Quotulatiousness

January 22, 2022

1842 Retreat From Kabul

Filed under: Asia, Britain, History, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered
Published 22 Sep 2021

On January 13, 1842, a single man on horseback approached the British garrison at Jalalabad, where soldiers were waiting for a retreating army of several thousand. Exhausted, the man had part of his skull shaved off by a sword and his horse was so exhausted that it would soon perish. As he was brought into the walls of the city the lone man was asked where the rest of the army was. “I am the army,” he replied. Thus ended a disastrous retreat from Kabul, where a British force of some 4,500 soldiers and thousands of civilians was almost entirely destroyed.

This is original content based on research by The History Guy. Images in the Public Domain are carefully selected and provide illustration. As very few images of the actual event are available in the Public Domain, images of similar objects and events are used for illustration.

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January 21, 2022

Boris is in trouble, threaten the BBC to take the heat off him!

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Spiked, Gareth Roberts wonders why Britons should continue to pay an annual license fee to support a media conglomerate that demonstrably hates them and their country:

Culture secretary Nadine Dorries, the most ardent of Boris Johnson stans, obligingly threw the deadest of cats on to the table at the weekend to distract from the woes of her beleaguered boss. She announced a two-year freeze on the BBC licence fee and dangled the prospect of scrapping it entirely.

Dorries must be well aware that any threat to the BBC always results in a Furies’ chorus of anger, horror and prophecies of woe, coming from precisely those people the Tory grassroots are likely to detest. And up they obligingly popped – Polly Toynbee, Nish Kumar, Gary Lineker, all present and correct. This wasn’t so much political theatre as a pantomime with stock phrases and responses. She’s behind you!

Behind all this repetitive call and response, there is something different this time around, on both sides. Dorries was noticeably blatant and direct when she tweeted that this licence-fee consultation “will be the last” (though she seemed less so in the Commons a couple of days later). And her detractors seemed more at a loss, struggling to find the counter examples of BBC excellence that used to come quickly and easily to hand. Citizen Khan creator Adil Ray tweeted a BBC promotional video asking “What has the BBC ever done for us?” that was made 36 years ago. Comedian Simon Day provided a list of great BBC comedies going back to the 1950s, which contained only one show commissioned in the last 15 years.

Canada’s CBC has a similar attitude toward Canadian culture and (ugh!) Canadians that the BBC displays, but the CBC gets direct government subsidies rather than a formal TV license required of all British TV owners. It’s quite reasonable to wonder what benefit Canadian taxpayers and British license-holders derive from all this financial support of increasingly unwatched TV and online propaganda that mocks and belittles them:

What this seems to show is that the BBC is now in a fix. In a way, the BBC hasn’t changed all that much. It is doing now what it has always done, reflecting and embodying a certain section of the middle class. When that section was sane, or at least fairly sane, that could be irritating on occasion, but we all forgave it because it had its heart in the right place. But in the past decade, the nominally “liberal” middle class has, to put it politely, gone both doolally and totalitarian.

To consume the BBC since about 2012 is to be never more than 10 minutes away from being scolded or berated, usually based on some spurious identity-politics talking point imported from the sick vortex of American academia. (On Radio 4 this happens much more frequently, about every 35 seconds.) It is unbearable, like paying £159 a year, on pain of imprisonment, to be told off by a particularly irritating polytechnic lecturer.

BBC News gets a lot of stick for this, understandably, but the Beeb’s drama, comedy and documentary output is now infested with it, too. It’s the same crushingly banal suite of opinions across everything.

Life before Blair was a grey, damp horror, a cultural wasteland of prejudice where Oswald Mosley had huge amounts of support (strangely enough, insinuating that people’s grandparents were all fascists doesn’t endear them to you). Working-class whites are bigots who can’t be trusted with basic information in case they start a race war. Fiona Bruce has kittens live on air when a doctor states the simple fact that it’s impossible to change sex. The BBC’s younger journalists have to be told that people have different opinions. If upper-class or working-class people can’t be shamed or blamed for something, the BBC just isn’t interested. It is stultifyingly bourgeois.

The BBC is often valued, and often trumpets itself, as a thing that brings the nation together. I think it has transmogrified into doing the opposite, with a superior sneer that treats Britain like something it’s found on its shoe.

