‘A State of Fear’: New book exposes UK’s unethical psyops team
that ramps up anxiety over Covid-19 to control a compliant public
Damian Wilson
is
a UK journalist, ex-Fleet Street editor, financial industry consultant
and political communications special advisor in the UK and EU.
19 May, 2021 07:00
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Dystopian ‘unelected psychocrats’ have cynically manipulated the
British people by weaponising fear to ensure compliance with lockdowns,
according to a new book that will cause many to reassess how the virus
has been handled.
By any
measure, the coronavirus situation in Britain should be looking pretty
rosy by now, as Covid-19 cases are down, hospital admissions are down,
deaths are down and vaccinations are up. The NHS has not been
overwhelmed, the pubs are open and the kids are free to hug their gran.
So, why the glum faces?
Something seemed off kilter last night as
the TV news screened images of holiday-hungry Brits arriving in
Portugal, a teenage cancer survivor hugging his nan after a year of
forced separation and a bunch of lads in a Barnsley pub drinking pints
and watching the football play-offs.
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These scenes of jollity were tempered with news from India of a new variant
that had arrived in the UK and was proving wildly virulent, perhaps
threatening the freedoms we had longed for, if its spread continued
unabated. The message was clear: restrictions on our freedom might have
eased from Monday, but we could be back in lockdown unless we can manage
this latest ‘scariant’ from the sub-continent. Stay alert. Stay
afraid.
I’m sorry, but this time I just don’t buy it. Enough with
the scare tactics, the dashboard of death and the prophets of doom.
It’s quite clear the vaccine is working. I’ve had both doses on the very
clear understanding that it works, and I don’t expect I’ll be
hospitalised or die even if I do at some point contract the virus.
But
PM Boris Johnson and his government are addicted to fear and the
control it gives over a compliant public. As journalist Laura Dodsworth
makes the case in her new book, ‘A State of Fear: How the UK Government Weaponised Fear During the Covid-19 Pandemic’,
the British public needs to push back on this constant bait and switch
aimed at keeping us all in a perpetual state of anxiety.
As soon
as we think one doomsday scenario has been overcome, another appears in
its place. Psychologist Dr Harrie Bunker-Smith tells Dodsworth the
government’s tactics echo those found in an abusive relationship, and
she is spot-on.
“Abusers will say they won’t do something again, but then they keep doing it,” says Dr Bunker-Smith. “Abuse
is not constant, it’s not bad all the time. You have periods of extreme
abuse followed by the honeymoon period, where you get flowers and
apologies and promises, and then things deteriorate again.”
Here’s
how the last 24 hours have played out. After months of wearisome
lockdown (extreme abuse) the joy was evident on everyone’s faces
yesterday, when lockdown eased. A stranger smiled at me and asked if I’d
had a hug yet (the honeymoon period).
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But things quickly soured (the deterioration). No sooner had
thousands boarded their flights to the sun than BoJo announced it was
inadvisable to travel to countries on the UK’s amber list, that the
Indian variant posed a major threat
to those who refused to vaccinate, that plans were being drawn up for a
return to the loathsome local lockdowns, and that ‘freedom day’ on June
21 was most probably a non-starter. The abuse continued.
As
Dodsworth discusses, fear diminishes over time, but by announcing an
easing of restrictions, the government faced losing the psychological
grip over a malleable public that it had worked so hard at establishing
and then enforcing by draconian emergency laws.
Aided and abetted
by what the author calls its team of “unelected psychocrats” – the
behavioural insights experts who advise the Scientific Advisory Group
for Emergencies (SAGE) – the government has encouraged the use of fear
to control people’s behaviour during the pandemic. One unnamed member of
that team, the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviours
(SPI-B), said they were “stunned by the weaponisation of behavioural psychology” on the British public.
Another anonymous member told Dodsworth, “In
March [2020] 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.”
Gavin Morgan, one SPI-B psychologist who was prepared to be named, admitted, “Clearly,
using fear as a means of control is not ethical. Using fear smacks of
totalitarianism. It’s not an ethical stance for any modern government.”
Establishing
control was relatively easy. A straightforward effort was in the choice
of data and graphs that were shared with the public at the regular
press briefings from Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance and
Chief Medical Officer for England Professor Chris Whitty. Professor
David Paton, a professor of Industrial Economics at Nottingham
University, called the duo’s appearances “the ultimate psyop”.
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Since January last year, the pair and their colleagues have
frequently appeared to pronounce the number of Covid-19 cases, hospital
admissions and deaths across Great Britain. When you stop to think for
just a minute, something was obviously missing from their grim
presentations. What about the number of people who’d recovered from the
coronavirus?
With the bodies stacking up to be carted away by
military trucks in Italy, or dumped on the banks of the Ganges in India,
no one has bothered to talk about those millions upon millions of
people who beat Covid, which would have sent multiple messages. First,
this thing is not a death sentence for everyone; second, it’s not even a
hospital visit for many; and third, it’s a virus you need to be
cautious about, not to fear. As one of Dodsworth’s sources says, “People would have loved headlines about recovery.”
LIke
many of its media accomplices in ratcheting up the fear factor, the
government realises there’s nothing scary about good news, so best just
not mention it. It’s not as if the docile journalists we expected to
challenge these experts even thought of asking the question.
The
experts determined the frame of reference for the spread of Covid-19,
and told us only what they wanted us to know in order to keep us
fearful. Data that never revealed those who had recovered from the virus
or were discharged from hospital created a false illusion that this was
an ever-escalating red line that would continue on an upwards
trajectory, rather than the usual bell jar graph we would expect.
It
was, and is, a cynically manipulative exercise that remains the go-to
strategy in Downing Street. Now, however, thanks to the work of authors
such as Dodsworth, the brain fog is lifting, as ‘normal’ beckons on the
horizon and more folk are starting to question the government’s
judgements on its roadmap out of this crisis.
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It’s true that the public mood has changed. I’m not sure if it’s
the lifting of the holiday ban, the chance to have a pint at the local
or the vaccination rollout that’s done it. Maybe it’s all these things
and more.
The creepy ‘psychocrats’ pulling the strings have been
rumbled, and as awareness grows of their role in the government’s inept
management of the pandemic, they’ll scuttle under the furniture like
cockroaches caught in the light, leaving the politicians fully exposed
and expected to explain themselves. And then the real fun begins.
Una straordinaria anticipazione. Un fuoruscito siciliano costantemente in giro per l'Europa e frequentatore dei circoli mazziniani londinesi, il barone Giuseppe Corvaja fu autore di un libro pubblicato nel 1841 con il titolo "Bancocrazia" nel quale "...
sostiene che l'unico potere effettivo nella società contemporanea è
ormai detenuto dalle banche e che pertanto occorrerebbe sostituire tutte
le banche private con un'unica banca centrale controllata dallo stato." (cfr. Giorgio Scichilone, Francesco Crispi, Flaccovio Editore, 2012, p. 93).
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