ECONOMY
•The UK’s GDP fell by 9.9% in 2020, the worst result of any G7 country, and worst contraction the UK economy has experienced since the Great Frost of 1709.29
•The increase in public sector net borrowing (March to November 2020 rise in OBR estimates) could be as much as £385.2 billion.13
•Unemployment is expected to increase by between 450,000 and 2.45 million above pre-pandemic levels.13
•More than a quarter of pubs do not believe they will stay in business after lockdown.13
•The creative industries project a loss of £77 billion in 2020.13
•The manufacturing sector faced a Gross Value Added (GVA) loss of £71.7 billion from the first two lockdowns.13
•The construction sector faced a GVA loss of £40 billion from the first two lockdowns.13
•The retail sector faced a GVA loss of £33.8 billion from the first two lockdowns.13
•The impact on hospitality was a £37.4 billion loss.13
ELLA, 47
My fear is authoritarianism. That other people will think they know what is best for us. I don’t believe in our leaders, so I can’t trust my environment and the world feels unanchored.
People have lost their minds with fear this year. We aren’t used to fear anymore. They are searching for a crescendo in life, an epiphany which they normally get from Netflix. They’ve imploded with the crisis of Covid. I think if people practised more mindfulness, if they were more present in the moment, they would have managed better.
This year has been a wake up call that people are shit with knowing they are temporary. I am OK with dying; we are here for a finite time. I’d like my children to live longer than me, but I don’t think I’m entitled to a longer life than I am going to get.
Lockdown has taught people to ignore feelings and ignore faith. When churches close, when schools close, and isolation becomes the norm, you cannot experience faith in the full. I am not a Christian, but I know what is right and wrong and I trust my faith. The government killed God. It’s as simple as that. To put protecting yourself from death above everything is killing God. I wasn’t brought up with religion, but I have faith. I believe my consciousness will live forever.
The art of living is not just about having brilliant things happen, it’s also about carrying the burden of loss. Life is about feeling.
Courage is fear in disguise.
17. WHY FEAR SHOULD NOT BE WEAPONISED
‘Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.’
Marie Curie
In the introduction I confessed my discovery that I was more frightened of authoritarianism than death, and more disturbed by manipulation than sickness. Has my fear helped or hindered me? For several weeks into lockdown in the spring of 2020, fear gave me a sick feeling of dread in my stomach a few seconds after I’d woken. Oh God, this is real, it’s not just a bad dream. That can’t have been a healthy way to start the day. Many studies have shown the link between psychological stress and the immune system.1 Fear also disconnected me from the usual pleasures of life and my senses were dulled. Even the spring blossom smelt sad. I was not in control of these responses; fear took over. But fear also gave me new intellectual and creative direction. It’s made me reconsider what I want from my government. Fear made me write a book.
Fear, like hope, can be very motivating and is not inherently bad. It is an adaptive emotion that mobilises our energy to respond to threat. The challenge is to identify when fear is being used deceptively or to manipulate, or is not well-calibrated to the actual threat and overwhelms us. If we are nudged towards a ‘greater good’ we play no active role in deciding what ‘good’ is. We have handed over the big decisions. We are like children being guided by adults who know best. If rule is by ‘science’ and we, the ignorant population, don’t get to review the software code of the models behind our new commandments, it is akin to the peasantry enduring sermons in Latin before the first English translations of the Bible.
The obvious argument in favour of fear is that the use of fear is acceptable if it works, if it kept us safe and if there is a net benefit for society. What did the government policies – lockdown, restrictions, a blitzkrieg of behavioural psychology – keep us safe from? Not unemployment, not other types of ill health, not death and certainly not fear. In fact, they couldn’t keep us safe from Covid-19 either. Lockdowns don’t work. Now these are strong words. You may splutter – ‘but, but, but!’ – and think my position is ludicrously counter-intuitive. But many international studies now offer the empirical evidence that lockdowns failed to contain the virus, and at the same time they are a blunt tool which causes great harms. The efficacy of lockdowns is not central to the tenets of this book, but if you want more of my thinking on lockdowns you can read the ‘Lockdowns don’t work’ essay in Appendix 2. Now, back to fear and why it should be not weaponised:
1. FEAR SLOWS RECOVERY
‘Fear is a disastrous way to do public health messaging,’ said Lucy Easthope, ‘and goes against everything we know about how to do health risk communication. Working on CBRN threats (chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons) taught me that weaponising fear to get the response you want causes you insurmountable problems in long-term recovery. Health risk communication is a science but most of that science has been ignored, not followed, during the Covid epidemic.’
Easthope told me ‘it’s going to take a long time for us to come out of this’, because the government deliberately exaggerated the risks of the disease. Fear will slow recovery. And then the next problem is that the ‘government don’t