Why Wilhelm I Didn’t Want To Be German Emperor

Filed under: France, Germany, History, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Real Time History
Published 20 Jan 2022

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The proclamation of the German Empire on 18 January 1871 is usually portraited as a glorious ceremony. Most people associated it with the famous paintings from Anton von Werner. But the ceremony itself was far from well organized and the soon-to-be Emperor Wilhlem I himself was not to thrilled about the whole affair.

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Arand, Tobias: 1870/71. Der Deutsch-Französische Krieg erzählt in Einzelschicksalen. Hamburg 2018

Bartmann, Dominik (Hrsg.): “Ausst.-Kat. DHM‚ Anton von Werner. Geschichte in Bildern.” Berlin 1993

Bauer, Gerhard u.a. (Hrsg.): Ausst.-Kat. MHM Dresden “Krieg – Macht – Nation. Wie das deutsche Kaiserreich entstand”. Dresden 2020

Bühl-Gramer, Charlotte: Anton von Werner – “Die Proklamierung des Deutschen Kaiserreichs 1871”, in: Der Europäische Bildersaal. Europa und seine Bilder, hrsg. v. Michael Wobring und Susanne Popp. Schwalbach/Ts. 2014. S. 86-97

Gouttman, Alain: La grande défaite. 1870-1871. Paris 2015

» SOURCES
Deuerlein, Ernst: Die Gründung des Deutschen Reichs 1870/71 in Augenzeugenberichten. Gerlingen 2011 (Neuauflage)

Goncourt, Edmond de: Journal des Goncourts. II.1. 1870-1871. Paris 1890

Meisner, Heinrich Otto (Hrsg.): Kaiser Friedrich III. Das Kriegstagebuch von 1870/71. Berlin, Leipzig 1926

Merkelbach, Thea (Hrsg.): Ferdinand Viebig. Der Krieg 1870/71. Aus den Erinnerungen eines preußischen Offiziers. Zell/Mosel 2021

N.N. (Hrsg.): Bismarcks Briefe an seine Gattin aus dem Kriege 1870/71. Stuttgart, Berlin 1903

Werner, Anton von: Erlebnisse und Eindrücke 1870-1890. Berlin 1913

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Conservatives versus the “Blob”

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Education, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Sam Ashworth-Hayes is writing here about the British Conservative party, but just swap out the names and it’s equally applicable to the Canadian equivalent, and very likely true for the rest of the western world:

The Conservative party is trapped in a nightmare of its own making. Number 10 is rocked by scandals, support in the polls is plummeting, the Northern Ireland Protocol (Chekhov’s car bomb) waits patiently for its return to the newscycle. As with every good nightmare, there is the sense of unease that something remains undone.

That something would be “conserving”. Set aside economic policy, where the Conservatives and Labour are still just about separable — although the new interest in higher taxes, spending and regulation is rapidly eroding this gap — and judge the period on the social axis: same-sex marriage, net migration at record highs, the march of progressive ideas through academia, business and press and into government speeches. You could be forgiven for thinking that Labour won the 2010 election, and every bout subsequent.

Why is that the Conservative party governs in such a fundamentally unconservative way? Part of the issue is that the average Conservative MP is, on social issues, basically indistinguishable from the average Labour voter, while the average Labour MP is to the left even of this. The centre of gravity in Parliament is well to the left of the general population.

A second part of the answer — and a partial cause of the first — is that the infrastructure of British politics is not designed for the right. When Michael Gove and his then-Special Advisor Dominic Cummings attempted to shake up the English education system in 2014, they found themselves publicly at war with what they termed “the Blob”: an amorphous conglomerate of civil servants, academics and unions that acted to gum up change and ensure stasis in the interests of its members. Rightwards reform is received as violent revolution, whilst the constant leftwards drift goes unremarked and unchallenged.

When Cummings made his way to Number 10, so did the concept of the Blob, expanded to include the BBC, various quangos, much of Whitehall and what is sometimes called “civil society”. The example of hate crime policy is illustrative of the general idea. The concept is not dissimilar to Curtis Yarvin’s “Cathedral”, or the Trumpian “deep state”. Critics of such accusations point out, not unreasonably, that coordinating so many constituent parts would be almost impossible — but this misses the point entirely. The purpose of a system is what it does, and individual elements responding to an ecosystem of incentives that produce given results can act in a remarkably coordinated way, when those incentives point in the same direction.

