Those who think this is scaremongering need to read an astonishing document still far too little known to the general public. It is a paper submitted to the government’s own SAGE committee on 22 March 2020, and it has the heading “Persuasion”. The key segment reads:
"Perceived threat: A substantial number of people still do not feel sufficiently personally threatened; it could be that they are reassured by the low death rate in their demographic group, although levels of concern may be rising. Having a good understanding of the risk has been found to be positively associated with adoption of Covid-19 social distancing measures in Hong Kong.
The perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent [my emphasis], using hard-hitting emotional messaging. To be effective this must also empower people by making clear the actions they can take to reduce the threat."
Documents of this kind are not supposed to get out. In better times than these, with active and critical media, this particular passage — with its clear implication that it was the task of the state to scare us into compliance — might have led to the fall of the government. As it is, you will struggle to find mentions of it in the British national press. They are there, but they are hard to find and not on any daily front pages. This is not because of censorship or because of any kind of collective action.
It is because most people, having lived all their lives in relaxed freedom, are quite unable to believe what is in front of their eyes. It is a Chestertonian paradox which Chesterton himself never wrote: a government changing the nature of the state successfully and without opposition because nobody can believe what they are seeing, and so everybody politely ignores it.