The All Too Casual Deployment of the Politics of Fear By Matt Hancock
Project Fear Was The Inevitable Consequence Of Institutionalised Social Engineering
What’s remarkable about the scandalous revelations surrounding the release of Matt Hancock’s lockdown WhatsApp files is the casual attitude displayed by sections of the British political establishment towards the instrumental deployment of scaremongering. ‘We frighten the pants off everyone,’ Matt Hancock suggested during one WhatsApp message with his media adviser’. He was by no means alone in opting for the politics of fear. Scaring the public to comply with the Government’s onerous lockdown policies was supported by many policy makers and their experts. The head of the Civil Service, Simon case recommended that the government’s messaging relied on the use of ‘fear/guilt factor’.
Hancock’s WhatsApp messages indicate that public health information about Covid was often dramatized and framed in a way that had little regard for truthful and objective communication. Officials discussed when to reveal the existence of the so-called Kent variant of Covid with a view to ensuring that it had a maximum fear impact.
No one should be surprised about the revelations contained in Hancock’s lockdown files. The British Political Establishment is under the spell of social engineering and have regard democracy as an inconvenience or as a second-order principle. The promotion of fear through pyschological manipulation is their weapon of choice.
Throughout the pandemic the promotion of public health became totally intertwined with the manipulation of citizens through the politicisation of fear. This insidious development has even been acknowledged by Simon Ruda, one of the co-founders of the Behavioural Insight Team, generally known as the Nudge Unit. He wrote that that the ‘most egregious and far-reaching mistake made in responding to the pandemic has been the level of fear willingly conveyed on the public’. In a half-hearted tone of self-criticism, he stated:
‘Though I don’t think it’s fair to blame behavioural scientists for propagating fear (I suspect that this was more to do with Government communicators and the incentives of news broadcasters), it may be worth reflecting on where we need to draw the line between the choice-maximising nudges of libertarian paternalism, and the creeping acceptance among policy makers that the state should use its heft to influence our lives without the accountability of legislative and parliamentary scrutiny’.
Ruda is not the only behavioural scientist to express regret about the consequences of the alarmist policy of systematic scaremongering practised by officialdom.
It was revealed that in March 2020, a paper written for the British Government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) was concerned that the public was too relaxed about the pandemic and that Government had to subject it to the fear of God. Dated March 22, the paper written by the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviours (SPI-B) stated:
“A substantial number of people still do not feel sufficiently personally threatened; it could be that they are reassured by the low death rate in their demographic group, although levels of concern may be rising … the perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging’.
Some members of Sage were later embarrassed about the use of ‘hard hitting emotional messaging’. One member of Sage acknowledged that: ‘The British people have been subjected to an unevaluated psychological experiment without being told that is what’s happening’.
Hancock’s behaviour is not entirely surprising. For almost a half a century, Western societies have been dominated by the perspective of fear. As I argued in my book, How Fear Works, The Culture Of Fear In The 21st Century it is through the perspective of fear that the political class approaches many of the problems that confront it. One of the distinct features of this perspective is the adoption of an intensely fatalistic form of worst-case thinking. This tendency to fear the worst has exercised a powerful influence over the conduct of policy makers and experts during the current Covid pandemic.
The politicisation of fear demonstrated utter contempt towards the public. It treated grown-ups as if they were children. Instead of providing citizens with an opportunity to reflect and debate the problems posed by the pandemic, Hancock and his colleagues infantilised them. They took the view that it was far easier to scare people than to convince people about what had to be done to confront the challenge posed by the pandemic. Their adoption of scare tactics demonstrated contempt towards democracy. Social engineering rather than democratic politics is the hallmark of these arrogant incompetent technocrats.
What I find particularly disturbing is not the Government’s adoption of the politics of fear but the casual manner with which they practised it. They appeared to believe that it was OK to fool people.The protagonists involved in policy making were not in the least bothered by their dishonest manipulation of British citizens. They were entirely devoid of a moral sensibility essential for distinguishing right from wrong. The WhatsApp post indicate that policy makers were solely interested in the art of impression management.
When lying comes so naturally to elected political leaders, you know that democracy and public life is in serious trouble.