Scared into submission by the Government's campaign of fear

'IF YOU GO OUT, YOU CAN SPREAD IT. PEOPLE WILL DIE.’ It is difficult to read that and not think that inducing anxiety was at least part of the purpose.

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In his poem Aubade, Philip Larkin hauntingly captures the sense of trepidation when one wakes in the small hours and cannot shake off the realisation that life is finite. In his words:

Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.

In time the curtain-edges will grow light.

Till then I see what's really always there:

Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,

Making all thought impossible but how

And where and when I shall myself die.

This aspect of human nature – the fear of death – has been capitalised on, cynically or benevolently depending on your viewpoint, by the British Government over the past fourteen months.

As a sub-committee for the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) infamously put it at the beginning of the Covid pandemic: 'The perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging.' This was back when their membership and minutes were still considered to be state secrets, on vague national security grounds. Perhaps they would have worded their thoughts differently had they known they would soon be published, as they were in May 2020.

Our profound and instinctive fear of dying was being discussed by academic advisors to the Government as if it were a vulnerability to be targeted for exploitation to ensure compliance with contentious and unprecedented public health measures, for which there was limited and often dubious evidence. The author Laura Dodsworth charts in her excellent new book A State of Fear how that advice was put into action. The Government spent hundreds of millions of pounds on a campaign, now well into its second year, of provoking panic by exaggeration, emotional blackmail, and making use of nudge theory to influence behaviour. Our fear of death was being manipulated to ensure compliance with lockdowns, mask-wearing, and biosecurity monitoring.

The British media class then amplified this environment of radical anxiety. Macabre imagery and misleading statistics became the norm. The open-mouthed acceptance of the claims of academics who had excitedly found themselves at the heart of government became commonplace when reporters and scientists encountered one another. Ofcom virtually prohibited broadcasters from properly scrutinising the 'experts' by chastising journalism which potentially undermined 'people's trust in the views being expressed by the authorities on the Coronavirus and the advice of mainstream source of public health information'.

Dr James Moreton Wakeley, the historian and former parliamentary researcher, wrote that 'employing it [fear] as a form of influence, however softly however subliminally, can profoundly change behaviour and cause lasting mental trauma'. Coupled with the relentless hyper-reel of the screen and print media, psychological trauma was well and truly triggered.

According to research cited by Laura Dodsworth, the levels of fear in the UK were higher than the rest of Europe, Asia, or America. Research published in July 2020 showed that the British public believed 6.76 per cent of the entire UK population had died from Covid. Scottish people thought it was as high as 10.23 per cent, which would have been almost seven million people. Even if we use the death toll endorsed by the Government, which has been wholly unreliable and prone to overcounting, the real amount was approximately 0.06 per cent at the time of the survey. The elevated sense of personal threat that the boffins advising the Government had hoped for had been achieved most successfully.

A study led by London South Bank University's School of Applied Sciences has found that up to twenty per cent of us have developed a 'compulsive and disproportionate' fear of the virus, which will not recede even if Covid ceases to exist. This phenomenon, known as 'Covid Anxiety Syndrome', does not seem to be related to any pre-pandemic mental health condition and has its own centrifugal force. Perhaps its existence is not surprising given the omnipresent slogans, such as the one asserting: 'IF YOU GO OUT, YOU CAN SPREAD IT. PEOPLE WILL DIE.' It is difficult to read that and not think that inducing anxiety was at least part of the purpose.

According to one of the report's authors, Marcantonio Spada, Professor of Addictive Behaviours and Mental Health at South Bank University, 'worrying, checking others for symptoms, and avoidance have, over the months, gradually cemented a state of fear about the virus'. Professor Spada's prognosis is that large numbers of people, who were not at risk of severe disease even prior to vaccination, are going to avoid re-engagement with society. Forty-seven health professionals have written a letter to the British Psychological Society to communicate their belief that the Government's use of behavioural science to stoke fear is unethical. They argue that 'the strategic decision to inflate fear levels has had unintended consequences, resulting in many people being too scared to leave their houses or to let anybody in, thereby exacerbating loneliness and isolation which – in turn – have detrimental impacts on physical and mental health'.

We can all see their concerns are clearly manifesting themselves in reality. By the end of May 2021, polling suggested that more than half of all British adults had not hugged a friend or relative despite the withdrawal of guidance to refrain from embracing. Eighty per cent said that they would not leave the country for any reason this year and over half would not even taken a holiday in the UK. This radical Covid anxiety is evident in the many thousands of non-Covid associated excess deaths of those too frightened to seek treatment for their ailments and maladies. It is there when two people circle round each other in the street like repelling magnets, or when the unshrouded or unvaccinated are reacted to as if they are lepers.

It will also be less visible to us in the many cases of people continuing to lock themselves in, fearful of leaving their isolation. Lockdown advocates would of course argue that this anxiety was a product of Covid, rather than our response to it. Perhaps in a world in which the Government had provided unemotive information and rational arguments to the public, for the population to consciously consider and then change their behaviour accordingly, this would have been arguable.

But we do not live in that world. We live in one whereby covert psychological strategy and 'hard-hitting emotional messaging' to provoke our thanatophobia have been the prime means of initiating behavioural change. Prior to 2020, we accepted it as a fact of life that we may become ill due to an infection contracted from a fellow human. It was relegated to the background of our minds. As it has been promoted to the foreground and the deliberate policy of generating a national hyper-anxiety has been so successful, the toothpaste cannot be put back into the tube. 'Covid Anxiety Syndrome' is among us and it is unclear how to flatten it.