There is a meaningful risk emerging that the quiescence of the public so far in response to lockdown is going to erupt into civil unrest over the summer as the bread and circuses employed so far are no longer enough to control the mob. In the UK, furlough which has provided most of the bread, has been repeatedly extended and now lasts until September, while France and Germany have schemes in place until at least the end of the year. In the US however, the preference has been for one-off payments and there is speculation that much of it has gone into, well, speculation. The collapse in a lot of retail concept stocks and the decimation this week in crypto currencies is going to come as a serious shock to many people and likely lead to a reassessment of who has really been winning and losing from the pandemic.
Meanwhile as the Public Health Officials struggle to relinquish their ’15 months of fame’ and try to insist that any new variant is sufficient reason to keep the populous locked up, pressure is going to build. If we want a taste of what might be to come in terms of the ‘logic’ of policy, we could look at Hong Kong. Here a stealth Zero Covid policy is spiralling rapidly into the sort of repression that the west will not stand for. In HK it currently involves seemingly permanent closure of the economy and the literal imprisonment for three weeks of anyone deemed to have come in contact with someone who has a positive test result. Entire apartment blocks have been taken to government quarantine for 3 weeks – even though they have tested negative and live many floors away from the ‘infected’ person.
Not a lot of people in the west seem to know about this, but then that is the circuses part. Distraction and limiting information are central to government activity, while the media are totally bought into the official narrative and are simply not reporting anything that might be deemed ‘unhelpful’. This has been enhanced, in the UK at least, by press regulator Ofcom insisting that it prohibits the broadcasting of ‘medical or other advice which… discourages the audience from following official rules and guidance.’
Zen and the Art of Protest….if there is a huge rally and the BBC does not report it, does it make a sound?
When we discussed the left brain versus the right brain recently,(one world, two realities) we observed as part of part of that post that two groups of people can draw different conclusions or outputs from the same set of inputs. But what if one group is not even aware of the available inputs? Consider the Freedom from lockdown protests that took place in London on April 24th. You didn’t know there were any? There you have the problem, the mainstream media, especially the news channels simply declined to broadcast it, or even talk about it other than a small item about some ‘violence’ at the end or in one newspaper an article composed almost entirely of tweets from ‘the public’ criticising the protestors. By contrast, ‘largely peaceful’ BLM marches that left 27 police officers injured or in hospital and the rabidly anti capitalist Extinction Rebellion disruptions get wall to wall coverage. Does it matter? Is it like the philosophical question about a tree falling in a forest when no-one is there to hear it? Does it make a sound?
The un(der)reported Freedom March suggests a very different narrative
Watching that (extremely well made) video certainly paints a very different picture from the YouGov(e) polls commissioned by the Cabinet Office (and heavily promoted by the BBC) that the overwhelming majority of the country not only agree with the lockdown restrictions but, if anything, want more, not less. They hear no sound because they are not listening, but as with so much about Covid, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. However, and to answer the philosophical question, that while the falling tree makes airwaves, but only makes a sound if there is an ear there to perceive it, the protests do make a sound and the sound will get louder as more ears become aware as ‘freedoms’ are restored in coming months.
As ever, we might ask, “what does this mean for markets?” Well firstly it should serve to remind us that the observed world of markets may not be following the ‘rules’ that we believe it to be doing. The philosophical question about the tree can quickly spiral into all sorts of existential questions and elements of quantum theory (another time perhaps), but the market mechanics we frequently discuss could perhaps be considered to be part of the ‘unobserved world’. Second, and more prosaically, the information in this video- new to many people we suspect – suggests that the behaviours post lifting of restrictions may be different than many are thinking – and pricing in to markets.
Boris Johnson’s body language as he announced an official enquiry suggests they have already written the conclusion that he did a great job, but maybe should have locked down a bit earlier. Otherwise, nothing to see here other than to celebrate the Dear Leader. So far, so Orwellian. However, as the video shows, locking people down again may well be harder than governments think (which is almost certainly why some groups are resisting lifting all restrictions). For one thing, any ‘new’ pandemic will have to be demonstrably worse in terms of actual deaths and the current approach of government that ‘you have to prove my policies don’t work, rather than I have to prove that they do’ is not going to be acceptable. Nor is the biased use of statistics in support of the established policy agenda. In particular, the perfect storm, where government media buying at full rack-rate (which we doubt is as naive as it looks) has been pretty much the only source of revenue for legacy media due to the collapse of any other economic activity and where the heavily democrat Social Media platforms were fully onboard at blocking any arguments ‘Orthogonal to the Orthodoxy’ (to quote the marvellous and much maligned Sunetra Gupta) as part of their campaign to rid the country of Donald Trump, is not going to be repeated. Other vested interests such as those wanting a bio-security state, or those wanting a permanent annuity income from vaccine boosters are powerful, but not so powerful as to resist the mob when it turns.
There will be certainly be more protests, particularly as the UK government ties itself in knots over its Schrodinger’s cat of a vaccine policy – it is simultaneously marvellous and they deserve credit but not so marvellous that they have to give up the power they have accumulated to themselves. At time of writing there was another protest that the BBC ‘did not hear’ last weekend, even though it ended up outside their building – although they did widely cover the much smaller protest on Palestine.
But cracks are appearing, the number 1 best seller on Amazon (in the European Government and politics section at least) is a new book State of Fear, by Laura Dodsworth, which is a chilling account of the UK government’s use of fear to manipulate behaviour, including admissions by members of the sinister sounding SPI-B behavioural unit (possibly even the perfectly named Professor Fear) that we have discussed previously. While it is said that it is easier to fool someone than convince them they have been fooled, there is also an expression that you can’t fool all of the people, all of the time and when and if the ‘mob’ realise what has happened, there is going to be some serious unrest.
