Emotion words. The role they were playing in the media/political response to the COVID-19 outbreak first became apparent to me on Monday, 27th April. That was the day Boris Johnson returned to work following a period of convalescence from his COVID-19-related illness. Speaking outside No. 10, he announced that he was (as his press team no doubt suggested he put it in order to resonate with the salaried classes) “back at his desk”. His statement contained all the usual Churchillian allusions. We were thanked for our “effort and sacrifice” and our “sheer grit and guts,” particularly in relation to “collectively shielding our NHS”. Ultimately, though, strip away the rhetoric and what were we being given? A pretty bleak message. Continue staying at home, obey the lockdown and wait for the government to tell you when you can pick up whatever pieces remain of your lives, jobs, careers and companies. No sense of a timeline (however “phased”) for ending the lockdown; no sense of an ending to this period of unprecedented economic national self-harm; no sense of the certainty that our economy – and the people and businesses who make that economy tick – need in order to get back to generating the wealth and prosperity that publicly-funded institutions like “our NHS” need in order to do their job.
How should we “feel” about this? As a matter of fact, during his statement Johnson claimed already to know how we felt about it. “I ask you,” he said at one point, vamping the camera with the same type of nauseatingly faux sincerity that Tony Blair once made his calling card, “to contain your impatience.” Impatience. Did you know you were impatient? Personally, I thought I was “intensely sceptical of the government’s strategy” or “thinking about different ways to manage a pandemic”, or maybe even, in moments of self-aggrandisement, “intellectually dissenting”. Apparently not, however. Those of us who have done our best to research, read widely and think carefully about how it might be possible to, you know, defeat COVID-19 without ending up jobless, business-less and in rent or mortgage arrears, are apparently “impatient”. One wonders how much of this type of thing British people will be able to stomach. Our economy is set to shrink by 13% this year, its deepest recession in three centuries. Public borrowing is set to surge to a post-WWII high. In the April-June period alone, economic output could plunge by 35%, with the unemployment rate more than doubling to 10%. At least 21,000 more firms went under in March 2020 compared with the same month last year – a year-on-year increase of 70 per cent. Does any of this make you feel “impatient”? I’d imagine it might make you feel quite a few other things, most of them unprintable. But you will also undoubtedly be “thinking” quite a lot of things too. That’s the point from which this article jumps off.
Emotion words are dangerous things when it comes to democracy and democratic politics. The word “impatient”, for instance, suggests a tendency to be quickly irritated or provoked by something. It is, in that sense, the emotional response of the infantile and the immature (hence the common, everyday phrase, “impatient as a child”). Perhaps unsurprisingly, the neat rhetorical affordances of Boris Johnson’s phrase weren’t lost on those mainstream media types still fighting their last-ditch, tin-pot battles against Brexit or indeed any other social action that has even the slightest whiff of perceived nativism about it. Thus, in the days following Boris Johnson’s first speech, we find the Guardian (of course) citing Fionnuala O’Connor approvingly (6th May) to the effect that, “[UK] Ministers of slim talent have bumbled through daily briefings and now big-business Conservative donors are impatient to reverse a shutdown so contrary to Brexiteer dreams”. Elsewhere, the BBC’s Jenny Hill described Angela Merkel (6th May) emerging from a “stormy session with Germany’s regional leaders who were so impatient to restart their local economies that some had already announced plans to relax restrictions before the meeting even began”. Those leaders, she noted with a condescendingly elitist nudge and a wink, “got their way and many Germans will no doubt be delighted at the prospect of beer gardens and Bundesliga”. Beer gardens and Bundesliga – such a wonderfully middle-class, Islington dinner party euphemism for “the AfD-fancying great unwashed”. Meanwhile, the Guardian’s own entry into this impromptu “make lockdown critics stand in metonymically for nativists” competition (6th May) read as follows: “On Wednesday, chancellor Angela Merkel announced the latest gradual reopening of large shops, schools, nurseries, and even restaurants and bars – seemingly bowing to a growing impatience with lockdown restrictions that was manifesting itself in political pressure from the leaders of the 16 federal states, the mass tabloid Bild, and growing conspiracy theory-driven protests across major cities.” Lockdown critics: impatient, ill-educated… and also, it turns out, possibly unhinged too.
