After Covid

The second implication is that the very possibility of democratic debate also depends on viewing each other as being part of the same community and, even if we disagree about the means of doing so, equally oriented to progressing the cause of that community. In this context, robust debate can be tolerated, or even embraced as a means of testing our ideas without degenerating into hostility and conflict. However, once those who disagree with us are cast as outgroup members, whose interventions are designed to advance alien interests and undermine our own, debate becomes impossible.10 Disagreement then constitutes an assault on us rather than an asset for us. Tolerance gives way to repression.

This relationship between group inclusion and democratic debate – or rather, between exclusion and threats to democracy – has been powerfully illustrated in recent years by the rise of right-wing movements which fuse a populist distinction between ‘people’ and ‘elite’ with the practice of ‘enemyship’ by which political competitors are cast as the witting or unwitting dupes of external foes. This has long been exemplified by Donald Trump who, in the run-up to the 2016 US presidential election, asserted that “Hilary Clinton and her friends in global finance want to scare America into thinking small”.11

By January 2021, Trump had radicalised his position to the point where not only were those who opposed him ‘unAmerican’ (and therefore an election defeat was necessarily a coup) but also even those Republicans who refused to actively support him in overturning the election were enemies of the nation. As he put it in his infamous speech to a rally on 6 January: “If you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore.”12 The result was an insurrectionary attack on the institutions of American democracy and the increasing difficulty of democratic debate within the country and also within the Republican party.

On 9 March 2020 – the day that Italy became the first European country to lock down, when Covid infections were starting to rise rapidly in Britain and people were beginning to die – England's chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, spoke to the nation in a televised address. He explained that:

“Anything we do, we have got to be able to sustain. Once we have started these things we have to continue them through the peak, and there is a risk that, if we go too early, people will understandably get fatigued and it will be difficult to sustain this over time.”13

This notion, which became known as ‘behavioural fatigue’, assumed that people lacked the ability to abide by the measures needed to suppress Covid transmission for any length of time. It justified a reluctance to act early for fear that measures would become ineffective by the time they were really needed. It was taken as fact by government ministers and played a part in delaying the UK lockdown for two more weeks until 23 March.14

‘Behavioural fatigue’ was not a concept recognised by behavioural scientists in general, 681 of whom wrote to the government asking for evidence to support it.15 It did not come from the government's own behavioural science advisory group SPI-B (of which I was part). Indeed it was publicly dismissed as ‘unscientific’ by some of SPI-B's participants.16 And it is at odds with the recent literature on behaviour in crises and emergencies.17

Finally, the development of these ‘communities of practice’ was underpinned by an emergent sense of psychological community – the ‘we-ness’ or group identity to which I have been referring.25 However, the impact of shared identity was not limited to mutual aid. A range of studies26 have shown that it was equally critical to following Covid measures. People adhered more out of a sense of social connection, social concern and social responsibility – that we want to come out of this together – than out of personal concern.27

David Nabarro, special envoy on Covid-19 for the World Health Organization (WHO), argues forcefully for a ‘people centred’ pandemic strategy, one in which “people are the solution; they are not the problem. Don't disempower, empower them. See them as the primary strength in your response.”34 I have already detailed some of the ways in which people are indeed a solution when they are constituted as a psychological group: in terms of personal adherence and in terms of providing the support to others which makes it possible for them to adhere.

However, perhaps the most spectacular example of a failure of response deriving from a failure of engagement, which in turn was rooted in misunderstandings of group process, comes from the one area where the government parades its paternalistic achievements: the vaccine programme. The official narrative is that Johnson's administration was highly successful in funding, developing and rolling out new Covid vaccines that protected the public and changed the course of the pandemic.39 There is some validity to this, but vaccines achieve nothing unless people get vaccinated. And while, overall, by Autumn 2021 vaccination rates were high (around 90 per cent), they were very much lower among a range of deprived and marginalised groups – especially Black Britons (around 60 per cent).40

Some four years ago, I wrote about the relationship between groups and democracy, about how the nature of group psychology has been consistently misunderstood and misrepresented and about how a sense of shared group membership is critical to democratic engagement.