Britain has been drilled to comply with lockdown under a future pandemic through wearing face masks and working from home, the Chief Executive of the Government ‘nudge unit’ has said. The Telegraph has the story.
Professor David Halpern told the Telegraph that the country had “practised the drill” of wearing face masks and working from home and “could redo it” in a future crisis.
Last Tuesday, Matt Hancock told the public inquiry that Britain must be ready to combat future disease outbreaks with wider, earlier and more stringent lockdowns.
Speaking on the Lockdown Files podcast, the Government adviser Prof. Halpern predicted that the country would comply with another ‘stay at home’ order because they “kind of know what the drill is”.
In an interview given before Mr. Hancock’s testimony, the leading behavioural scientist even suggested that the nation’s prior experience made it “much easier to now imagine” the population would accept future local restrictions.
Prof. Halpern said that while fear-based messaging in general is not effective, he defended its use in extreme circumstances.
“There are times when you do need to cut through… particularly if you think people are wrongly calibrated,” he said.
The suggestion that Britain might be primed to accept further social-distancing restrictions is likely to alarm lockdown-sceptics concerned by the collateral damage such measures cause.
When the pandemic hit, Mr Hancock’s department enlisted the professor’s Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) – better known as the ‘nudge unit’ – to provide them with “frictionless access to behavioural expertise”, according to a £1 million contract.
BIT used earworm slogans such as ‘hands, face, space’ to maximise compliance with Covid rules.
In his most wide-ranging interview since March 2020, Prof Halpern explained that his unit’s campaigns were devised to help reinforce new behaviours.
He said their posters acted as visual prompts so that “when you go into a shop or somewhere else, it re-reminds you, it cues, it acts as a trigger for the behaviour”.
The professor said that this messaging encouraged mask-wearing, meaning people felt “naked” when they forgot to put one on.
“Put it this way,” he said. “You would feel like, ‘Oh my God, I haven’t got my mask’. You feel naked, right?”
Once the public has learnt a new behaviour, Prof. Halpern said: “In principle, you can switch it back on.”
“You’ve got the beginning, particularly, of what is called a habit loop: if this has happened, then you should do that,” he said.
Major disasters “leave this enduring trace on society”, he explained. As well as knowing the drill, this “quasi-evolutionary” impact is a strong indicator of future behaviour, he claimed.
Faced with another contagious disease, the professor predicted that the British public would start wearing masks again “relatively rapidly if they were persuaded”.
“They might protest, ‘do we really have to do it?’ [Showing] good healthy scepticism. But once you’ve exercised those muscles, they’re more likely to be reused again,” he said.
As a result, the British public – having learnt to work from home – would be more likely, he believed, to accept stay-at-home measures being used to clamp down on local outbreaks.
Worth reading in full.
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One of the most alarming things about this scandal is that one of the main perpetrators of debanking seems to be the Nat West Group. Both Coutts and RBS are owned by NWG.
In turn, NWG is still 39% owned by the Government. Essentially, this is state sponsored activity.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NatWest_Group#:~:text=The%20Royal%20Bank%20of%20Scotland%20International%2C%20trading%20as%20NatWest%20International,banking%20arm%20of%20NatWest%20Group.
One of my domestic business accounts with Natwest was closed in 2018 by faceless uncommunicative and apparently incompetent operators in a Coventry office who repeatedly claimed I had not sent them documents ( I had,3 times, twice with proof of postage) and claimed falsely that they had contacted me several times ( they had not, only twice ). The local business manager admitted this was a problem and they were powerless to intervene. He and several colleagues have lost their jobs through decentralization and branch closures. I was reminded of First They Came – by Pastor Martin Niemöller
I moved the account to Barclays who recently seem to be running the same script. I heard that Natwest over the last 4 years have been equally as Kafkaesque.
Time for some independent form of community banking. We already practice barter/exchange of goods and services which without money exchange cuts the treasury out too..