Of course, this is all to hang a lot of analytic weight off just one word. True enough. So it’s probably worth noting in passing that emotion words have proliferated elsewhere in media/political responses to COVID-19. Terrified, scared, anxious – all have recently been pressed into action within the public sphere. But here, let’s briefly consider the word “fearful”. Its implications of a purely emotional response to an external stimulus helps it perform much the same rhetorical work as “impatient”. In his 10th May speech to the nation, for example, Boris Johnson was at it again, imputing certain emotions to his audience. “There are millions of people,” he declared, “who are both fearful of this terrible disease, and at the same time also fearful of what this long period of enforced inactivity will do to their livelihoods and their mental and physical wellbeing.” Again, did you know that you are fearful? And even if you did… is that all that you are? I would say that I’m “concerned” about what happens as the lockdown is phased out; that I’m “studying” all the available epidemiological/medical/scientific evidence to the best of my (admittedly limited) ability; and that I’m also “planning” for ways in which my business can respond to what will undoubtedly be a fluid, rocky and rapidly-evolving situation. Concerned, studying, planning – these are action descriptions, not emotion words. True, they might be tinged with emotion, but fundamentally, deep down, each of these actions constitute a rational, cognitive response to an external stimulus. Indeed, they point to the type of cognitive work that individuals in any fully-functioning democracy need to undertake all the time – lockdown or no lockdown.
Does this imputation of certain types of feeling to the voters of the UK matter? I think it does. It was the American sociologist Arlie Hochschild who, in the 1980s, first argued that emotional cues may be among the most important cues in social interaction. Feelings, as we all know, are a kind of pre-script to action. That much is obvious. It is internal behaviour that we engage in that prepares us to act externally. In days gone by, you got angry (feeling) and then smashed things up (action); now, you get angry (feeling) and you engage in passive-aggressive social-media one-upmanship with your followers (action). There is, then, a clear link between how we feel and how we act. But Hochschild went on to point out that in modern societies, there is much more to feeling than just some simple kind of inner authenticity. Her research into modern labour markets made clear that the feelings of individual employees were something that companies were increasingly seeking to own, and, in owning, control. People weren’t just buying an airline ticket anymore, they were buying the simpering smile of an airline hostess; similarly, people weren’t just buying a hamburger, they were buying a friendly encounter and the server’s cheery exhortation to “have a nice day now!” Employees were being (badly) paid as much for aligning their emotion management with the needs of their employer as they were for their physical labour.
In complex mass societies, governments also tend to put a surprisingly large amount of work into ensuring not only that the actions, but also the emotions, of the population are aligned with the norms and expectations that they’ve set across multiple different settings. Some of that is right and necessary, of course – we shouldn’t “hate” foreigners, just as children shouldn’t “trust” strangers and we should all feel “disgust” when we see prejudice in action. But what we also find is that modern government increasingly involves the repositioning of issues that would once have been seen as intellectual and cognitive issues as emotional phenomenon. This matters to and for democracy. If something political like a society’s overall response to the threat of a pandemic is seen – as it should be seen – as an intellectual issue then it requires debate, argumentation, criticism and negotiation. In the end, of course, there might turn out to be arguments that are more workable, viable and plausible than others. But everything here depends on continuing debate, negotiation and compromise between equals. On the other hand, if something political starts to be seen as an emotional issue, then there’s a definite tendency for the subsequent interaction to become laden with unequal power relations: the government and its appointed representatives announce a position or perspective, and then get to position everyone’s subsequent response on an emotional spectrum from usefully “docile” and “happy” to unhelpfully “immature”, “infantile” or, of course, “impatient”. Here, then, there’s only ever one argument which is workable and plausible (the government’s argument, of course) and a series of emotional responses to that argument which are either acceptable or unacceptable. In some ways, this is weirdly akin to a doctor-patient interaction on a psychiatric ward. Whatever you say to your Doctor, your words are never taken at face value, and only ever taken as the channel to some deeper emotional malaise that you yourself can’t see.