A Rare Navy Stopgap: the CLLE MkI Naval Enfield

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 6 Sep 2021

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The British Royal Navy tended to accumulate some of the obsolescent patterns of Enfield rifles around the turn of the 19th century, as the Army had higher priority for the new types of rifle. This resulted in a rather odd and poorly-documented pattern, the Charger-Loading Lee Enfield (CLLE) MkI Naval.

Produced around 1910-1912, these guns began as original production Long Lee (or Metford) rifles. In 1910, the new MkVII high velocity Spitzer ammunition was adopted, and it was largely issued on charger clips for use in the new SMLE rifles. The Royal Navy decided that it wanted to be able to use this ammunition, and so it converted some (exact numbers are unclear) of the old Long Lees with a mishmash of updates.

The rear sights were recalibrated for MkVII ammunition, but not changed in style. So, no windage adjustment was possible on either the front or rear.

A charger bridge was added, including a channel cut to allow a sight picture on the old-style sights. This also involved removing the early pattern dust covers on the bolts.

The resulting guns were marked “HV” for “high velocity” in front of their rear sights. The right side of the receiver socket retained the original production markings, and “CLLE MkI” was added to the left side of the sockets.

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January 20, 2022

David Starkey — The Churchills episode 2

Filed under: Books, Britain, France, Germany, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Whitehall Moll History Clips
Published 11 Feb 2019

Dr David Starkey reveals how Winston Churchill’s biography of his ancestor John Churchill marked out Winston as the only politician who truly understood war — just as WWII loomed.

Discovery ’70 — “A Tale of Two Forts” — Fort Niagara & Fort George, War of 1812

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

PeriscopeFilm
Published 19 Oct 2021

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This episode of the television show Discovery ’70 is hosted by Virginia Gibson. “A Tale of Two Forts” focuses on two important historic forts from the War of 1812, Fort Niagara and Fort George, which are located between the United States and Canada on the Niagara River. The episode contains re-enactments of the activities at the forts, a bitter battle for control of the Niagara River valley, and the Battle of Queenston Heights — the first major battle of the war. Fort Niagara was an important American post near the outlet of the Niagara River into Lake Ontario. During the early days of the war, it launched artillery fire against the British at Fort George on the other side of the river. On 27 May 1813, the Americans won the Battle of Fort George, and held the enemy fortification. Later that same year, after the burning of Newark and with American forces in disarray, the British advanced on Fort George, forcing the American garrison to abandon it. The artillery could not be withdrawn from Fort George and was thrown into the ditch surrounding the fort. The American garrison at Fort Niagara was then taken by surprise in a night assault by a select force of British regular infantry. Fort Niagara remained in British possession until the end of the war, until they relinquished it under the terms of the Treaty of Ghent. The War of 1812 was won by the British, and was the last military conflict between the two countries.

In 1812, the U.S. Army’s Fort Niagara stood near the British Army’s Fort George in Canada. The introduction of the film begins with a re-enactment of U.S. soldiers in Revolutionary era dress advancing by canoe on the river at :12. British Redcoat soldiers and cannons at Fort George. Main title. At 1:16 the film shows small vessels near Lake Ontario, which was Indian land in 1812. At 1:27 a cannon. At 1:43 the American Fort Niagara, made of stone and brick. At 2:17 the French “stone house” is shown. This was actually a disguised fort with cannon positions. Defenses and the outside of the fort at 2:52. At 4:08, to show the seizure of the fort by the British, a Redcoat is shown triumphantly walking past the fort. The fort served as a refuge for English loyalists at 4:55. At 5:57 an American drummer, and Continental type soldiers. At 6:59 a woman and her daughter go to the well to fetch water. A type of oven is shown that heated cannonballs, so that they could not be re-used by the enemy. At 8:07 an overhead view of Fort George. Houses, log stockades, ladders, saws. British soldiers on parade and marching. At 11:20 British soldiers firing, and the Union Jack being raised. At 12:20 English and American officers dine together. The generals of both Fort George and Fort Niagara are shown in the re-enactment — Major-General Sir Isaac Brock for the British and American General Stephen Van Rensselaer. A Redcoat rides a horse toward the house where the dinner takes place, bearing news that the U.S. has declared war on the British. U.S. soldiers canoe past the island at 14:34, attempting to establish a foothold on the Canadian side of the Niagara River. The American assault on October 13, known as the Battle of Queenston Heights — the first major battle in the War of 1812 — takes place. American soldiers attempting plant “Old Glory” at 15:58. At 16:48 at Fort George, General Brock writes dispatches requesting reinforcements, then leads his men into battle as part of the counter attack. General Brock is fatally hit by sniper fire 17:51. The forts firing cannons at each other 18:13. At 19:17 British soldiers firing at American soldiers, the British prevail. At 19:49 the Americans retreating in defeat. At 20:07 The British salute their fallen general. The Americans salute Brock as well. The film ends at 21:04.

