Investigation and verifying claims is not straightforward. Absence of evidence could indicate that a theory is just a ‘conspiracy theory’, or it could mean the evidence is obscured for the time being. Although conspiracy theories have a bad reputation, some conspiracies turn out to be true, and people in power at the highest levels try and cover up what they are doing. In our own recent history in the UK there are weapons of mass destruction used to justify an invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the lies perpetrated by South Yorkshire Police after the Hillsborough disaster.
Actor Sean Ward was surprised to find out that he might feature in a BBC documentary ‘about people who have lost, or are losing loved ones down the conspiracy rabbit hole’ and families ‘ripped apart… by harmful conspiratorial belief’. A BBC TV researcher contacted Ward’s sister through her personal Facebook account and her work email.
Ward has been vocal about opposition to lockdown and also talked about vaccine concerns through his popular social media channels. The BBC researcher may perhaps characterise him as an ‘anti-vaxxer’ and conspiracy theorist. He also received ‘bad press’ – in his words – for attending anti-lockdown protests in London. But he feels his social media airings have been helpful to his followers and created a sense of community. Which is, of course, exactly the sort of influence the programme makers are concerned about – ‘blue ticks’ influencing in the wrong way.
Regardless of his beliefs and their veracity, the description of the programme in the email (which he forwarded to me to read) to Ward’s sister appeared to be quite one-sided, describing the ‘big issues’ of people with ‘huge numbers of followers’ sharing disinformation. They didn’t specify what the disinformation consisted of in Ward’s case though.
The email nodded to mental health issues, but this would be a very sensitive area for the documentary makers to manage without psychologically harming their contributors and the family members they are talking about. I spoke with Ward about how the approach, made to his family behind his back, had affected him. ‘I feel like I am easy-pickings because I spoke about mental health and suicidal thoughts in 2018,’ he told me. ‘Messaging my family feels very personal. This is especially painful because the BBC was my employer for years. My sister was quite worried about it the first time they approached her and now she is livid. She doesn’t think they really have the content they need and that’s why they need her.’
Ward’s sister did not want to contribute to the programme and the request had a sobering affect on the two of them. One can imagine that if families weren’t ‘ripped apart’ before the documentary, they might be after.
This chapter belies my own fascination with conspiracy theory and, of course, this is an ideal area of exploration for a documentary, but there is a danger of upholding the tropes so favoured during the epidemic of the ‘Covidiot’ and ‘conspiracy theorist’, and using denigration to suppress dissent, as discussed in Chapter 13, ‘The climate of fear’. Media appears never to have been so partisan and propagandist, even while purporting to be the opposite
I decided to research people who fall under the umbrella term ‘conspiracy theorist’. To be honest it was easy to uncover all kinds of theories among all kinds of people given that the gap between rationality and reality was more of a chasm. I interviewed two men, Steve and Alex, both of whom had pronounced theories and had taken action upon them.
Steve’s camouflage clothes and olive green Land Rover would have been well disguised in woodlands, but he was immediately obvious to me in the B&Q car park. Although cafés were open at the time, he’d wanted to meet somewhere anonymous, and suggested our salubrious setting. I got a coffee from the hot dog van and got into his car.
I knew Steve from his job as a security guard in a local shop. I’d been chatting to him throughout lockdown about how business had been, how people reacted when face masks were mandated, if the people in the store had caught Covid – every shopping trip is a research opportunity! In our many conversations we’d talked about what could be behind the UK government’s pandemic policies. We’d arranged to meet away from his place of work so he could tell me about his theories.
‘All my life I have been prepping. I am always doing risk assessments in my head,’ he told me. ‘You have car insurance. Why not have a year’s supply of rice?’ I said I thought that constantly planning for the worst sounded exhausting, but he was cheerful: ‘It’s not exhausting, because it’s not happened yet. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst. I don’t think this is it. I think this is a test run. In peacetime you prepare for war.’