“I ask you to contain your impatience.” “There are millions of people… who are both fearful of this terrible disease, and at the same time also fearful of what this long period of enforced inactivity will do to their livelihoods.” These might seem like small, unimportant little snippets of what are, after all, “just” speeches. Indeed, it might seem like the real action, the big important stuff, is happening somewhere else. But when the Prime Minister of the UK imputes to the voting population feelings like “impatience” or “fearfulness” over something as important as the country’s response to COVID-19 it matters in deep, politically fundamental ways. His choice of words subtly starts to establish feeling rules for what should actually be issues of intellectual debate and discussion. We move from differing forms of cognition and argumentation to “good” and “bad” types of emotional response. Happily clapping the NHS every week? Virtue-signalling one’s love for key workers on social media? Good emotion. Useful emotion. But we shouldn’t forget that it’s also politically docile emotion. In this new political economy of emotion that Boris Johnson and others seem to be proposing, however, there’s also bad emotion. Here, a lot of us – lockdown sceptics in particular – no longer need to be listened to. We need to grow up. We’re not “sceptical” about the way in which the lockdown is continuing without any clear sense of an ending in sight; we haven’t “proposed” a dissenting virological or epidemiological viewpoint; we haven’t “deconstructed” elements of the computer code used to model the outbreak’s impact on society; we aren’t “advocating” for free speech in an era of unparalleled censorship; we’re not “intellectually opposed” to the idea of state power being wielded on this scale for such a prolonged period. In each and every case, we’re “impatient”. In this way, the dissent and debate that’s necessary to a fully functioning democracy is quietly repositioned at the end of the emotional spectrum marked as “infantile” and “immature”.
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Can Reiner Fuellmich be on the enquiry team? Along with Ivor Cummins, Carl Heneghan, Sunetra Gupta, Michael Yeadon etc.
I wouldn’t necessarily want them to be. I would like an inquiry simply where the members have an unbiased ability to look at evidence, and the technical skills to assess it, as well as a basic grasp of the issues.
I have no doubt that is pie in the f.ing sky, and there will be no holding to account for the biggest scam in post-war history. The judge and jury will be picked by the establishment and dependent on it.
One of the biggest scams of all time, especially when you consider the global nature of it
Not going to argue with that. I was just sticking to the easily verifiable, Julian.
How much would you bet that Lord Sumption won’t be part of it!
I’d bet my face mask on it.
As much as I would like to see an inquiry in to this fiasco, I fear it will be another white wash, it will last for years and add another £20 mil to the bill to find out “they acted correctly”. To be blunt, it will achieve auck fll.
If they do find anything it will be buried like the report into the islamic grooming gangs.
Not sure WHY the Rotherham voters recently CONTINUED to elect a mix of those who enabled the cover up, even if they did dump the original cover up conspiritant party.
Look how long Hillsborough went on for..
Don’t forget that Yeadon and Sunetra Gupta made the wrong call on herd immunity in spring 2020. I’m not sure they should be questioning the judgement of others.
If you were to exclude anyone who’d made a wrong call you might struggle to find anyone to do the questioning
Please explain
Sunetra Gupta was claiming that the UK had reached her immunity in March 2020 while Yeadon was asserting that the “pandemic was over” in summer 2020.
They were obviously wrong.
I seem to remember that winter excess deaths were less far above the expected level for the time of year than in April (and some of those would presumably have been caused by lockdown restrictions etc. Or indeed the vaccines…). And then there is the question of whether it actually was a pandemic in the proper sense.
…. and that’s the spectre at the feast – the lack of reliable data on Covid.
I speak as someone who’s just been fighting off adding to duff data by means of a crap nose invasion test (for which I was presented with zero real information).
That’s the standard fallback excuse. If the data disagrees with your agenda – blame the data.
The data’s not perfect but it’s good enough to pick out trends and correlations. e.g. the timing of peaks in cases, hospitalisation and deaths. The same agreements are evident in data from all across the world.
