The politics of fear

Wednesday July 27, 2011

Society is being driven by a culture of fear, spurred by exaggerated research, paid for by government and promoted by the media, says Simon Hills.

How frightened were you when you got up this morning? A bit uneasy, scared, or absolutely terrified? You did, presumably, make it out of the house. Then more fool you. You obviously haven’t been reading the news.

MPs were told recently that killer pollution is coming to London from the continent. One Professor Frank Kelly of King’s College London said “A large proportion of the PM2.5 (particulates) associated with loss of life expectancy in the UK arises from neighbouring countries. Long-term exposure to this type of air pollution underlies many of our chronic diseases and results in people dying earlier than they should do.”

It’s the default mode of the modern academic to serve up scary statistics such as these. The role of the modern-day egg-head is to ramp up his evidence to the nth degree, get himself in a tabloid, use it to get more academic funding and do some more research telling everyone that the previous research underestimated the problem that no one knew was a problem until you told them so.

Did you know that between 3,000 and 5,000 people a year in the capital die ‘early’ because of pollution? No? All hail, then, Professor Kelly (he does not explain exactly when you should you die, by the way).

This hysteria has infected the modern world, propagated by a cosy coalition of academics, politicians, and we in the press. Get grant, publish outlandish statistics from research, get reported, spur ambitious young political gun to make it an issue. Get government committee going, demand more research… and so on.

So we are bombarded daily by ‘new research’ telling us that we are all going to die. Just a couple of glasses of wine a day can pose a serious long-term threat to your health, according to Professor Curtis Ellison of Boston University Medical Centre in the US.

Alcohol in general is a very bad thing. There were 1,057,000 alcohol-related admissions to hospital, according to official figures. Enter the charity Alcohol Concern, which predicted that the number of admissions would reach 1.5 million a year by 2015! Costing the NHS £3.7 billion a year! Panic!

It’s not just enough, you see, to become hysterical over figures you have got (by the way those hospital admissions include mental illness, people bumping into furniture etc). Chuck them into a computer, make a projection and become even more hysterical.

You type in a load of figures that have been increasing over the past ten years, then keep the line going at the same rate for the next five. Bingo! Keep the graph going and soon enough every member of the population will be admitted to hospital for some alcohol-related malady.

Global warming, which will kill us all (although the cuddly polar bears will go first) is predicated entirely on what will happen on this type of curve. Although on current trends we’ll all be obese, drug-addicted and in prison, so frankly global warming will be the least of our problems.

It is on these horrific projections that our clot-head coalition makes policy. We are governed by the constant shrill of the pressure group; of overpaid lobbyists with no discernible talent other than to tell everyone else to heed them or prepare to meet their doom; of over-zealous pipsqueak politicians. They gorge themselves on utterly meaningless statistics and spew them out into proposals to boss us around.

As I write this I read of a London Assembly report telling us London will get ‘totally jammed’ unless action is taken now. Well, excuse me, London roads are already totally jammed. They’re totally jammed because of the hysterical manipulation of statistics to prove the pedestrian is an endangered species.

Roads, therefore, are no longer for travelling along lest someone gets run over, the resulting congestion the perfect example of absurd, unnecessary rules to protect people who didn’t think they needed protecting.

Evidence of Panic Britain is everywhere: wind turbines covering any area of Britain that has a smidgen of beauty in the name of protecting the planet they are despoiling; the mass closure of pubs that condemns the aged to stay at home so their lives won’t end earlier than they should by inhaling secondary smoke; daily warnings about anorexia; daily warnings about being too fat; warnings for people to take care on London Underground escalators (you never know what might happen).

What these academics are saying, basically, is that life’s a killer, unless you live in the middle of the country on a diet of nuts and cabbages like a 14th Century peasant. But given the lifestyle of said peasant, do you know, I think I’ll take the PM2.5 (particulates).

Simon Hills is associate editor of The Times Magazine and author of Strictly No! How We’re Being Overrun by the Nanny State