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January 19, 2022

Neville Chamberlain, the “great appeaser”

Filed under: Books, Britain, Germany, History — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Alexander Larman considers an attempt to paint British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in a much more positive light than his popular image after appeasement failed:

Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain at Heston Aerodrome, holding up a copy of the Anglo-German Declaration he had negotiated with Adolf Hitler, 30 September, 1938.
Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe via Wikimedia Commons.

On 30 September 1938, the Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain waved a piece of paper in his hand and declared “My good friends, for the second time in our history, a British Prime Minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time.” He was, of course, incorrect. Less than a year later, Britain was at war with Germany, and the piece of paper was rendered meaningless.

Posterity has been hard on Chamberlain, regarding him as one of the least effective British premiers, and he has been entirely overshadowed by his more charismatic and successful replacement, Winston Churchill. Yet the bestselling author Robert Harris took a more sympathetic view of Chamberlain, and suggested in his 2017 novel Munich that, far from the Prime Minister being a hapless blunderer, he was in fact a canny tactician who bought his country an invaluable extra year to prepare for the coming conflict. This novel has now been filmed by Netflix, and has attracted particular attention for Jeremy Irons’ sympathetic and warm portrayal of Chamberlain.

Harris has even suggested that “I could perhaps show him as a tragic hero rather than merely the gullible old fool of popular myth … it is a mark of maturity to be able to hold two competing views in one’s head at the same time: that Churchill was vital to the defeat of Germany, and so, in a different way, was Neville Chamberlain.” Does he have a point, or is this just the canny spin of a novelist who has found a new and profitable angle to bring a well-worn story to life?

For my forthcoming book The Windsors at War, dealing with the royals in WWII and their relationships with the politicians of the day, I researched many letters and documents written by Chamberlain, members of the Royal Family and those around him in Downing Street. Several things came to light. There was residual antipathy between Chamberlain, who was an instinctive appeaser, and Churchill, who was not, and the Prime Minister privately derided the other politician as “a bandit” and “a pirate”. He also despised Attlee’s Labour party, calling them experts in “sob-stuff” sentimentality. He can undeniably be accused of high-handedness and complacency. Yet the charge of incompetence is a more deadly one.

Chamberlain himself came from a distinguished political family. His father Joseph was a ruthless Liberal parliamentarian who was said to have originated the phrase “you cannot teach old dogs new tricks”, and his elder brother Austen, one-time Chancellor of the Exchequer and leader of the Conservative Party, demonstrated a confidence in his intellectual abilities that his sibling did his best to emulate. He was not universally popular with his own side – the Conservative MP and diarist Harold Nicolson called him “a bourgeois shit” – but he generally had the support of his party in pursuing his policy of appeasement towards Hitler and Germany, believing – correctly – that Britain could not win the conflict outright.

Drøbak Sound, 1940 – “Either I will be Decorated or Court Martialed. Fire!”

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Operations Room
Published 22 May 2021

Peering through the darkness, Colonel Birger Eriksen spots a dark and menacing shape on the water. He can’t tell if its a friendly or enemy warship, but there’s no time to find out for sure. The dark and silent ship threatens his beloved Oslo. He must make his decision whether or not to fire. The German invasion of Norway has begun.

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January 18, 2022

Decadence

Filed under: Economics, History, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, Sarah Hoyt considers the old Soviet put-down of all of western culture (especially the American one) … that it was decadent:

“The Consummation of Empire” from the painting series “The Course of Empire” by Thomas Cole (1801-1848).
New York HIstorical Society collection via Wikimedia Commons.

Yes, sure. I hear any number of you gnashing your teeth on that side of the screen: the soft living, the snowflakery in — mostly — our universities, the demands that everyone cater to them, people being completely terrified of a bad cold. Oh, yeah, rampant crime and bad sexual morals. We’re OBVIOUSLY decadent. How can I make fun of it?