I was curious about when he had started prepping. ‘Back in the 1970s we had power shortages. I remember going down to the shops and not being able to buy sweets, so I started hoarding sweets. It started there. I was also in the army,’ he said. I was a child of the 70s too, and I remember the drawer always full of candles and matches, and that we needed them. I don’t have a year’s supply of rice, but I have a drawer of headlights, candles and matches, and I know that preparation for power cuts comes straight from my childhood.
We talked about why he felt suspicious. ‘I can smell a trap. What are the restrictions and the masks for? They aren’t going to affect a virus, so why are they doing it? I think we’re being trained for obedience.’ I had sympathy with this view.
It seemed very likely that the UK had performed a U-turn on masks for psychological not medical reasons. We know that behavioural scientists think masks give a ‘signal’, which would inspire obedience to the lockdown rules. In a sense, Steve’s interpretation is correct. If you perceive manipulation by the government it creates mistrust. So far, so reasonable. And as he said, ‘things are a conspiracy theory until they happen.’
Steve continued: ‘The Coronavirus Act is an Enabling Act like the Nazis had. And it’s scary that governments around the world are acting similarly. Is someone else dishing out the control?’ I could see where he was coming from. The Coronavirus Act and Public Health Act were terrifyingly draconian (see Chapter 15, ‘Tyranny’) and one could potentially draw parallels with the Nazi legislation. And why did governments around the world adopt similar policies at the same time? These policies didn’t come from existing pandemic planning literature and expertise – in fact, they were counter to it – so why? Were they copying each other, in a political version of playground psychology? We had to lock down, Sir, the other boys did it! Or were policy changes being driven by another source, a sinister cabal of globalist puppeteers?
I decided to test how ‘out there’ Steve’s beliefs might be. Did he believe aliens might be involved in controlling governments? ‘I don’t know,’ he said. He asked me if I thought there was intelligent life in the universe which might have visited earth. Yes, I thought that was possible. His satisfied face told me he could rest his case. I asked whether he thought a ‘Covid conspiracy’ was operated by the Masons or Illuminati? ‘I’m not a Mason, so I wouldn’t know.’ Fair enough. So, what was his theory?
‘I think the virus could be man-made or released,’ he asserted. At one point this definitely would have sounded conspiracy-esque, or at least highly speculative. But by the time he and I met, the WHO still hadn’t been granted access to the laboratory in Wuhan, China, and at the time of writing, British scientist Professor John Watson, who was involved in the eventual investigation, said he could not rule out a leak from the lab.3
Steve also thought that the pandemic response was ‘to destroy the economies of the world’, and said ‘we can’t service all this debt. If you can’t pay the debt you are in someone’s pocket. Are we going to be living like China with a social credit? Is this about getting us all to have digital ID?’
We had hit another inconvenient truth. Something that was seen as ‘conspiracy theory’ – that Covid was an excuse to impose a digital ID system upon us – looks more likely in 2021. A logical conclusion to a pandemic in an age of technology? Opportunism by political leaders who want to bring in digital ID anyway? Or a pre-determined plan? The
UK government announced it would review a Covid certification scheme, or ‘freedom app’ or ‘vaccine passport’. The European Union put forward a legislative proposal for a ‘Digital Green Pass’ that provides proof of vaccination or test results. Israel introduced a ‘Green Pass’.
I pointed out that although he was open-minded he didn’t seem to know what was going on. ‘That’s right,’ he agreed, ‘I don’t know. All I know is you have 1% who have everything. Then a few more percent under them who control all of us. The middle classes are going now. I think we are sinking down lower and lower and those that control us want a small number of super rich and the rest super poor.’ Well, there had been a huge upshift in wealth during the epidemic, so I could see why he thought this. US billionaire wealth grew $1.3 trillion between mid-March 2020 and February 2021.4 Two thousand of the world’s wealthiest billionaires grew their collective wealth by 27.5%.5 Yet overall labour income dropped 10.7% globally,6 mainly in lower-income countries, and 150 million were expected to be pushed into extreme poverty by 20217 by the pandemic, or rather the lockdowns and restrictions.