Indeed. Browsing through that, it appears that, although the Gov has sold a lot of it’s shares (it owned about 2/3 of the whole lot for a while), it made a loss overall. Perhaps the Treasury should open a simplified national branch providing basic services to the general public. A bit like National Savings handling cash, maybe.
Incidentally, if they are trading on the NYSE, they are likely to be liable to pay US tax.
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Signed it a few days ago.
Thanks Toby good article and thanks for fighting back. If it can happen to you, Farage and the Christian Priest in Yorkshire, it can happen to us all. Coercion is the usual method of choice for fascist or totalitarian cults, regimes or programs. Debanking is a potent coercive weapon which our enemies who control gov’t and most large banks, are going to use more often. I believe this phenomenon (illegal, immoral, unconstitutional) will only accelerate. We all need a backup plan, what that is exactly I am not clever enough to come up with, but we need one.
We’re now working on some guidance for our members…
Yes, grateful thanks are due to Toby and the FSU. DS subscriber @NeilofWatford has suggested (more than once IIRC) we need a league table of woke companies … an excellent idea. Some guidance on that would be much appreciated too.
Well, well, well…. In the BBC bingo of guess the presenter who the winning presenter is Huw Edwards
https://www.gbnews.com/news/huw-edwards-bbc-presenter-wife-statement
Nooooo!
Never in a million years would I have suspected Huw. Blimey, I’m staggered.
The most dangerous predators are the ones who you least expect or trust the most….
I didn’t know he was suffering from depression. Well this isn’t exactly going to serve him. How will someone like him recover from this??
Hopefully Hardliner isn’t on shift tonight.
Hey nice little sneaky dump BTW. When you’ve gotta go you’ve gotta go with a hot potato like that!
Seems to fit in with the general theme of cancelling for being persona non grata though, you have to admit
“I didn’t know he was suffering from depression.”
Are you on the Smirnoff Mogs?
Why it was only last evening he gave a 10 minute lecture on Libel and Deformation from his chair in the newsroom, telling all the little people that they ran the risk of being sued if they didn’t shut up. Now this. I wonder if they might be connected.?
Looks like there’s more to come & his wife’s statement is part of his legal strategy….
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/22987085/huw-edwards-revealed-bbc-presenter-sex-pics-scandal-youngsters/
God…how would you react if you were his wife? Me or him would be straight out the door. Couldn’t possibly live under the same roof as him after all of these revelations. Divorce lawyer, stat. I’d feel like I’d been living with a stranger who’d been leading a double life! Hope she’s not one of those pathetic doormat women who just stick with a man who blatantly neither loves nor respects her, he just wants to have his cake and eat it and only says he’s sorry because he was caught!
And 17yrs old? I’d wanna see his hard drive as well, and no that’s not a euphemism!
He’d be out. No questions asked. Especially with children in the house.
This was posted on the Lawyers of Light Telegram Channel about this before he was named. Calls out, with references to the appropriate legislation, the failings of the Met in investigating or not this case.
Charles Malet Unbound Today
“The obfuscation and conjecture surrounding the ‘BBC presenter’ story acts as a smokescreen covering the extremely suspect relationship between the BBC and the Met Police, as well as the perfectly astonishing efforts taken by the BBC to suppress the story in the first place.
Quite why the ‘victim’s’ family did not go to the police at the outset does not appear clear. It would be hard to blame them for thinking that they would not be believed. However, in airing a complaint of this nature to the BBC, they should have expected a prompt and robust set of actions. Instead, it looks as though Tim Davie has been bounced into doing something only by the Sun’s reporting on the matter.
Even if the BBC were not aware of the specific nature of the complaint from May of this year, taking four days to get in touch with police might well amount to the indictable offence of perverting the course of justice (max sentence is life): https://www.cps.gov.uk/legal-guidance/public-justice-offences-incorporating-charging-standard.
At the very least, it is hard to see how those that had any awareness of the situation from May would not be subject to investigation for ‘concealing offences’, under section 5 of the Criminal Law Act 1967 https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1967/58/section/5.
