The Politics of Communicating COVID in the United Kingdom

Abstract

Like every country in the past two years, the United Kingdom has seen its fair share of COVID fake news in circulation. An early example in the first days of the pandemic was the rumor that the disease was spread by 5 G technology, a story that led to a number of masts being vandalized, significantly hampering the emergency services (Martin, 2020). A different strand of misinformation denied that COVID even existed or was far milder than had been claimed by the government. “Evidence” for views of this kind often involved videos of empty hospitals (Giles, Goodman, & Robinson, 2021), with believers arguing that the danger of the disease was being exaggerated in order to introduce draconian restrictions on personal liberty. More recently, the anti-vaccination movement has been strong enough to stage protests involving large numbers of people, some of which have led to violence, intimidating behavior and arrests (Gayle, 2021). However, the biggest challenge to public understanding and engaged debate on COVID-related issues was not necessarily posed by such blatant examples of misinformation. Instead, as academic research has shown, more significant is obfuscation in government communications and news reporting that failed to effectively contextualize the UK’s COVID response, particularly with international comparisons (Cushion, Morani, Kyriakidou, & Soo, 2021). The latter issue is particularly significant, as UK seems to have had a poor pandemic when its efforts were juxtaposed with similar countries. At the time of writing, the UK’s COVID death-rate per 100,000 people was 226.6. In France, the comparable figure was 188.4 in France and in Germany 138.9 (Financial Times, 2022). Despite his electoral success, it is hard to imagine a politician more ill-suited to the requirements of sober public health communication than Boris Johnson, a former journalist, controversialist and television panel show guest. Examples of Johnson’s communication during the pandemic included a claim that the virus would be defeated in 12 weeks in March 2020, referring to the government’s desperate quest to source emergency ventilators as “operation last gasp,” and claiming that the UK’s procurement of personal protective equipment and the effectiveness of the country’s test and trace systems were “world-beating” (they provably were not). Perhaps in an effort to counteract these weaknesses, the government made notable use of experts in its COVID communication strategy. Civil service scientific officials regularly appeared in daily pandemic press conferences with elected politicians, with some – notably England’s Chief Medical Officer Professor Chris Whitty and Deputy Chief Medical Office Professor Jonathan Van-Tam – becoming household names. In the context of the recent history of the British political communication, this was a notable development. Famously in the 2016 EU Membership referendum campaign, leave supporter and Conservative cabinet minister Michael Gove claimed that “people of this country have had enough of experts” (Mance, 2016). Gove’s argument was self-serving (he was dismissing a particular set of economic models), but his observation became emblematic of broader decline in a technocratic, expert-led forms of political communication that seemed to be occurring across liberal democracies more generally (Waisbord,