An alarmed populace will desire to be led to safety by its government. The more severe the emergency, the more a population will appreciate strong government. In the US, they call it ‘rallying around the flag’. In Hidden Persuaders by Vance Packard, which explored the use of depth psychology and subliminal research in post-war United States consumerism, the ‘perfect president’ is described as a ‘father image’. In an obvious and visceral attempt to convey a strong paternal leadership, Boris Johnson said the government would put its ‘arms around every single worker’ during the epidemic. Some might welcome the embrace of the state, while others feel it as a stranglehold.
People willingly sacrifice liberty for security during a crisis. This is not a simple exchange though. What does security mean? And is liberty returned when the crisis has passed? After a crisis some governments may wish to lengthen the state of fear, or exaggerate it, to keep the population obedient.
Early in 2020, the people of the world realised en masse they would die. Of course, they were always going to die. But they believed they could die then, or soon, as a result of the epidemic. Mortality felt real. It could be that a modern-day death phobia, or at least our disconnect from death, has primed us for an over-reaction. If you haven’t accepted you will die one day, you are a sitting duck for policies which claim to be for your safety. There is mixed evidence about the efficacy of lockdowns. We do know that they have cost lives. (For a fuller explanation, see Appendix 2.) Yet people traded their liberty in the hope that the government knew best.
Robert Higgs, the American economic historian, said, ‘The masses can be turned around on a dime on the basis of a crisis, even a bogus crisis. The politicians will quickly come running round to exploit on a crisis.’ He has good form for predicting the effects of crisis on government. In his book Crisis and Leviathan he postulated that the First World War, Great Depression, Second World War, Johnson–Nixon years, 9/11 and the Great Recession that started in 2008 all caused the US government to expand, in a pattern he calls the ‘ratchet effect’. Effectively, nothing is so permanent as a temporary government measure.
‘A crisis,’ Higgs observed,3 ‘alters the fundamental conditions of political life. Like a river suddenly swollen by the collapse of an upstream dam, the ideological current becomes bloated by the public’s fear and apprehension of impending dangers and its heightened uncertainty about future developments.’ Bewildered people turn to the government to resolve the situation, demanding that government officials ‘do something’ to repair the damage already done and prevent further harm.
In an interview for Reason magazine on 20 September 2001 – nine days after 9/11 – Higgs was asked about the future of the US and its government, based on his studies of crises in the past. He accurately predicted more surveillance, the military increasingly being used for domestic duties, the enlargement of the ‘Big Brother’ state and that terrorism would not be wiped out.
So, what does Higgs predict will happen as a result of the Covid crisis? In short, associated government measures will leave an abundance of legacies for the worse so far as people’s freedom is concerned.4
There were significant changes in the UK following acts of terror too. The Prevent policy is one of the most significant of recent years. In 2015 it became a legal duty for public sector institutions to effectively engage in surveillance of the population for signs of extremism and radicalisation. We should remember that extremism and radicalisation are not illegal, and who gets to define them anyway? Let’s not forget that the Suffragettes were considered extremists in their time.
The Investigatory Powers Act 2016 followed the controversy over bulk data collection by authorities which had been revealed in the famous Snowden leaks, and aimed to create a firmer legal footing for bulk collection and interception of communications, including your internet browsing histories. It allowed police and other governmental organisations to access information. Effectively it legalised the mass surveillance that Snowden had revealed.
The Terrorism Act 2000 enabled arrest without charge beyond 24 hours and stop and search without suspicion. This basically allows people to be held for considerable periods of time without charge and for that to be extended, whereas normally the police can only hold you for 24 hours without charge. Chillingly, the UK might also have been caught up in torture since 9/11.5
What was the risk to the UK population which justified these far-reaching policies of mass surveillance, stop and search and detention? Acts of terror create a whiplash of shock and fear, but in fact from 1975–2018 the risk of dying in a terrorist attack in the UK was one in 11.4 million per year.6 The risk of being injured was one in 496,464. It’s imperative we understand how much fear clouds our perception of risk.
I interviewed Silkie Carlo, the director of Big Brother Watch, about the parallels between the changes to UK law and society after 9/11 and what we are experiencing since Covid. She didn’t hold back: ‘Covid has given the world an electric shock. It’s a time when measures can be introduced and there is little bandwidth for people to oppose. The extent of the changes this year is going to affect everything about being human. The point about liberties is when you restrict them you don’t just restrict the legal aspect of liberty, you restrict life itself. The reason we are in the situation we are in now is because of the precedents that were set after 9/11.’
While we talked I felt a recognition in my gut of my own fears this year. She told me that after the war on terror ‘we were left with a raft of counter-terror legislation which had implications beyond counter-terror. It justified the global mass surveillance architecture that we passively live under now.’ As