Very easily.

For one your gnashing of teeth rhymes eerily with Romans gnashing of teeth for millennia, long before Rome was anywhere near ripe to fall, and in fact while Rome was the bad ass of the world. Second, it echoes even more eerily all of the Christian explanations of why Rome fell, which curiously also echoed the Christian beliefs in the loss of paradise.

“Decadence is sinfulness, and then comes the end and only G-d can save you” is the narrative there. Which is fine, in a spiritual sense, and completely bonkers insane when it applies to cultures and history. But it served the nascent theocracy that replaced Rome quite well. One of the things it served was to explain why life was now much, much harder. Because you know, abundance is what leads to decadence. Life is too soft, you don’t work hard enough and … bam! suddenly you’re in the middle of an orgy or worshiping a goat or something. Never you mind that the Romans pretty much did that all along, even when they were the badasses of the world. It’s really easy to shape the history of a fallen civilization so it suits the purposes of its successor.

Which brings us to the fact that Communism is a Christian heresy, complete with paradise — the supposed egalitarian and property-free pre-history (it’s also really easy to shape a period that left no account of itself that we can find) — until greed — and in one version PATRIARCHY and in another “whiteness” WTF that means — kicked us out of it. Now we must force the perfect human (Homo Sovieticus!) to emerge, so we can go back to living in caves in (sing it) perfect harmony. (Yeah.)

The complaints of decadence I heard as a young woman were mostly Soviet Agit Prop. Yes, yours were too. They ranged from incoherent to frigging insane. Some of it was a very old rhyming chorus: Americans were decadent because they were too rich. They had too many choices. They were too immoral. They never had enough, and would commit crimes to be richer. They ate too much, drove too much, slept in too comfortable a bed, and in general were DECADENT. Just like Rome before it fell. (If you realize the actual structure of Imperial Rome was closer to the Soviet Union’s, a plunder culture that could only survive by stealing, the whole thing will take your breath away with its chutzpah.

The fact that our (even though at the time it was your, as I was a foreigner at least in some ways) entertainment and art echoed these crazy accusations only made the whole thing stick, so even the right, American loving side (which anyway always has a vast side of puritanism in America. And speaking of puritans, let’s talk about what some of them did to … turkeys? If weird sexual kinks are a sign of decadence, we’ve never been non-decadent) bought into it. I mean Spartacus (the novel) portrait of the decadence of Rome was meant to echo how bad America was. What’s that I hear? The author was a communist? You. Don’t. Say. I think I sent my shocked face out to be mended, but I won’t be a sec while I retrieve it.

In a more personal sense, my own family told me Portugal too was decadent. Why, unlike mom, I didn’t have to walk beside the train line to pick up enough coal for the family to cook. We had butane bottles delivered, even if they were super expensive, so we often cooked on a petrol lamp in the patio, if the weather was fine.

Decadent and soft living, I tell you. Sure, the bathroom was outside, but it was a bathroom, with running water included. JUST like Rome before the fall. How much longer till we started screwing Nightingales’ Tongues, eating Bear Sausages and electing horses to congress (I think in America we’ve been doing that all along, too. Though I’d prefer if every now and then we elected the front half of the horse.)

David Starkey – The Churchills episode 1

Filed under: Books, Britain, Europe, France, Germany, History, Military — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Whitehall Moll History Clips
Published 7 Jan 2019

David Starkey weaves the stories of two great British war leaders: John and Winston Churchill. Hear how John Churchill rose from obscurity to be King James II’s right-hand man.

A Labour Party attempt to count coup against Boris Johnson may have backfired by showing the NHS in a terrible light

Filed under: Britain, Health, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Brendan O’Neill explains why he found the Labour social media post to be a very bad idea:

Not actually the official symbol of Britain’s National Health Services … probably.

This week, in response to the latest drinks-during-lockdown scandal engulfing Downing Street, the Labour Party tweeted something so extraordinary, so tone deaf, so inhumane, that it managed to make Boris and his coterie of rule-breaking hypocrites look almost principled in comparison.