I had a lot of sympathy with some of Steve’s views. I even shared some to an extent, although I couldn’t say whether these end results were the result of sinister secret conspiracies, opportunism, disaster capitalism, or just bad luck. Steve was sure something was going on, but also didn’t know what. His genuine curiosity about the world, plus an appetite to read and communicate with others of similar views, seemed to have combined with a childhood predilection for ‘being prepared’. While many would call him a conspiracy theorist and ‘prepper’ I think his beliefs were more nuanced. He would have predicted digital ID, a destabilised world economy and a wealth grab by elites at the beginning of the pandemic, and he would have been right. On the other hand, he thought aliens could be the masterminds of it all.
Steve’s Land Rover was a cornucopia of useful items. He had freeze-dried food, water canisters, spare fuel, tools, spare clothes. He told me he could drive into the woods and survive for days. I asked why? What did he think might be coming? ‘I’ve been ready this year to pack my bags and go. My wife believes in all this reluctantly. She doesn’t want to believe something else is going on, but she does. I’m always prepared because you never know.’ He told me they had bought some woodland and were building a cabin, so that if the time came, they could live off-grid. He described them as being in a ‘transitional period’ as they prepared for the worst-case scenario. They had a ready supply of fuel, a log burner and a year’s supply of rice. He had been buying small pieces of gold for years and had a good supply of carbon arrows. Arrows? That sounded apocalyptic! Would we be shooting each other with bows and arrows? ‘I practise archery. I like it, it’s a hobby. That doesn’t detract from the fact that it’s a post-apocalyptic survival skill.’
I asked Steve what was next? ‘Tier Three or full lockdown around Christmas. I think worse is coming. 2021 something will happen. There could be riots when people come off furlough. We can’t go on like this forever.’
I talked to Alex over Zoom. Although we could have met during the dizzying freedom granted by the government during the summer of 2020, he’d already moved to Sweden. He told me that he’d ‘had enough of England, the government and the media’. He had been shocked at how quickly the British public acquiesced to the restrictions on their lives, and said he and his family decided not ‘to play the game’ but to try life somewhere else.
‘The public health and political systems are somewhat uncoupled, so it’s less crazy here. You don’t read about Covid on signs everywhere, it’s not in the media 24/7. Sweden didn’t turn Covid into a political game,’ he told me. ‘Despite what you see in the media in the UK, the Swedes are quite proud of the way they responded. No one here thinks they could or should have done a lockdown.’
I asked how he had felt when the pandemic started, and he told me that Fright Night had a profound effect on him – just as it had on me. ‘It was weird, like the Queen’s speech on Christmas Day. The whole family was together. I was in the moment. I get chills when I think about it. It was like a show. Boris came out with buffoon hair. They hadn’t brushed it, which seemed a bit odd.’
I was impressed by the swift escape to Sweden. I think it was an enviable move. In truth, most people would have enjoyed life in Sweden better during 2020. No-lockdown Sweden is an awkward counter-factual to locked-down UK. The country followed existing pandemic protocol and didn’t try the brand new lockdown experiment. The Swedes have largely been entrusted with government guidance rather than law and, as a result, life has carried on more normally and the economy saw a much milder downturn than the UK, with a 2.9% contraction in GDP,8 rather than the UK’s 11.3%.9 Lockdown fanatics think Sweden pursued a reckless strategy and fared less well than its Scandinavian neighbours, while lockdown critics praise the gods that a control exists to show how a pandemic can be managed without putting people under virtual house arrest. When Sweden did not lock down, gloomy modellers predicted 100,000 deaths10 by 1 July. In fact, there were only 5,490 deaths.
I asked how they managed to travel there. ‘It was easy,’ Alex laughed, ‘Travel wasn’t as restricted then as it is now. We packed up and drove here! We barely even needed masks on the way. We knew we had a window to travel and then the restrictions would get worse in the UK.’
