Within days of Boris Johnson announcing lockdown restrictions in late March, Toby Young – self-appointed general secretary of the Free Speech Union – had his own take on the government’s tripartite slogan. “Stay sceptical. End the lockdown. Save lives.”
Scepticism has a long and venerable history. From Descartes’s musings on metaphysics to Carl Sagan’s “fine art of baloney detection”, sceptics are unafraid to ask unpopular questions. Even if it means being branded a heretic.
Journalists are inheritors of this fine intellectual tradition. It’s our job to call out the self-serving spin of the powerful; to hold them to account. And from massaged Covid-19 testing rates to denialism about the crisis in our care homes, strong reasons for scepticism haven’t exactly been in short supply of late.
But in the comment sections of some of the rightwing press, a new, virulent strain of Covid-19 scepticism has emerged that is the precise opposite of journalism. Rather than holding power to account, it distorts and bends reality to serve elite interests – and to warp public debate.
In the pages of the Daily Telegraph, the Spectator and other outlets, Britain’s contemporary “lockdown sceptics” have dedicated themselves to a singular cause: proving that the UK response to coronavirus has been a massive, hysterical overreaction. “Lift the lockdown” is their cogito ergo sum; Sweden their promised land.
Even as the coronavirus death toll has skyrocketed, the serried ranks of Britain’s lockdown sceptics have swelled. What was once largely the preserve of libertarians and professional contrarians now has supporters on the government benches and even, it appears, round the cabinet table.
Britain’s self-appointed sceptics often look more like US-style culture warriors than critical thinkers. The lockdown – and the scientists advising caution – have become targets of their increasingly frenzied, partisan attacks.
Young has been one of the loudest lockdown sceptics – while being across TV and radio stations complaining about how he’s been silenced.
A personal brush with coronavirus has only emboldened him. “Coronavirus has turned us into a nation of scaredy-cats,” he declared in a column published the same day that the UK’s official death toll passed 31,500. (Young’s Lockdown Sceptics website even carries adverts from solicitors promising to advise anyone who “might have a legal case or claim over the government’s ‘lockdown’ regulations”.) Young is not alone. Newspaper columnists such as Allison Pearson blithely equate asking schoolchildren to wear face masks with child abuse. Shutting British pubs, meanwhile, is a deprivation of liberty comparable to Communist totalitarianism.
Particular ire is reserved for a group of people whose profession is based on scepticism: scientists. The team at Imperial College London – whose modelling predicted as many as half a million coronavirus deaths in Britain without lockdown measures – have been accused of “crude mathematical guesswork”. (By, er, Matt Ridley who presided over the crash at Northern Rock.)
When the Telegraph caught Neil Ferguson in breach of lockdown guidance, few were as cock-a-hoop as the paper’s columnists. On social media, anti-lockdown outriders presented the professor’s misdemeanours as evidence that his work was flawed. Imperial boffins had ruined the economy.
It is no surprise that so many professional contrarians are paid-up lockdown sceptics. They are products of our distorted media ecosystem, which invariably privileges heat over light. For them, the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about – even if what you are talking about amounts to social Darwinism.
But the lockdown opponents are not just media “personalities”. Many of the Conservatives’ most generous donors have called for the economy to be reopened. (Because the views of party funders are, of course, a crucial consideration in a public health emergency.)
Politicians have joined the chorus, too. David Davis – who still seems to believe that Brexit Britain will be saved by the political clout of German car manufacturers – has become a convert to the sceptic cause. The former cabinet minister Steve Baker has called on his prime minister to end the “absurd, dystopian and tyrannical lockdown”. Their colleague Daniel Kawczynski would like to see the Welsh Assembly abolished so his constituents can get to the seaside.
How long before a British parliamentarian goes full “plandemic” and wonders aloud if Covid-19 is all a conspiracy? Nadine Dorries, Lucy Allan and Maria Caulfield have already shown a fondness for sharing far-right talking points. Whoever does will doubtless receive far more column inches than the attention-seeking Irish politician, Mattie McGrath, who asked last week if the pandemic was “a great con” and was roundly ignored in local media, save a savage lampooning.
Polls suggest that lockdown scepticism is very much a minority sport, but recent British history shows how quickly fringe views can become mainstream. When the former MEP and prominent Telegraph columnist Daniel Hannan first got on board with Euroscepticism, it was a fringe concern. Now he is one of the guiding lights of Britain’s vote to leave the EU – and, as it happens, a vocal lockdown critic, who insouciantly proclaimed in February: “I’m going to stick my neck out here. You’re unlikely to be killed by the coronavirus.”
The echoes of Brexit in all this aren’t hard to spot. The disavowal of expertise. The pitting of “the elite” against “the people”. It is striking that while by no means all Brexiters are lockdown sceptics, almost all lockdown sceptics are Brexiters. Having chastised the government for inaction in early March, Nigel Farage now demands a return to liberty for all. On social media, Brexit moneybags Arron Banks’s Leave.EU is among the most belligerent anti-lockdown voices.
It is easy to dismiss the lockdown sceptics as a rag-tag bunch bound together by instinctive contrarianism, libertarian ideology, vested interests and a fear of a shift towards big state Conservatism. But they have already succeeded in shifting public discourse – far-right activists have been organising anti-lockdown demonstrations in London. We may come to a point where there is almost no “expertise” that cannot be somehow discredited by this brand of “scepticism”. And given the platform and power many of the people peddling it possess, they can attempt to make anyone look like a hypocrite or a useful idiot, undermining any sense of truth.
There is so much to be rightly sceptical about right now. There is indeed plenty wrong with Britain’s lockdown. Our government has just given private tech firms “unprecedented” access to our personal health data. Consultancy giants have been awarded massive contracts for PPE and testing without any open tender process. And how have so many businesses been able to exploit loopholes in lockdown restrictions, forcing low-paid workers to work without adequate safety provision?
These are the questions any self-respecting sceptic should be asking.
Instead, the “lockdown sceptics” are hoping to win a narrative battle, to shape what comes next. Britain’s success – such as it is – in curtailing deaths will be adduced as proof that the lockdown restrictions were unnecessary. The experts cannot be trusted. The cure was worse than the disease.
Carl Sagan would take one look at these contemporary sceptics and declare “baloney”. It is high time we did likewise.
• Peter Geoghegan is investigations editor of openDemocracy and author of Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics, out in August. Mary Fitzgerald is editor-in-chief of openDemocracy