It was a comment from an NHS nurse named only as Jenny (thank God for the absence of Jenny’s surname, for I shudder to think of the abuse she would receive if her full identity were revealed). This is what Jenny, according to Labour, had to say about the government’s boozy get-togethers on 20 May 2020 and other occasions when the rest of us were locked down:

    I remember 20 May 2020 vividly, I spent hours on the phone to a man who was in the hospital car park, utterly desperate to see his wife. He begged, wept, shouted to be let in, but we said no – for the greater good of everyone else. She died unexpectedly and alone, as the government had a party.

This is a genuinely extraordinary statement. It is astonishing that no one in the Labour social-media team thought twice about posting it. The aim of this tweet is clearly to make us shake our heads and say “I can’t believe the government had a party while the NHS was making such tough decisions”, but in truth it has the exact opposite effect. It made me, at least, think to myself: “I can’t believe we let people die alone. I can’t believe the howling grief of a desperate man was ignored. I can’t believe there was such a complete and catastrophic collapse in everyday humanity during the lockdown.”

Labour clearly wants us to sympathise with “Jenny” against the government. But I find myself far more disgusted, far more outraged, by Jenny’s behaviour than by Boris Johnson’s. To have a sneaky party during lockdown is one thing. To ignore the pleas of a begging, weeping man and to watch as his wife subsequently died alone is something else entirely. It is in an utterly different moral ballpark. It is an unconscionable act. It is an obscenity against the human family that makes Boris and Carrie’s 25-minute visit to a garden party look saintly in comparison.

Ishapore No6 Jungle Carbine SMLE Prototype

Filed under: Britain, History, India, Military, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 21 Nov 2018

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In 1943, the British government began a program to develop a shortened and lightened version of the No1 SMLE rifle, for production in India and Australia — where the national ordnance factories had not converted to production of the No4 rifle. This prototype is the first pattern produced by the Ishapore Arsenal for testing. Its barrel is cut down to 16.5 inches (plus a 2.8 inch long conical flash hider), it has a unique 3-position flag style of rear aperture sight, and has had its sling swivels repositioned. This rifle was tested in the UK, and some modifications were recommended. A second pattern from Ishapore was then provisionally approved as the No6 MkI on September 1st, 1944, but cancelled before production could begin. The Australian pattern of No6 was approved a year late in September 1945, but then declared obsolete before it could be put into production. With the end of World War Two and Indian independence in 1947, the funding and impetus for a new short rifle were lost, and instead Ishapore would end up converting its production to No1 pattern rifles in 7.62mm NATO a few years later.

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January 17, 2022

HMS Victory – The Original Fast Battleship

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Drachinifel
Published 3 Jul 2019

Today we look at the world’s oldest commissioned warship, the first rate ship of the line HMS Victory.

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“We need to address the corrosive influence of behavioural science on public life”

Filed under: Britain, Government, Health, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Frank Furedi on the British government’s use (and over-use) of “nudge” polices to influence the behaviour of the British public:

Behavioural science, aka “nudging”, has been used by the government during the pandemic to scare people into doing the “right” thing. This insidious development has even been acknowledged by Simon Ruda, one of the co-founders of the Behavioural Insights Team, aka the Nudge Unit, which is part-owned by the UK government. He wrote that the “most egregious and far-reaching mistake made in responding to the pandemic has been the level of fear willingly conveyed [to] the public”.

Though he said that the propagation of fear had more to do “with government communicators and the incentives of news broadcasters” than with behavioural scientists themselves, Ruda’s admission is still striking. He even expressed concern about the state’s willingness “to use its heft to influence our lives without the accountability of legislative and parliamentary scrutiny”.

Ruda is not the only behavioural scientist concerned about officialdom’s systematic scaremongering. On 22 March 2020, a paper written by the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Behaviour Advisory Committee (SPI-B) for the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) complained that the public was too relaxed about the pandemic. “A substantial number of people still do not feel sufficiently personally threatened”, it stated, adding that too many “are reassured by the low death rate in their demographic group”. It then urged the government to increase “the perceived level of personal threat… among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging”.

Some members of SAGE have since reported feeling “embarrassed” by the nature of SPI-B’s advice. As one regular SAGE attendee put it last year: “The British people have been subjected to an unevaluated psychological experiment without being told that is what’s happening.”

It is to be welcomed that at least some behavioural scientists are now questioning the political use of their discipline. But the problem goes deeper than fear-mongering during the pandemic. We need to address the corrosive influence of behavioural science on public life in general.

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