Curiously, he was right – travelling did become harder. So, what were his theories about why this was happening? ‘This isn’t about Covid. This is an excuse to crash the economy. I’ve known it’s coming for years. I just didn’t know it would be a virus,’ he told me. ‘Governments are printing the shit out of money. Wealth is shifting upwards more, and the rich are using this “new” money in a wealth grab to buy resources, like land. We’re playing a massive game of monopoly. I don’t think we ordinary people can win anymore. We can’t throw the board over and say we’re not playing the game anymore. It’s too late for that.’
And so he moved to Sweden because the economy will be stronger? ‘No. I think we’re about to see the collapse of the Western world. A lot of people will die. You have to be prepared to be one of them. I don’t think Sweden will escape from this. All countries will get there in the end. I’m not under any illusion that coming here is a permanent escape. But there are 10 million people here and a lot of land. There are 70 million in the UK. I think it’s going to be messy and I’ll do what I can to keep me and my family out of it.’
Well, we are quantitative-easing the ‘shit out of money’. Hmm, this was a bit frightening (fear is contagious!) because his theory echoed my own early fears. Knowing that the government was pursuing such an economically harmful policy had frightened me. However, I had tried to remain observant about concerns and emotions, and I’d talked to a variety of friends about their interpretations of events in order to sense-check myself. I asked Alex if he thought he was paranoid: ‘No. There is nothing new going on right now. Plenty of people have predicted this. The virus provides cover for crashing the economic system and bringing in a new system that will purport to be for the people but is not. There will be digital ID, we’ll go cashless, you won’t be able to travel anywhere without being vaccinated up to the eyeballs and there will be a grab of the tangible assets. I’ve been predicting an economic crash since 2012.’
By the time of publication more of Alex’s predictions seem to be bearing fruit. I asked how he thought this worked: how and why would our democratically-elected leaders coordinate to crash the world economy? ‘There’s insane worldwide money printing,’ he said, ‘so this is obviously a worldwide plan. Johnson and Starmer aren’t in charge. They are high-level Masons. They are working for others.’ Who? ‘Who do you think?’ I didn’t know, that was why I was asking him. Alex didn’t want to go into much more detail.
‘At no point in this so-called pandemic did I ever feel fear about it. I always knew I’d be fine. I’m healthy,’ said Alex, when I asked if he was scared. ‘What frightened me was seeing everything I’ve read about
and believed would happen, come to pass at warp speed. They aren’t playing games, they are going for it. Knowing where this could go is scary.’
Theories flourish in the gap between what we know makes rational sense and our lived reality. So much of the response to the Covid epidemic did not make sense. World leaders did act similarly. They used the same language. Was this evidence of coordination behind the scenes, or was it linguistic contagion? Were they acting in sinister lockstep or were they copying each other? They pursued lockdown strategies that might save lives, although there was no evidence that they would, while knowing they would cause economic and societal harm which would cost lives. What is an intelligent and imaginative person to theorise?
Broadly, we might assume government plans were carefully considered, or that a conspiracy was driving events, or that it was all a big cock-up. The initial response looked wise, precautionary and justifiable to many people, and it still does to some. By this point my lockdown critical colours are nailed firmly to the mast. Conspiracy can be as extreme as believing that aliens are pulling strings behind the scenes, or that 5G masts are going to poison us, or it can be more believable. How about the World Economic Forum’s ‘Great Reset’?11
Some people think the government’s response to Covid is a smokescreen to disguise their participation in this reset; a radical restructuring of the economy and society. The World Economic Forum also uses the slogan ‘Build back better’. My first thought when I heard that was that, if we are ‘building back’, a degree of destruction has been wrought first. Might I suggest a modest refurbishment instead?
The Great Reset is no ‘conspiracy theory’, it’s a manifesto, a plan, laid out in black and white. And does it tie in to Covid? Yes, if Professor Klaus Schwab, the founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, has his way. He said: ‘The pandemic represents a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine, and reset our world’.12
A State of Fear: How the UK government weaponised fear during the Covid-19 pandemic Page 22
