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4-March-2023 |
Throughout the course of the pandemic, officials and ministers wrestled with how to ensure the public complied with ever-changing lockdown restrictions. One weapon in their arsenal was fear.
“We frighten the pants off everyone,” Matt Hancock suggested during one WhatsApp message with his media adviser.
The then health secretary was not alone in his desire to scare the public into compliance. The WhatsApp messages seen by The Telegraph show how several members of Mr Hancock’s team engaged in a kind of “Project Fear”, in which they spoke of how to utilise “fear and guilt” to make people obey lockdown.
An Imperial College survey of Covid infections in the community – called the React programme and led by the eminent professor Lord Darzi – provided “positive” news for Mr Hancock and his team.
The study they referred to appeared to have been a survey showing “decreasing prevalence” of Covid through May and an R number – the reproduction rate of the virus – of just 0.57.
Continue reading @ Daily Telegraph.
“We frighten the pants off everyone,” Matt Hancock suggested during one WhatsApp message with his media adviser.
The then health secretary was not alone in his desire to scare the public into compliance. The WhatsApp messages seen by The Telegraph show how several members of Mr Hancock’s team engaged in a kind of “Project Fear”, in which they spoke of how to utilise “fear and guilt” to make people obey lockdown.
An Imperial College survey of Covid infections in the community – called the React programme and led by the eminent professor Lord Darzi – provided “positive” news for Mr Hancock and his team.
The study they referred to appeared to have been a survey showing “decreasing prevalence” of Covid through May and an R number – the reproduction rate of the virus – of just 0.57.
Continue reading @ Daily Telegraph.
If it was Hancocks idea to frighten people, it worked. As usual, tell a gullible public enough nasties and they will believe it without question, irrespective of whether they voted for the government party or not. I for one thought all the lockdowns unneccessary and well OTT. Masks in public places yes, restricting A+E patients, yes, vaccines defo, closing pubs no, all that did was frustrate people. Locking people indoors, no, no.
ReplyDeleteAt my Dads funeral, people were afraid to get too close to each other, why? Because Matt Hancock had said so. I thought, how gullible can you get!
It was used as a means of control by governments around the globe, including Britain. Before Covid mass demonstrations against climate change and planetary vandalism were organised and carried out by school students. Governments, though perhaps not states, were worried. Enter Covid annd lockdown. Result, end of protests and once the momentum was lost it has not, so far, returned.
Caoimhin O'Muraile
That sounds too close to a right wing conspiracy theory Caoimhin. While I didn't take much interest in it all during the time, despite finding it a nuiisance, the Left, the trade union movement, the hospital workers were all calling for restrictions. My own view is that governments were unsure and opted for caution and stringent measures. No doubt they learned an awful lot from it in terms of controlling society which will be used to curb civil liberties when the moment calls for it. While people like Pádraig O Maonaigh who recommended the piece campaigned against the measures from a Left democratic standpoint, because the most strident voices against, for example, vaccination have historically been on the right and the far right in this country latched onto it as an issue which they hoped their other hates would coagulate around - and were visible at protests - there was little chance of Left libertarians mounting an effective challenge to government policies. Even looking at the world through a descriptive Marxian lens as some of us do, it is hard to think of any Left wing government who would have eased up on restrictions.
ReplyDeleteWe lost the plot during covid. Constitutional rights and civil liberties were shown to be removable. The threshold for proof was found to be the decrees and word of power. In time this will be shown to be a pivot point for authoritarianism. The biggest transfer of wealth in history to the already richest entities and the erosion of free media are no longer taboo to call out, they are verifiable.
ReplyDeleteThe jury is probably out on whether the plot was lost. I think it will be years before we get a more settled view, maybe only after a Chilcott type inquiry which will itself not go far enough. There is a constant dialectic between state control and civil liberties. And the transfer of wealth to the wealthiest has been consistently taking place since attempts to arrest the growth of the Welfare State, which itself was accused of being authoritarian.
DeleteI detect in some people an interpretation of liberty as manifesting itself in a desire to be free from illness and poverty. That leads them to think that without a strong state rampant individualism will flourish and they will be left to fend for themselves. The 'common sense' is that the lives of people have only improved when there was a government and got worse in the absence of one.
There is something of a quandary in all that which I am not sure the Left has managed to circumvent.