You can’t counter Conspiracy Britain with facts

The first lockdown came during a luridly warm spring. Few like to recall what we were doing in April 2020, how we felt or the fact that Mr Motivator was suddenly back on television. There have been no successful films, novels or TV series about this unsettling period. I vaguely remember trying to stifle my sense of the world ending by rereading David Copperfield in the sun.

Our government feared something worse than a never-ending Victorian novel. The pandemic was the greatest public health crisis to face Britain since mad George III thought an oak tree in Kew Gardens was Napoleon’s ambassador. In July 2020 the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies voiced its fears beyond the virus.

“In the next few weeks and months the UK will face grave challenges to public order,” professors Cliff Stott and Mark Harrison wrote. “While widespread urban disorder is not inevitable, currently, the situation in the UK is precariously balanced and the smallest error in policing … or policy could unleash a dynamic which will make the management of Covid-19 all but impossible.”

In the end there were two further lockdowns, but British cities did not ignite. The army stayed in its barracks and arrests were made at scattered anti-lockdown rallies that never threatened to boil over into full-blown riots. Instead, something much more interesting happened.

Rather than smashing up their towns, many people in Britain turned inwards. They thought about themselves, not their society. They changed jobs, moved house and considered getting a divorce. Respectable forms of knowledge and the institutions that created them came under intense scrutiny. Some people did more than quit their jobs. They began to live in digital fantasy worlds, safer places than the terrible reality around them. And they never left these new worlds.

Undercover reporting by Tom Ball for The Times last week showed just how long the tail of the pandemic is. Universallkidz, a suspected illegal school in Stockport, Greater Manchester, teaches between 13 and 28 pupils that “Bill Gates is planning to force populations to eat cockroaches”. Pupils at the institution, open since 2021, learn how to use crystals as a “way to heal serious illnesses”, and that their bodies contain energy that ebbs and flows “according to whether or not they are telling the truth”.

Home schooling has a fairly sketchy record: you can probably only point to Montaigne, Pitt the Younger and John Stuart Mill as pupils for whom it worked. And even then, Mill was a bit of an oddball. Universallkidz resembles home schooling, mainly in the sense that it guarantees the children in its care will have even more adolescent growing pains than teenagers usually do.

Ball found staff were adherents of the “great reset theory”, a Covid-era fable that claims the World Economic Forum, politicians and bankers are trying to depopulate and enslave us through manufactured viruses and microchip-spiked vaccines. An art teacher breezily told Ball that “condensation left in the sky by aeroplanes was, in fact, an aluminium vapour spread by the government to give people dementia”. This theory has its origin in a United States Air Force research paper — Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025 — written in 1996. Heavily distorted since then, like other conspiracy theories, it appears to be yet another paranoid idea to drift through the internet from America to Britain.

The idea for Universallkidz came to its founder, Ladan Ratcliffe, during an October 2020 anti-lockdown rally. Once she had her eyes opened to the nature of reality during the pandemic, Ratcliffe took steps to ensure that the next generation would not have it closed to them.

You might consider Ratcliffe, and those like her, fringe figures: a “conspiracy theorist”, mocked and largely ignored. But the truth about Conspiracy Britain is that it’s a big place. It has its own newspaper (The Light), music festivals (Stand in The Light), heroes (David Icke and Kate Shemirani) and martyrs (Russell Brand and Piers Corbyn). It makes perfect sense that this burgeoning nation within a nation would set up its own madrasah (Universallkidz).

According to research last year by King’s College London, the public underestimate the number of conspiracy theorists by about four million adults, while one in seven people — about six million adults — believe violence is a fair response to some alleged conspiracies. I suspect Conspiracy Britain won’t be taking up arms in the near future. But that relies on there not being another pandemic around the corner. Almost a quarter of the population thought Covid was a hoax. It’s hard to imagine so many of them rigidly obeying a lockdown order ever again.

Damage control exercises proliferate in the meantime. What else could describe BBC Verify, BBC Monitoring and BBC Reality Check, where journalists try to show their workings out behind stories that conspiracy theorists definitely won’t believe anyway?

Heavy-handed fact checking has the opposite of its intended effect. To treat the theories being circulated by Universallkidz as vulnerable to critique is a category error. If somebody passionately believes in an invisible giraffe, a stranger with a BBC lanyard telling them, “Actually, I think you’ll find invisible giraffes do not exist”, is not going to persuade them. Every new piece of information they receive just adds to their sense that the invisible giraffe is real.

Stronger medicine, such as “anti-hate” laws that bundle conspiracy theorists together with political extremists, risk doing as much harm as good. The line between legitimate criticism, informed scepticism and arrant nonsense can be blurry. Anti-lockdown protests were allowed to continue during the pandemic.

My memory of the people at those protests was that they were grieving and angry. They had lost businesses or family members to the virus. Their embrace of conspiracy was a way of controlling the mourning process. Far from being new age freaks, they looked like slightly troubled accountants, not unhinged fanatics.

It should not be a surprise that the nation most resistant to conspiracy theories is Denmark. This comes not from some inherent sanity among Danes, but from a social settlement far more equitable than those in countries such as South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria, whose traumatised populations are riddled with conspiratorial thinking.

As the US has lost prestige and global standing, so too has its populace become more inclined to conspiracy. Believing, as many Americans do, that 9/11 was an inside job is a coping strategy and a pattern of thought that maintains American control over events.

Universallkidz should, of course, be shut down. But it will take far more than disbanding a school to break up Conspiracy Britain.