wise, precautionary and justifiable to many people, and it still does to some. By this point my lockdown critical colours are nailed firmly to the mast. Conspiracy can be as extreme as believing that aliens are pulling strings behind the scenes, or that 5G masts are going to poison us, or it can be more believable. How about the World Economic Forum’s ‘Great Reset’?11

Some people think the government’s response to Covid is a smokescreen to disguise their participation in this reset; a radical restructuring of the economy and society. The World Economic Forum also uses the slogan ‘Build back better’. My first thought when I heard that was that, if we are ‘building back’, a degree of destruction has been wrought first. Might I suggest a modest refurbishment instead?

The Great Reset is no ‘conspiracy theory’, it’s a manifesto, a plan, laid out in black and white. And does it tie in to Covid? Yes, if Professor Klaus Schwab, the founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, has his way. He said: ‘The pandemic represents a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine, and reset our world’.12

The World Economic Forum published an article by Ida Auken, one of their Young Global Leaders and a Danish Member of Parliament, entitled ‘Welcome to 2030: I own nothing, have no privacy and life has never been better’.13 It’s supposed to be a provocative enticement to consider the sort of future the WEF imagines, but I would retitle it ‘Welcome To 2030: I am a serf and have never been so gullible’. It’s an incredibly unpalatable imagining of the future. Every Englishman’s home is his castle, and I think that owning nothing and squatting in a communal living space is going to be a very hard sell in this country indeed.

In February 2020 a World Economic Forum tweet stated ‘Lockdowns are quietly improving cities around the world’ and celebrated the closures of factories and the deserted streets while earthquake scientists can work more effectively. This is by no means evidence of a ‘conspiracy’ but does suggest an incredibly out-of-touch technocratic approach to life. The tweet did not hit the right note and they deleted it.

Maybe influential international organisations, world leaders and business are conspiring to bring about certain changes in the world. That would be for another book, it strays too far from my remit, and there are thousands of digital rabbit holes for you to explore. Or maybe the answers lie in cock-ups? Of course governments, international organisations and individual scientists make mistakes. Fear clouds rational judgement. Then they might try to hide their mistakes. Maybe between conspiracy and cock-up are conflicts of interest and convergent agendas. Less over-arching than a grand ‘conspiracy theory’, they could account for lobbying, sympathetic media exposure and high-level handshakes and contracts.

News about conflicts of interest seeped out slowly during the epidemic. SAGE members’ financial interests have still not been published at the time of writing. The BMJ reported in December 202014 that the government was withholding SAGE and other advisory bodies’ competing interests, such as whether they had financial interests in pharmaceutical companies receiving government contracts.

The BMJ reported that ‘Throughout the pandemic, allegations of financial conflicts of interest have circled many public and private actors in many jurisdictions. In the UK the government’s Chief Scientific Adviser, Patrick Vallance, made headlines when he was shown to have financial ties to the drug company GlaxoSmithKline.’15 The journal also reported on the the Wellcome Trust’s conflicts of interest; its pharmaceutical investments overlap with its research efforts. Both Wellcome and the Gates Foundation are ‘positioned to potentially benefit financially from its leading role in the pandemic response’. And the ‘UK government acted unlawfully in failing to publish details of dozens of contracts awarded without competition for goods