If there’s a fiddle going on then every country is using exactly the same fiddle.
Does the data match (a) personal experience (b) the experiences of people I trust (c) doctors I know and trust. Generally -Yes.
I’m not sure what this means but there was a big excess in April 2020.
Not in April. Most of the April peak deaths would have been infected before the lockdown.
Oh yes, in April.
Look, what I need to know is whether there is a link between the “vaccinating of over 75’s in France (which appears to have been continuing through April) and the extra reported deaths. And I need to know for certain.
Were they? In actuality, the ‘pandemic’ was only one in terms of half the old definition – conveniently altered by the WHO to exclude the question of severity. Remember – even at worst, Covid never reached epidemic levels in the community.
And nothing much happened until New Year, when an odd spike, correlated to the vaccination of the most vulnerable occurred – followed by a slower seasonal decline than usual. Yeadon’s mistake was in actually using the loaded term ‘pandemic’ in this context, and Gupta’s in not allowing for the possibility of vaccine deaths.
As to inaccuracy – remember the 4000 deaths a day predicted by Valance? That far outstrips any opposing errors.
I heard that the CQC were investigating the disproportionate no of deaths of the disabled, increasing the probability there was no pandemic ( previous definition) instead there was a withdrawal of medical care.
“The Care Quality Commission (CQC) had found that thirty-four-percent of people working in health and social care were pressured into placing ‘do not attempt cardiopulmonary resuscitation’ (DNACPR) orders on Covid patients who suffered from disabilities and learning difficulties, without involving the patient or their families in the decision.
Well today we can confirm this scandal led to disabled people accounting for 3 in every 5 Covid deaths according to ONS figures.”
https://dailyexpose.co.uk/2021/04/01/do-not-resuscitate-scandal-led-to-disabled-people-accounting-for-3-in-5-covid-deaths-according-to-ons-figures/
Of course the eugenicists never went away, and this is very worrying. In Iceland, children with cerebral palsy have been almost eliminated, and I’m afraid there are plenty of people who want to do similar things in other countries.
Yes – they were wrong. Many parts of the country had hardly been touched by the virus. There were very few infections in out neck of the woods in Spring but were hit hard in January. The large Birmingham Trust came under a lot of pressure in the New Year and – No – they weren’t vaccine deaths.
Ha – I see – the definition of a pandemic is the problem. Both Yeadon and Gupta were convinced that whatever we had in spring 2020 would not be repeated, This was drivel. The spring outbreak was likely cut short by seasonality. The outbreaks were too patchy to provide herd immunity. They were both badly wrong – AS I SAID AT THE TIME.
But cases were counted employing mass testing of asymptomatic persons, using the notorious PCR test at threshold cycles set too high. And anyone presenting any of the various virus symptoms (which might be caused by other infections) was deemed to have it. I believe they were more right than wrong.
Irrelevant. There was a peak in April and another peak in January. I knew several people who got a nasty bout of covid in January. I know people who work in hospitals who were reporting big increases in hospitalisations and deaths in January.
There people had Covid-19. While I accept that a number of cases and deaths reported in the figures may be invalid, it doesn’t alter the fact that there were 2 (possibly 3) waves and the later one was at least as big as the first.
You need to pay more attention to the doctors who we trust – particularly those in the US who are pushing for Ivermectin and other such treatments. They know Covid-19 is real. They know it’s real in Mexico – in Brazil – in Chile – in the rest of South America ..etc.
Utter nonsense! Weekly deaths were back to normal mid-June and stayed that way all through to October!
Was it a wrong call? Only if you equate it with total immunity.
And, certainly, they’ve not had the appalling record of SAGE – wrong on everything of significance.
Sorry – you’ll need to explain this? Herd Immunity does not mean that everyone in the population is immune. It means that enough people are immune that the virus is incapable of spreading ‘exponentially’, i.e. when an individual transmits the virus to more than one other person.
I seem to remember London was hit much less severely in the winter after suffering badly in April. Obviously this is not the case everywhere. Moray is seemingly one example.