The Protection of Children Act 1978 stipulates a maximum sentence of 10 years for possessing indecent images of children (which does include 17 year-olds): https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1978/37
That the Met Police has put out a statement saying that they are ‘assessing the information’ and making ‘further enquiries…to establish whether there is evidence of a criminal offence being committed’ is, without doubt, to give the BBC and its personnel special treatment. More or less the only reason that an allegation can be dismissed at the point of inception is if a police constable happened to be on the scene and can rebut the information immediately. In other words, they appear to be suggesting that they are not actually investigating this.
The immediate action on receipt of an allegation is to raise a crime report, which does constitute an investigation, even if it never goes as far as interviewing a suspect. This looks very much as though the Met are giving the BBC the benefit of the doubt, which is not within their gift to give.
However, they are investigating an allegation of a ‘malicious communication’, which will be someone having taken a guess on social media. Rest assured, we will hear plenty about this.”
It reminds me of Tarantino in Pulp Fiction:
‘I’m gonna get divorced? All right? No marriage counselling, no trial separation, I’m gonna get f***ing divorced, okay? And I don’t want to get fucking divorced!’
I dunno but I’m thinking this page should just be renamed ‘The Shame Of Being Huw Edwards’.
On the Edwards front. He will now be portrayed as a victim of ‘mental health’. Perpetrator turns victim.
We will then be told that he paid these young men via Only Fans. By law, you have to be over 18 to parade yourself on Only Fans. Thus, it’s Only Fans failure to ensure the welfare of both their underage tempter & their overage voyeur.
Edwards will follow Schofield, he’ll out himself & we’ll be expected to feel sorry for him & call him brave.
Yep, I’m with this lady. Same as what you’re saying. He’ll try and play the mental health card as some last ditch attempt to try and garner the sympathy vote. It’s pathetic and doesn’t wash. Don’t know the ages of the kids but it’s irrelevant because they all have to face people and carry on leading their day to day lives. How will this effect them? Everyone knowing your dad is a massive perv! This is where the wife comes in and needs to demonstrate what a strong role model of a parent looks like and keep things together for the kids’ sake. How will they ever forgive their dad behaving like this? Yeah Schofield will be well relieved the spotlight’s not on him any more.
”Huw Edwards does NOT get to play the mental health card.
If the alleged claims are true that he paid £35K for nude pictures of SCHOOL BOYS, he deserves no sympathy.
He is married with five kids. They have to live with this.
This is disgusting and utterly indefensible.”
Interesting comments underneath too.
https://twitter.com/AnnaMcGovernUK/status/1679196697174343690
“Edwards will follow Schofield, he’ll out himself & we’ll be expected to feel sorry for him & call him brave.”
And further clampdowns on social media networks will ensue.
BB guilty of an off-topic dump.
I don’t buy this.
I can’t believe that paedos have to pay tens of thousands of £s for their photos.
Oops, missed.
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https://youtu.be/-PmLP5dP8_8
Christine Anderson in the EU telling the WHO:
“You picked a fight, now you’ve got a fight.’
Two minutes. Brilliant.
The whole point of CBDC’s (and a cashless society) is so that we will all live permanently in fear of being de-banked …. and will therefore conform to the Globalists’ agenda.
The banks are just priming the fear …..
Use cash as much as you possibly can.
Has Huw Edwards been de-banked? Asking for a friend.
Farage’s case is a good example of why it’s risky to publicly complain about being debanked. Coutts, the elite bank he had used for over 40 years, went straight to the BBC, telling one of its journalists that the reason his account was closed is because he didn’t have enough money to bank with them. Essentially, Coutts told the world that it debanked him because he’s too poor to hang out with the rich folks.
This is a bit misleading. Coutts didn’t go straight to the BBC. They said nothing for several days after Farage complained he had been debanked and even then we don’t know if they went to the journalist or the journalist took the initiative and managed to winkle out the story from contacts. While I don’t approve of it, it is standard part of Coutts T&Cs that you have to be rich to have an account with them – nothing political about it. Plebs can always take out a Nat West account and apparently Farage was offered one – so they weren’t debanking him.