I just want to say, in response to your many downvotes, that I welcome your posts that go against the conventional view around here. Healthy debate is needed.
That being said, in this case, I don’t see it as a problem that these people have made predictions that were wrong. People make mistakes and people on both sides of the argument have been wrong at times.
And Lord Jonathan Sumption.
Headed up by Lord Sumption will be ideal, but the wankers who will choose the inquiry team will ensure only supporters of this hysteria to be involved and that idiot physicist Ferguson will model the outcome
It’s far too soon for it to be anything other than a whitewash/nonsense about locking down sooner/better etc.
Better to wait a few years to stand a chance of some calm perspective returning.
No, very soon, before memories fade and more internet is disappeared. We have nearly all the evidence we need. Just got to get through the next flu season and we will know exactly what we are looking at.
Get all the important internet stuff backed up off-line. I remember the Guardian being ordered to take down their Snowden leaks stuff. Didn’t make any difference though as it was all backed up.
No – Julian’s right. Haste will just lead to repentance – and there is zero chance of a considered outcome if its rushed and involves so much admission of incredible wrongness.
Bound to be, I should think. It is imperative that some sort of credible alternative inquiry is organised. Complete with fact finding trips to Belarus, Sweden, Texas, Zambia….
you wouldn’t want to wait too long in case A) lot of documents get shredded in the interim or B) another one comes along and the same mistakes get repeated all over again until the UK has been annihilated – you know what pandemics are like – there isn’t one for ages and then 2 come along at once.
Fixed. Pointless.
Boris has written the conclusions already.
The victors write history.
well yes and no – don’t discount the dreaded Dom Cummings – he has it in for the PM
It’ll be like Blairs WMD’s inquiry which is actually very similar, WMD aka Covid and lies
I’ll save the expense -this is what it will say.
“Should have locked down earlier, should have mandated masks earlier, should have brought in vaccine passports to
blackmailencourageNot necessarily – but there will be no pinning down of the sheer error and venal stupidity. The worst will be sympathetic ‘tuts’ and ‘perhapses’.
So, quickly set the limited terms of enquiry and time scale to get this over with asap, and well before the real damage (UK economy, social impact of lockdown, experimental vaxx deaths/long term side effects, mental health, collapse of the NHS as a viable service, contract cronyism etc, etc) starts to become more and more apparent.
Then grease a few select palms…
…and hope that witless sap Keir Starmer is still opposition leader.
I must admit, Boris has always been adept at this sort of thing; but something tells me it’s simply not going to wash this time.
Let’s face it, we’ll likely be going over this for years, if not decades like Ballymurphy and Hillsborogh. only this time there are many millions of us, throughout the world. Hopefully they won’t get out of this so easily. We’ll learn the truth alright, the hard part will be getting those responsible held to account and owning up to it.
Witless sap is a perfect description. I will never vote Conservative, but Starner has now made me a lifelong Labour refugee. I’m completely politically deracinated.
becoming all too clear now, the politics that matters now is the people against vested interests.
We need a people’s enquiry. For the people, by the people. What we have faced is so historically audacious that we probably should have a referendum to decide how it is organized and who is on which panel. Impractical, I realize. The powers that be will already be deciding the witnesses, judge(s) and outcome, especially now they realize so many are onto them.
What people? There’s a handful of us, and a horde of zombies.
I love this idea. An independent people’s enquiry. I don’t see why this can’t happen.
FFS – the ‘people’ are largely already signed up to the defense.
wir sind das Volk
I said last time this came up, that any inquiry that happens will simply be used to bolster the fake reality they have created about a fake pandemic. Any inquiry that does not recognise that this was a political crisis; a power grab; an enormous assault on the public, etc, will be a farcical white wash.
We’ve heard them debating their fantasy shit in parliament, we’ve seen the complicit media arguing that the government failed to lockdown earlier and failed to keep us locked down longer. They’ll probably make accusations towards the public for lack of adherence to lockdown ‘rules’ too.
It’ll be a shower of shit, another kick in the gonades. We need prosecutions, not inquiries.
“recognise that this was… an assault on the public”.
Don’ t get your hopes up, the people behind this scam are bent on taking over the world. (probably bent too, come to think of it).
2020 is the year politics corrupted science. Once scumbag politics has been rinsed thoroughly from the science will truth prevail. I fucking hate politics
Or one of the years. The year people started to become more aware of it perhaps. My understanding is that politicians have long chosen scientific adviserfs to tell them what they want to hear. I seem to remember a story about a certain German regime in the 1930’s…
Whats the betting phrases like mistakes were made but lessons have been learnt, in the best public interest, unprecedented territory, nobody to blame etc.
My personal favourite: we are where we are…
Indeed – the most likely result.
How much weight do you think will be given to the fact that the basic fallacies were known by April 2020 by even the intelligent PC + Spreadsheet brigade.
IMO, the current crop of Poliarticians (right and left across the board) are all so bent that if they swallowed six inch nails they would en mass all shit out cork screws. ( just sayin’)
A complete waste of time, and a lot of it, I might be dead by the time its published. Which is a terrible indictement of our democratic and parliamentary processes.
As anyone who remembers ‘Yes Minister’ will know, Sir Humphrew will already have written the report, it just requires endless meeetings and debate before it can see the light of day.
Much as I am loath to admit it, I think that you are right. It will be arse covering on an industrial scale.
It’s only function will be to establish the price of Whitewash if purchased through Government procurement!
The most interesting thing about any enquiry will be the quality of the paint job. Whitewash, emulsion, distemper or gloss? Applied with brush, roller, paint sprayer? Pure white, off white, brilliant white?
Of one thing we can be sure. However blatantly bad and bodged the quality of the work, many corners will be unpainted without criticism, and the painters will follow their client’s wishes to the letter. All costs will naturally be billed to J
Public.
Will it be before or after the enquiries into who paid for his holiday or wallpaper ?
Will this be a similar enquiry as to why we haven’t got Ivermectin yet? You know the stuff that the public are largely unaware of? Or why we’re still using a defunct testing system, the one the public still think tells then they’ve got WuFlu? Or using gunk by the gallon, and putting bits of paper on their faces for no good reason? Or acting like brainless Lemmings, chucking themselves over a cliff just to get the Jabz?
Theres Zero chance of getting any answers because the great British public aren’t even asking any fu****g questions!
When Civil Servants want to hide government cock ups, thry simply declare that they will hold a public enquiry. The scope will be so wide and all encompassing that it will take years to complete.
By the time it is over, those responsible will have left government and those who cared will be either dead or have given up waiting.
Can I just lower the tone by saying that Boris in that pic looks like an inverse Minstrel show?
I’m so jaded and disillusioned by this last year that not even the idea of a public enquiry can cheer me up. If it’s like the one into Grenfell the conclusion will be that we should have known better than to trust the authorities and stay in place, and that the victims of the experimental gene therapy should have known better than to take it, as the information about side effects was all out there to be found if you looked hard enough. That masks were to make us feel better, and at the time we were all misled by some fall guy or other into thinking that HCQ, Ivermectin etc were ineffective.
More likely than not, there’ll be some fresh disaster to divert us all and the the country will behave like supine cowards begging King Boris to protect us in exchange for forgetting all the bad things he did. His resemblance to Henry VIII will increase with every passing day, (apart for the non-resemblance of his father to Henry VII).
The government must not be allowed to set the phrasing of the question.
In the words of Yes, Minister:
“But we don’t want a public inquiry! We want to find out what went wrong!”
Best buy shares in whitewash manufacturers now. There is no way we will have an open minded enquiry. Nobody will require the government to present cost/benefit analyses of mask wearing or lockdown.
It doesnt matter. It will be a whitewash, think Levison. It will be to back up Gov. policy and find they did a great job in saving untold lives and the UK economy. Absolving Boris and his cabal and making them legendary heroes, which the lockdowners will be eternally grateful for.
Wasn’t it Levison where the judge asked intelligent, probing questions and then came up with the result the government wanted? This will be the same
Anyone who trusts any promises from the current Prime Minister needs their head examining!